My 2025 model 3 has driven me over 95% of my last thousand miles. I'm frankly surprised it isn't more, but I'm not the only driver of the car.
It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc
Out of curiosity, do you live in a place that gets heavy snow? I've always felt that FSD would struggle to handle heavy snow fall, roads with snow banks on the sides and difficult driving/braking conditions in the snow and on ice patches.
For any doubters: using a 2025 model is a key detail here. It's the latest hardware version of the self driving computer. The older cars on the road are stuck with significantly worse FSD software because the hardware is far too weak.
FSD 14 lite, which is now available for the HW3 (~2019-2023) Teslas, is surprisingly good. I have a HW3 and HW4, and while HW3 isn't as confident and competent as HW4, it's good enough that I don't mind it anymore. My wife was planning on trading in the HW3 for a new Model Y next year, and now she might just wait a few more years.
I have a 2020 M3 on HW3 with v14 lite and it's very good. But even v12 was pretty good. I drove an HW4 as a loaner and did not notice a significant difference. I think the big difference would be on the long-tail of edge conditions, but I'm not sure.
There's a wide range of what people find acceptable. I think v12 was the last I tried on HW3 and it was bad. Inching into oncoming traffic trying to do left turns, extremely sudden and sharp lane changes, lots of interventions required. v14 on HW4 was the first I've seen it actually drive competently. I even got to try it in a couple snow storms and it did great. I did not try v14 lite, it's great they got it working in some capacity but I still wouldn't trust it as FSD because it's probably the equivalent of running a heavily quantized LLM (HW4 doubles the available RAM).
That's absolutely fair. I'm comparing it against v11, where I couldn't go a block before disengaging. And my routes and neighborhoods are relatively easy.
But still, even v12 can handle things like manual traffic signalers, construction zones, etc. The first time my car followed instructions of a cop waving us through a stop sign, I was amazed.
We are a republic of 50 states, who are only willing to work together because they are represented. I’ve lived in NY, MO, CA and TX. The cultures and beliefs are different in each, and the people you seem to call “idiots” I have never found to be idiots. They just don’t prioritize nearly the same things you do, and may have radically different values
They might not be idiots, but I am afraid that many of them are politically illiterate. How else would you explain that Donald Trump became president again?
Agreed. The unbearable smugness of the coastal elites is so pervasive, a person will dismiss “those people” but tie themselves in knots to avoid criticizing even the least the current protected class of the month
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iPod and co-inventor of the iPhone, and later Nest founder, commented this in Stratechery about the lawsuit when filed:
"This is Apple’s typical tactic to scare Apple employees — either former or current. I heard this lawsuit was driven by the Apple board.
Steve threatened to file a lawsuit against Nest for poaching 80-100 Apple employees. He called me, screamed for a while with lots of accusations. Then I said, “Steve, it’s Apple’s job to retain its talent, not mine.” He stopped his rant and then we went on to talk about our families and vacation plans. We kept hiring…"
These companies (e.g., Intel, Google, etc.) also had to compensate their employees as a part of the settlement. Especially for people in engineering orgs, many of them received decent settlement checks.
The amount was dependent on their seniority and a lot of people received bigger checks. Regardless, we can all argue if any amount was sufficient to compensate for limiting peoples' movement among these companies back then....
The term make it sounds like a good thing, however I do not know if this was really a net positive. It might have helped the companies but isn't this anti-competitive at the employee level?
It was mass-collusion between big companies to prevent people from exercising labour mobility. Poaching is illegal, i.e. theft from an individual or the crown; we shouldn't encourage treating people like company property.
Yes and they got in huge trouble for it. It was a massive scandal. The only reason Apple wasn’t made an example of was because all the other big companies followed suit and did the same thing. It was Steve Jobs that drove this monopolistic behavior that could have turned out much worse for Apple.
I think that's just standard across the US. But the unions are a people problem not a company problem necessarily. People can still form unions even with massive investments to squash them.. Europe has proven that. But the story told to all US workers SEEMS to be, you have to suffer and grind to make money.
I might be wrong but that's the impression I get when talking with US people about unions and workers rights.
Unions primarily benefit the weakest workers, and in places like SV, usually the top workers already are getting fat plates and others are pushing hard to get there.
Think of it like a football club holding a vote to flatten player pay. The benchwarmers will be falling over themselves to unionize, and the top players will be looking where to move too.
This is why union efforts fail, which many find perplexing. The most valuable players get better deals negotiating without a union.
Interesting point. I think there might be something special about sag given the way Hollywood does business. Everyone switches employers constantly as projects spin up and wind down. Having a mostly permanent role in an organization is super unusual - and I wonder if these roles (like a 20 year soaps gig or the simpson’s) have different stats on working on/off the card.
> Interesting point. I think there might be something special about sag given the way Hollywood does business. Everyone switches employers constantly as projects spin up and wind down. Having a mostly permanent role in an organization is super unusual […]
And yet all the major US sports have player associations/unions with minimum salaries. The players are hardly constantly switching, and when they do switch it's often not their own choice but rather their employer/team trading them.
If Silicon Valley had unions, employee stock options would end. And along with it, most of the incentive structure that drives innovation in the valley.
If Tony and Steve were friends, that's not Apple being cutthroat. Cue: the chapter about poaching from friends in Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things. If you cross that line and poach from your friends, expect to hear about it. Another example: https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1jgz...
It's worse. "Cutthroat" implies being ruthless but legitimate. So-called "poaching" is completely moral and legal, whereas trying to get others not to "poach" "your" employees is immoral and illegal.
There's a bright, clear line between targeted attempts to hire someone who has a job working for a competitor, and trying to get that person to take confidential information with them when they switch jobs. The latter is wrong and will rightfully result in legal action. The former is perfectly fine, and good for employees, which I'd wager still includes most of this site's audience despite the startup-founder focus.
Remember, employers don't own the people who work for them. They cannot be "poached." They can only be given a better offer. If your employee decides they'd be better off working for your competitor instead, then you have only yourself to blame for not giving them enough incentive to stay. Either up your game, or give them a friendly goodbye.
Eh, the kind of poaching OpenAI is accused of doing here is not normal recruiting. It is being claimed that they are giving specific instructions to exfiltrate Apple’s proprietary info & trade secrets.
I know, hence why I pointed out the very important difference between those two things.
I wouldn't describe this as "poaching." What OpenAI is accused of doing is industrial espionage and IP theft. It did this as part of hiring somebody away from another company, which is commonly (and IMO incorrectly) described as "poaching." But the problem isn't the "poaching," it's the theft. If they'd "poached" without the theft it would be fine. If they'd found a way to steal IP without hiring anyone it would still be bad.
I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.
OpenAI did not launch any hardware (yet), and I don't think their IPO pricing hinges on them launching an iPhone competitor. To me, it looks like Apple wants to launch a similar AI hardware and is slowing-down the competition to be the first-to-market.
Funny thing: they are barking at the wrong tree here.
The risk is not hardware launch per se. It's the unresolved lawsuit from a powerful company that's hanging over OpenAI and what may be revealed if the case goes to trial and discovery. All that will get priced in by institutional investors. If OpenAI is shopping the IPO, it's likely among the first questions large investors performing due diligence will ask.
The worst scenario is OpenAI tells investors that the risks are low, there's nothing damaging, the costs are immaterial, and tries to push forward. Then the case goes to trial and emails, Slack messages, documents are revealed in discovery that run counter to everything OpenAI told investors. Court issues an injunction, awards damages, OpenAI has to dismiss execs, secondary lawsuits are filed, existing investors release letters they had no idea, underwriter backs out, etc. That outcome could crush an IPO.
I think it's notable that Apple is vague about what was actually stolen and what OpenAI has actually received.
I read into these PR blasts, lawsuits that Apple is sour about losing employees to higher salary opportunities, and is likely using lawsuits instead of higher salaries to retain them.
Please don't use epithets like this on HN. It's unkind, even if there’s any truth to it. It's not about anything you owe to the person being discussed, but about the way we talk about people on HN. If there's an anecdote that illustrates what you mean, please share it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can't accept a quote from Tony Fadell about how Apple was trying to "scare" employees without taking into consideration his considerably bad reputation. That is actively supporting disinformation. His quote is incredibly unreliable.
Jobs had something to prove though. He was kicked out, brought back, he definitely wanted to ensure his legacy. But while I don't agree with it, I think it's harder to be an ethical company that makes it to a billion than a non ethical one. When shareholders are involved you don't have a choice really.. You're obliged to maximize their earnings.
> You're obliged to maximize [shareholder] earnings.
One of the most pernicious and harmful lies of the past 50 years.
Management is obliged to act in shareholders' interests. Executives are paid in stock. Maximizing earnings makes the stock price go up, which makes executives more money personally. So they're happy to let everyone believe they are legally required to make the stock price go up.
There is no law or court precedent making it illegal for management to de-prioritize short-term profit as long as they aren't hurting the shareholders interests and advancing their own.
Yes, but also the "executives are paid in stock" by certain people. If the stock price goes up, of course the executive equity will be worth more, but also if the executives make the certain people happy, the certain people can increase and otherwise adjust the amount of stock. So the stock price can be much about maximizing those very large shareholding certain people. That the price also changes the value of the exec equity is a thing, but the package is straightforwardly modulated as needed whether the price is high or low.
You're not though, legally anyway. Courts will generally not second-guess a board's business decisions so long as the board acted in "good faith" even if that decision results in loss for shareholders, or does something that does not maximize their returns.
Board just has to link the decision and the long term health of the company. But it's just that, health of the company which is legally distinct from the health or short-term desires of individual shareholders and investors.
Maybe a court won't, but there are lots of examples where activist investors have forced the CEO or board members out with a campaign focused on short(er) term results. And Wallstreet is notorious for only giving a public company 2 quarters to get anything done.
Sometimes I think it’s time to give shareholder supremacy a rest. If they don’t like what they own, they can sell it. But this is probably also why I’m not on a board of directors.
Interestingly enough, Apple at one point had that attitude even under Cook.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,” Cook said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
That was back in 2014.
But I do agree, it's time to normalize telling shareholders where they can shove it. If they don't like it, they can sell.
Ironically (and perversely) it's much easier to do this with exotic cap tables that keep voting rights and ownership effectively split. You needed a very valuable company to make this work and the most obvious example (Meta) is not exactly a beacon of corporate governance.
I don’t see how this is the case? The CEO can absolutely tell the board to shove it. The board can’t micromanage the CEO - they don’t have the levers to do that. So their options are few, and pretty much all nuclear along the lines of firing the CEO. Is the Apple board going to fire Tim Cook for making iPhones accessible? If they did, they’d find themselves fired by the shareholders.
This is not true. Fiduciary responsibility does not mean "maximize earnings". This one fiction has done more damage in the name of unfettered capitalism than anything else.
One of the best and most clever "hidden" features. Very Apple.
I never get nauseous looking at my phone in an Uber anymore. My wife can barely handle looking at a screen in a car and this feature allows her to work with no issue.
These have become some of the most valuable companies on Earth. The idea that there are lapses in governance in these companies is insane. Any shareholder is buying in fully aware of the governance structure. Many because of it! Shareholders’ rights are clearly enumerated.
I agree many buy because of the governance structure and founders retaining control, but there is a lot of dumb money out there.
From Claude via stockanalysis.com:
META — institutions 67.51%, insiders 13.49%, float 2.19B of 2.54B shares outstanding. That leaves roughly 19% as retail/other.
SPCX — institutions 5.95%, insiders 46.47%, float only 638.65M of 13.17B shares. Residual is ~47.6%, but that is not retail.
That’s an indictment on them. You should know where you’re putting your money and why. If you delegate this to a professional or influencer, you do not get to blame them. After all, you could just buy something you think you understand better like real estate or keep it in cash.
How true is that these days? Sure, old-school pension funds are managed without any input from the future pensioners, but most 401ks (and similar) these days have a variety of investment options that the employee can choose from. Yes, there are some that have extremely limited options, but I'm not sure how common those are.
And once you've left the company and roll those 401ks over into IRAs, you can put them at whatever financial institution you want, many of which have more or less unlimited flexibility (within legality) with regard to what you can invest in.
Now, I know many employees just sort of adopt an "autopilot" attitude and don't pay much attention to their retirement account investments, but that's on them for ignoring this stuff. (The lack of general financial literacy, in the US at least, continues to disappoint me.)
So: yes, there are some people who don't have much of a say in how their retirement fund is invested, but my feeling is that those people are a small minority. I do think a large number (perhaps even a majority) of people do have the ability to direct their retirement investments, but either don't know they can do it, or can't be bothered. Again, though, that's on them for not educating themselves and playing a more active role in their financial future.
You can roll it over into such a plan when you’re still working for the company you’re at, but you have to take it upon yourself to do so they don’t volunteer that information. Most of the people in my design department didn’t bother to roll it over to such an account they just kept it in the original account.
Exactly. If nothing else, you should know who you're supporting.
Many people wouldn't support SpaceX and Tesla if they knew more about Musk. Conversely, some other people who don't know much about him might want to support his companies.
Willful ignorance is not an excuse. If you buy into an ETF, you are delegating responsibility to the people who run the ETF (or the people who maintain the index that the ETF tracks), and you've decided you're ok with that, and are ok with whatever companies are in the index/ETF.
You can always decide to pick an ETF that doesn't invest in the companies you don't like, or invest in individual stocks if you have the time and stomach for it.
I'm saying it's how the world works. The majority of pension funds (public or private) and 401k plans are simply passive index funds with nearly no direct voting rights (and at best very limited, indirect voting rights).
> The majority of pension funds (public or private) and 401k plans are simply passive index funds
That’s completely wrong.
Most 401k plans have by far more active fund options than passive fund options. Notwithstanding, more and more dollars are tilting towards the passive index funds, i.e. through consumer choice.
More money is in passive now than active. On a dollar basis, there are fewer votes purchased dollar for dollar.
Even then, active funds don't always offer proxy vote services so I'm not sure wtf active has to do with my original point: that investors today don't seem to give a rats ass about the vote.
You can transfer your 401(k) to an account that will allow you to buy individual shares I did that and bought as many shares as I could in a blue chip tech company. Glad I did because if I had stayed in one of those so called index (all for one) funds my rate of return would’ve been very, very small over the years.
The managers ofsuch funds are lazy and invest in multiple mediocre companies, most of whom produce mediocre returns for example investing in 10 tech companies when only two or three of the companies actually accomplish anything won’t help you in the long-term.
Investing in one or two really good tech companies over time allowed me to retire early.
they typically offer a brokerage option. fidelity and vanguard both offered this when I had them. if that wasn't on the table I'd roll it into something that gave me flexibility.
To Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Who have crafted companies who have virtually no voting rights but get purchased up by the masses through passive index funds.
In the case of Spacex that's literally not the case, when private investors bought shares the company was already a decade old and had a single class of shares. It's only since the IPO that the company switched to a dual structure, multiple years after private investors bought in. And class-B shares have only been given to Elon and a few of his friends.
SpaceX has had multiple share classes the entire time, what are you talking about? pre-IPO there was a third Class C with no voting rights at all, these got converted to Class A
Instagram Reels? Your measure of “innovation” is just not how large companies succeed. They are specialized at optimization, and take seeds of things and water them. Instagram had 0 revenue and like 13 employees when acquired. WhatsApp had 50 employees, no encryption, etc
The grandparent of your post, however, blamed capitalism for the destruction of the environment, as though other economic systems would not do the same. So your comment isn't really that relevant if the parent to your post is just offering a counterexample. I get it, you don't like capitalism, but jumping every time capitalism is mentioned--particularly when your point isn't really relevant--doesn't really win others to your side.
The destruction of the environment that has actually occurred in our capitalist countries has been because of capitalism.
It's like saying desktop enshittification has been caused by Microsoft. This is true in our timeline, even though if Apple had owned the desktop for 30 years they also would have enshittified it.
This line from your article really stood out to me: "It was typical to use natural resources extensively without considering the effects on the environment."
Because, per the article, the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors the supposedly "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
You prefer capitalism because you live privileged and weigh short term wealth higher than long term effects of capitalism. Personally I'd much prefer not exploiting 3rd world countries to fund first world consumerism.
Yeah, being born in rust belt of the former Eastern Bloc was a privilege like hell. You don't know what you are talking about. If you visit places like Chisinau, you'll get a glimpse of Ostrava cca 1994.
What are the long term effects of the systems that you push? Can you even model them?
Long term effects of Soviet-style Communism were ghastly. Dried lakes, poisoned rivers, mass graves, all in the name "of the people".
Non-market economies can only be sustained by constant violent repression and censorship, and the incentives in such systems where prices aren't serving as a signal are totally out of whack, resulting in extreme waste on one side and constant shortages on the other.
The absolutely worst thing that liberated African and Asian countries did was to introduce Marxist economies. Fortunately most of them already realized just how deep that hole goes. Economic liberalization in India alone will likely lift a billion people out of poverty in mere 20 years or so.
so if it's socialism/communism destroying the environment it's a mistake. but if it's capitalism it's by design?
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
The so-called socialist economies were just the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
Maybe it’s never been done properly cause human nature will never allow it to be, e.g. it’s an ideology that’s incompatible with humanity.
But surely there’s a more sane option than under regulated capitalism with a problematic wealth distribution and fucked up incentives that encourage short term profit at the expense of society, environment and all else?
then it's a terrible system to govern humans under.
your system should work with human nature or it will never work.
capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity. socialism falls under greed.
and no there's not a better solution, or at least it hasn't been found yet. if it was it'd still be a form of capitalism, not the other side of the spectrum.
but we disagree on the effects of the current system. capitalism has not been at the expense of society, the opposite in fact. we've had so much prosperity due to it.
same with the environment really. communist countries don't really have better air quality, worse in fact! US has the money from capitalism to develop clean tech.
I agree with both of y'all: Humans are inherently tribal, greedy, and selfish, and seek to better themselves and their kin at the expense of others.
Communism seeks to mitigate or avoid this human instinct, often failing.
Capitalism throws its hands in the air and says "ok, be greedy and selfish, ignore others and society, and if we're lucky, and it sometimes provides any societal benefit, that's purely incidental and secondary to you making money".
> then it's a terrible system to govern humans under.
Agreed!
> capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity.
Sadly without representation, that prosperity accumulates around the few that then don’t necessarily disperse it back into the economy but hoard it and lobby against taxes and workers’ rights etc.
From where I stand, both systems suck, just that regulated capitalism is more workable in the more socialist leaning nations from a human welfare perspective, like many of the ones in the EU. Ofc an economic powerhouse that does not make, not necessarily.
And then there’s corruption and various bureaucratic inefficiencies, which you’ll get to some degree in any system.
Communism has never been done properly, because it cannot be done properly.
Communism is an erroneous idea. It starts from a correct premise, that humans who have accumulated much wealth are able to use it abusively for accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the others, and this positive feedback cannot be stopped without some kind of regulation.
However, the solution proposed by communism is an illusion that cannot work with real humans. The communist solution is to confiscate everything valuable from all citizens and put it under the management of the state bureaucrats, who supposedly will administrate it efficiently and in such a manner as to produce maximum benefits for all citizens.
The reality is that of course the communist bureaucrats are composed of the same people who succeed to become politicians or managers everywhere, i.e. those for whom the priority is to satisfy their own interests and greed, and not the interests of the entire society.
Therefore in all socialist/communist countries, those who were supposed to manage resources in the name of the "entire society" behaved exactly like the owners of those resources, so they lived like US millionaires or even billionaires, while most of the population lived in poverty, because all what their parents or grand-parents had in the past had been confiscated and now they were at the mercy of their managers, who decided unilaterally what they should be allowed to work and what they should receive to be able to live.
The only solution that could work would be the exact opposite of communism. Instead of centralizing everything, the production of at least all the things strictly necessary for living should be as distributed as possible, done by numerous small local companies, not by a few huge global monopolies.
Instead of having 3 producers of memory chips for the entire Earth, there should be at least 3 or 4 in every country. Similarly for any other industrial product.
Unfortunately that is extremely unlikely to happen because during the last decades everything has evolved in the opposite direction.
To continue with the same example, when I was young a large fraction of the European countries were still able to make integrated circuits and computer memories, even many of the East-European countries. But then one-by-one most electronics or computing companies have been bought or closed, until none survived. An important role in the disappearance of the electronics industries in most countries had been that of USA, who used various means of pressure and blackmailing to prevent other countries to enact protectionist measures favoring their internal producers against US companies, i.e. exactly what now USA itself uses against China.
we regularly depose those with political power. In elections.
And the wealthy die or stop participating within around 30 yrs of becoming wealthy normally. And compete themselves across idiology. Soros, Koch, Musk and Moskowitz all have very different packages of political beliefs they advocate vs each other
It's very obvious to me that FSD is a reality already, usually from parking spot to parking spot. And it at least feels much safer than I am driving, especially since I can get tired, etc
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