The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?
They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
The market discounts future returns but it is unclear and shifting what proportion of those returns are from the operations of the company in the market it sells products in and what proportion comes from the operations of traders in financial markets. More plainly, traders discount returns from buybacks and dividends financed by the operations of the company and returns from selling their shares to "greater fools".
As long as the music is playing they will keep dancing. Musk is a master of DJing that party. We might wake up tomorrow and find that his house of cards has fallen apart, but we might wake up to learn they really have solved FSD. That ambiguity keeps the price from collapsing.
What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
If elon builds a time machine and goes to the future to get FSD tech from 100 years from now and rolls it out to all teslas tomorrow, what will change? Will every car driver get rid of their cars and get a tesla? Will that suddenly justify the stupid valuation?
Realistically, I don't think the majority of drivers will care that much. Sure, their sales will go up, but I can't see it going up by that much.
FSD will never be "achieved" suddenly. The tech will incrementally improve every year, across all manufacturers until one day we are manual driving only 1% of the time with FSD doing the rest. Like AGI, there is no moat in FSD. This is the natural outcome of the trajectory that we are on right now, and nothing about tesla is making me believe they will offer anything that other OEMs can't.
No, I think the market is much more cynical than that. Tesla is a meme stock similar to bitcoin or GME. Investors are degenerate gamblers, hoping that it will continue to rise because that's what it does atm, and hoping they won't be the one left behind holding the bag when it crashes one day. It's little more than a voluntary ponzi scheme that most big investors openly buy into knowing full well what's at stake.
Exactly. It's meme stock. There's no rational explanation for this ridiculous valuation.
Tesla has been overvalued for a long time, and not by a bit either; they're worth more than the next several car makers put together, yet sell less cars than any of them. Their high valuation could still be considered defensible when they were the fastest growing car company in the world and the only one selling electric cars. But none of that is true; everybody is selling electric cars now, and BYD is selling more than Tesla, I think. And instead of growing, Tesla is now shrinking in many markets. Even their self driving is not the best.
The share price should have collapsed, yet it remains high. How? It makes no sense to me.
>What is it about FSD that results in this valuation though?
Are you willing to accept the ugly answer? Because the point of FSD isn't what they pitch. The replacing human drivers to save lives yada yada... That ain't it. The point is creating a handful of leverage points through which the autonomy of the populace to move wherever they want can be controlled through. Once the tech is the majority driver, people can finally be properly managed as the little work units they are. That's the dark part of the valuation. The power aspect. The ones who own the means to locomote are the ultimate rent collectors. There's simply no arguing that can be done by a populace that can be prevented from showing up to any attempt at collective protest via geofencing. Or if they do show up, can be added to a comprehensive list for participating in disruptive activities.
Capabilities, ladies and gentlemen. We have to assess these things on the ground of what they enable. Delegating transport entirely to a third party necessarily creates a vulnerability of society to manipulation by the ones running the damn thing; and the ones running the damn thing want money, and security for themselves.
Because their stocks aren't memes, their investors are serious, nobody really GAF about self driving and fully autonomous driving isn't actually the "killer app" many think it is.
There are so, so, so many companies operating in this space right now. You list two that have given up. A quick google brings back at least a dozen operations that appear to be still ongoing.
BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
Whether Tesla is going to be the first to achieve true autonomy or not is a toss-up. And and regardless of who achieves it, the rest will be very very short on their heels.
> BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!
You need to put about 10 asterisks on those. MB Drive Pilot has been discontinued due to "low demand and high cost", and those other 2 systems appear to have substantial restrictions. Meanwhile, FSD today "works" on pretty much any road or highway. I can easily see certain folks see that as far ahead of competitors, since it physically can do more in more places and operate in more conditions.
That can't/won't happen. Musk's wealth is primarily in SpaceX now and he has a much higher ownership stake in SpaceX than Tesla. As well as that, Tesla is public so he can't just do napkin math and decide to merge them. So the question is: Does Tesla buy SpaceX? Well no, Tesla can't afford it. Ok, well can SpaceX buy Tesla? Well no, SpaceX can't afford it either. So do they announce a merger? Well that doesn't make any sense because Tesla is valued like a meme stock so it would massively dilute Musk's ownership of the overall company. So the idea that they fuse might be driving up the stock, but by driving up the stock you're actually preventing it happening. If Tesla starts to trade at realistic multiples and comes down to lets say a 200Bn company, I'd expect SpaceX to snap it up at that valuation, but it'd be crazy to do it before then.
Even if they have FSD ready tomorrow the financials would not support this valuation.
Summing the sales figures in [0] we get 9M to 10M Teslas on the road. Let's say 10M and and let's say Tesla will keep selling 1.6M / year for the next 5 years [1]. This is 18M Teslas and let's assume all of them are converted into paying customers at $100 / month [2]. This works out to $21 B / year in income. $22 B / year in income cannot justify $1.5 T in market value.
[2] this is another huge assumption - I know 5 Teslas owners. They tried the $100 / month assisted driving (or whatever Tesla calls it these days). All said it was cool, but not worth it and did not sign up after the trial period. These are professionals who value their time (tech engineers and 1 banker)
There's zero chance that Musk will have suddenly "solved" FSD in a day, a week, or a year. He's not an engineer; he's a money man, and a grifter.
That's why people keep giving Tesla money: because Musk has fooled so many people into believing he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight—and, moreover, has gotten them to buy into it so deeply that they have tied their identity into that belief, and so in order to continue to cling to it, they reject empirical evidence of both his lack of qualifications and his outright crimes.
Well he certainly wouldn't but the engineers working for Tesla might, with a probability that is very low but greater than 0. It's much higher (but still low) in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. Tomorrow is a metanym for the future.
But to be very clear I not only don't think they will but I don't think that they think they will, or they wouldn't be shifting focus to Optimus. I'm not invested in Tesla except for my exposure through
index funds.
If anyone who is a fan of Tesla can get through this article without changing their mind. Well. Bless their heart.
To be maximally reductive, FSD will never work because the sensor suite is deficient. There are other reasons but that one's enough.
Same for a rocket that's ridiculously large for orbital missions but can't go beyond orbit without 15 to 25 refueling flights of the same enormous rocket.
The reasons for both these failing are going to be manyfold and complex, but there are enough simple reasons that everyone should understand.
It would be actually fun to see where the limit is on echolocation with serious ML processing these days. Apparently people did quite well in 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9655721/
> Do Tesla shareholders think the rest of the auto industry are in a coma?
I have no idea what institutional investors think, and they're probably the relevant group here.
From the way I've observed individuals discussing it, defending it, on HN… it pattern-matches to my understanding of what people these days call "main character syndrome", i.e. that the other companies are just a supporting cast to provide an interesting challenge for the only one that's not an NPC.
Or, they're stuck in a narrative that stopped making sense only gradually. Tesla solving self-driving ten years ago would have been a triumph. Solving it today, meh. They would be ahead of others by a couple of years, max.
I appreciate when my vocabulary expands. I understood this by context and similarity to 'synonym'. I may have encountered it before (probably), but I didn't know it. Excellent use in a post.
> he's this amazing engineer, who could, possibly, "solve" FSD overnight
Even if thay were true many people hate Elon now. Enough that they will pass on any technology he is the only purveyor of.
After he celebrated letting children starve (USAID) by dancing on stage with a chainsaw many people decided to never buy any Musk product for any reason. Now there are the Epstein ties.
Worse, many people who dont care about politics at all won't get involved, because Musk is an unstable drug user and its not wise to entangle yourself in his business affairs.
You really thought the poster meant that Elon Musk personally went and implemented FSD? Just for your information, Musk is also not personally assembling every Tesla vehicle.
Well if there are plenty of posters then it should be easy to give me 5 comments of different people where it's clear they believe Tesla R&D is a solo Elon Musk operation.
They don’t care because Musk is marketing Tesla not as a car company but as a technology company (building robots and self driving rental service). And why does he do that? Maybe because his car sales are down…
I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.
I thought it was always a tech company focused around trying to import things from the future. Since before they ever had enough sales that sales could go down.
Actually the funny thing is that there is a mixing of meme stuff, Elon verse impacts (AI + self driving + Energy) etc. and under none of these circumstances is a 200+ PE justified.
The funny thing is after 6 years of effort apparently they have managed to get the dry coating process for batteries working and according to a few reputed sources have ingredients for entire battery chain available locally.
The thing is if this stock was underpriced and rational this would be such a positive news after 2-3 years of growth stall.
Instead they are trying to keep the hype up with endless goalpost changing and self driving possibly stuck perenially in edge case doom scenario with camera only decision
Batteries are boring, or at least the hype has a short shelf life. There are enough normies making progress on batteries that Elon hasn't got a credible argument that he is different and better.
Same for cheap Teslas. Some hype trains hit the buffers sooner than later.
I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet
That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.
Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety.
I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.
I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!
Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.
You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.
They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book
The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?
Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.
Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
I agree with you. I personally dropped my stock when it was clear that the bull thesis had collapsed.
I had priced in, margin staying the same or going slowly down. FSD not working but achieving at least a decent amount of software sale conversion. Service to become a profit center. And most importantly, a profitable truck and 'Model 2' program to further push volume. Beyond that, just generally that electrification was ongoing and Tesla had a role to play.
I never considered Robi-Taxi or Human Robots.
All of these failed. Volume didn't continue to go up. Margin couldn't be substantiated. FSD didn't get much buys (not helped by absurdly increasing price). Truck program was a failure (and I don't think its because of the design). And 'Model 2' program was cancelled.
I profited a lot from this stock and I think there was time where the stock-price was reasonable (I don't buy the claim that it was always a pure meme stock). But every quarter it got worse and worse. I can't understand why its still so high either.
It’s Elon. It’s a meme stock. Fundamentals don’t matter. That his wealth is so wrapped up in the public valuation of Tesla I guess investors think he will do everything he can to keep th stock price up that is until SpaceX goes public the I think he won’t care because his wealth will come form that primarily.
Wouldn’t this be a side effect of everyone buying only indexes funds or ETFs?
Me and other millions of people are investing in our pensions every month and buying ETF (S&P500 or global) and indirectly buying Tesla stocks even if we don’t want to.
The system would need a big shock to cause the ETFs to rebalance and reduce the proportion of Tesla stocks that are part of the index.
I wonder if some of it is because of Musk, not despite him. Yes, his actions and statements in the last year have been terrible, but he also demonstrated he is very close to one of the most important power centers on the planet. That might be enough for some investors.
Musk, the perception of. As always. Popular media drilled in that geniuses behaving like idiots is on point. So other idiots with money still suspect him of being a genius and singlehandedly turning things around at some point before the cliff.
Long story short --- it's a cult --- there is no logical way to explain it.
Musk is the leader selling his own brand of fantasy that he makes up as he goes along. A lot (if not most) of what he says never comes to pass but people still cling to every prognostication as if it is gospel.
For over two decades, he was all about taking over the auto business with full self driving EVs. Obviously never happened. So now he is off to take over ride sharing and robots and AI and whatever else comes down the pike tomorrow.
At some point you have to wonder if there's some manipulation going on? Do 100s of bots buy and sell these stocks at specific times to keep the price up? Maybe there's an institutional investor or few who secretly back Elon and are part of a scheme?
A bit speculative reply but would appreciate if anybody links any such analysis'/investigations.
From my limited knowledge, I know people have been shorting Tesla based on fundamentals for a while now but haven't been successful.
The billionaire class loves their crypto nazis--they won't let Musk fall from grace. Given the Epstein files, the Panama papers, and what we know about the elite networks, you'd have to be a sucker not to believe that the stock market is manipulated to the core.
The very fact that people are siding with AI agent here says volumes about where we are headed. I didn’t find the hit piece emotionally compelling, rather it’s lazy, obnoxious, having all the telltale signs of being written by AI. To speak nothing of the how insane it’s to write a targeted blog post just because your PR wasn’t merged.
Have our standards fallen by this much that we find things written without an ounce of originality persuasive?
> The article does point out exactly this problem, but glosses over the fact that most artists don't want to change to popular art. Only a few can, and most don't want to.
I don't think author hides the fact. It's plain as day that to make a living, you need to sell art which resonates with people. You can still find room to be creative within that constraint, but you can't ignore the audience.
Artists should quit the illusion that they can create whatever they please and expect the income to automatically follow.
But that isn’t really true, per se. It depends on your definition of “people” – the mass market? High end collectors and galleries like Gagosian? Very different audiences, and appealing to one is probably the opposite of the other.
I didn't understand GP's point at all because I think the author makes this exceedingly clear: if you want to paint only for you, and only stuff that appeals to you and a limited few, that's totally fine (and I think the author really emphasizes that's totally fine), just don't expect to make a living off of it.
I thought this article was excellent. In particular, I liked the emphasis that you really just have to produce lots and lots of art to find "image market fit", because it's nearly impossible to know what will resonate with people before you create it. There is just an undeniably huge amount of luck in finding something a lot of people like, so it's important to give yourself as many swings at bat as possible.
Encyclopedia Brittanica defines "popular art" as art that resonates with ordinary people in modern urban society. I'm sure we could point to examples of people earning a living at non popular art.
Yeah, I am amazed how people are brushing this off simply because GCC exists. This was far more challenging task than the browser thing, because of how far few open source compilers are there. Add to that no internet access and no dependencies.
At this point, it’s hard to deny that AI has become capable of completing extremely difficult tasks, provided it has enough time and tokens.
I don't think this is more challenging than the browser thing. The scope is much smaller. The fact that this is "only" 100k lines is evidence for this. But, it's still very impressive.
I think this is Anthropic seeing the Cursor guy's bullshit and saying "but, we need to show people that the AI _can actually_ do very impressive shit as long as you pick a more sensible goal"
> Going forward, the U.S. government will continue its global health leadership through existing and new engagements directly with other countries, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and faith-based entities. U.S.-led efforts will prioritize emergency response, biosecurity coordination, and health innovation to protect America first while delivering benefits to partners around the world.
The funny thing about this administration is that they label existing system as "bad" and "corrupt", use that as justification to abandon it, and then proceed to recreate the same thing different way.
“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
You think they will actually replace it with something similar though. They won't. They have no desire to do that. Even in name. Just like all their other supposed plans - it's just smoke and mirrors and no one will actually do any such thing.
I dunno, reading it in context of the whole statement, "...and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states" deserves a bit of focus. The UN is structurally designed to give China and Russia outsized influence. Coordinating technical matters like healthcare through the UN does seem a bit unwise given that everyone is posturing up for some sort of Cold-war or potential WWIII style scenario. I don't think we've seen much deescalation of tension in the last decade.
Better to leave the bandwidth of the UN free to focus on diplomacy without distractions, the military situation is urgent.
> Coordinating technical matters like healthcare through the UN does seem a bit unwise given that everyone is posturing up for some sort of Cold-war or potential WWIII style scenario.
On the contrary, the fact that we have to coordinate technical matters like healthcare through the UN is a large part of the reason why the Cold War remained cold and we had WW2 within 20 years of WW1 but no WW3 in the 80 years since.
Until the US decided to re-elect a literal madman, the necessity of coordinating on technical matters was obvious to all, which meant these countries weee constantly talking, building relationships and communicating with each other which helped prevent minor conflagrations from escalating.
> The UN is structurally designed to give China and Russia outsized influence.
An interesting assertion. I presume you are implying outsized influence over the US (or do you mean every other country?). I'm honestly curious: can you describe this structural design?
The thing that jumps to mind is the Security Council, which they can parley into diplomatic favours from other people. And the whole point of the UN is that it was the victors of WWII explaining to the rest of the world how international affairs were going to work, so I'd be pleasantly surprised if the special privileges stopped there.
And even without that, the UN isn't really set up to handle technical matters. It is a diplomatic club. The point is to give people a seat at the table without considering their competence.
The Security Council is controlled by the US and its allies (3 out of 5 permanent seats). And the Security Council does not decide on matters of public health like the WHO does. The WHO is staffed by very competent people, certainly more competent than RFK.
The UN has handled several technical matters successfully, including global vaccination programs.
> proceed to recreate the same thing different way
Not a same or similar thing in any way. Everything that is being torn down is being replaced by grifter schemes where all that money is funneled to personal pockets.
I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content.
It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.
I think "internet" needs a shared reputation & identity layer - i.e. if somebody offers a comment/review/contribution/etc, it should be easy to check - what else are their contributing, who can vouch for them, etc.
Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo.
PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died.
People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.
It'll stop soonish. The industry is now financed by debt rather than monetary assets that actually exist. Tons of companies see zero gain from AI as its reported repeatedly here on HN. So all the LLM vendors will eventually have to enshittify their products (most likely through ads, shorter token windows, higher pricing and whatnot). As of now, not a sustainable business model thankfully. The only sad part is that this debt will hit the poorest people most.
This is the reason I absolutely hate shadcn. The number of dependencies and files you introduce for trivial components is insane. Even tiny little divs are their own component for no good reason. I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.
Shoutout to Basecoat UI[1], so implementing the same components using Tailwind and minimal JS. That's what I am preferring to use these days.
> I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.
in my anecdotal experience as a bit of an old fogey with a greying beard, the enthusiastic juniors come along, watch a video by some YouTube guru (who makes videos about code for a living instead of making actual software) proselytizing about whatever the trendy new library is, and they assume that it's just what everyone uses and don't question it. It's not uncommon for them to be unaware that the vanilla elements even exist at times, such is the pervasiveness of React bloat.
Please name some names of these performative developer/engineers. I want to know how many are on my bingo card. Ill start, something imegen and tnumber geegee.
I don't really keep up with these Tech/Soft tubers, but watch a video on occasion. Can't really say I find something-imagen guilty of this, but like I said I watch the occasional video, not the stream. What I've watched from him is generally about what he agrees/disagrees with and he also tells you why he thinks that. Often reading articles/blogposts. Not to dismiss your opinion, but I would put him in the entertaining with substantive arguments category.
IMO software education/tainment suffers much worse though. They teach you how to do X in only this specific way with these specific tools, generally sponsored. Not the admittedly far more boring basics to do it yourself, or how to actually use these tools in a broader sense.
I'd never heard of basecoat but it looks great. IMO this is what Tailwind UI should have been. It was utter stupidity that they forced you to use their preferred shiny new JS framework of the week for UI components.
> I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.
I call it 'Shiny Object Syndrome' - Frontend devs tend to love the latest new JS frameworks for some reason. The idea of something being long running, tried and tested and stable for 5-10 years is totally foreign to many FE devs.
Despite its age JS and its ecosystem have just never matured into a stable set of reliable, repeatable frameworks and libraries.
Why attempt something that has abundant number of libraries to pick and choose? To me, however impressive it is, 'browser build from scratch' simply overstates it. Why not attempt something like a 3D game where it's hard to find open source code to use?
This is definitely correct. I had a dream about a new video game the other day, woke up and Gemini one-shotted the game, but the characters are janky as hell because it has made them from whole cloth.
What it should have been willing to do is go off and look for free external assets on the Web that it could download and integrate.
There are a lot of examples out there. Funny that you mention this. I literally just last night started a "play" project having Claude Code build a 3D web assembly/webgl game using no frameworka. It did it, but it isn't fun yet.
I think the current models are at a capability level that could create a decent 3D game. The challenges are creating graphic assets and debugging/Qa. The debugging problem is you need to figure out a good harness to let the model understand when something is working, or how it is failing.
Also graphics acceleration makes it hard to do from scratch rather than using using the 3D APIs but I guess you could in principle go bare iron on hardware that has published specs such as AMD, or just do software only rendering.
Before leaving the house, I find it helpful to imagine the median intelligence level in my geographic area (local, or country as a whole) and then recall that about half the population has a level below that point.
The issue isn't intelligence per se. It's ignorance (often willful ignorance), dogmatism, media illiteracy, political illiteracy, etc. There are many intelligent (but evil) people in the Trump administration and not every Trump voter is a dunce. Framing them all as stupid isn't useful, because it doesn't help us understand and counteract what's happening.
For many Americans (on both sides) politics is not about policy.
It's about tribalism and nihilism. Decades of political disfunction (defined by the failure of elected leaders to enact policy broadly supported by voters) has lead to a loss of faith in the ability of government (as currently structured) to deliver anything. If government (and other institutions) have failed to deliver anything to someone, it's understand why they may not care about its destruction.
Do not underestimate latent European fascism, which is easily promoted using the same issue: immigrants. Most countries have a not-quite-majority for doing their own version of Ice, including shooting civilians.
I keep reading in the news that Trump now polls the lowest ever for any US president, then I check Nate Silver and he's been hovering around the same value for the last 90 days or so.
You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.
I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.
I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services ... There got to be something between homelabs and cloud services bc the gap is too big.
Not quite there yet but Yunohost is a fantastic attempt to get closer to this ideal. Install the OS - and the basic self-hostic-use-case apps are all just there to click and install. From Immich to Kodi to Wordpress and what not.
With IPv6 (and/or NAT-forwarding) it was already possible to host stuff.
However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.
Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
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