People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at.
There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.
More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.
Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.
>More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong.
That's a good way to find yourself with a job you hate by the way.
I don’t know why I spend time on HN anymore - it used to be a place to learn things and interact with interesting people. Now it’s just a crappy subreddit. The interesting people mostly fled to private channels (or X) long ago.
With PG’s retarded “Free Palestine” arch, it’s probably best to just leave.
I worked very hard to interrogate and challenge the foundations of the white-supremacist patriarchal "political religion" (do you not know the word "ideology?") into which I was born.
This transition was deliberate, and conscious. I can't imagine how I could have endured all of the social risks and personal discomfort "without even realizing it."
But, more to the point: have you never heard of The Feminine Mystique? Have you never heard of The Vindication of the Rights of Women? It's an undeniable fact that female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor and domestic violence—including legalized rape.
This is a serious issue, and it's not "much dumber" to oppose. Frankly, you have to be pretty stupid to think that we're better off through gendered subjugation.
I agree that women have gotten a raw deal for much of history and continue to do in many parts of the world but
> female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor
Until fairly recently, due to the realities of childbirth and breastfeeding, women had to shoulder that burden. Unpaid is wrong - women received the fruits of their spouse's labor in return for their own work at home. Underpaid labor is more accurate, since women often couldn't inherit or own their spouse's property.
This guy’s entire post is about riding a sad Caltrain to some Palo Alto job and being disappointed his memorization of obscure computer trivia or generic software job didn’t provide meaning in his life.
My point is that marriage and kids provide a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment and a certain kind of narrowing clarity and that ideas of what leads to a fulfilling life are well established in old cultural communities for a reason. He’d no longer be looking for the meaning in obscure trivia - which was never the correct place to find it anyway.
The other bit is a lot of jobs are bullshit (probably most) with enormous amounts of waste building stuff that doesn’t matter. You can fix that by working at Tesla, spacex, etc.
Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and the tradlife, in one post. Please touch some grass.
If you’re complaining about secularism and committed to Judeo-Christian religion, how do you reconcile Elon and Karp being the embodiment of everything that Jesus condemns?
I suspect nothing you believe about either of them is remotely true.
I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community.
You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.
It’s not so much my belief but plain established fact that they’re both very very rich. What’d Jesus have to say about the rich getting into heaven? Camels, eyes of needles…?
The rich have access to industrial-scale blenders & can commission a hydraulic syringe. Pretty sure they can blend the camel into a fine liquid & squeeze it through the eye of a needle. Heaven awaits!
I commend your effort in eating the cat turd of trying to provide them a different perspective into life. Their resistance to even considering that you’re not saying something insane + inappropriate is a mark on them, not you.
For what it’s worth- I’ve been on a similar journey recently and it’s brought me to similar conclusions. I got there through learning more about Eastern Philosophy and trying to map it to modern Western life.
Someone (throwtato@protonmail) sent me a death threat from my hacker news email alias over this thread - ridiculous, but not surprising given the left wing extremist violence. The most hostility I've see on HN is from trans leftist activists.
They're a battle-tested technology but, like fossil fuels or pesticides, come at a price.
We should aim to take a balanced, complete and holistic view of what that price has looked like, and looks like today.
In general terms it optimises for the middle of various bell-curves, at considerable disbenefit for those towards the edges of the distribution. Essentially if you naturally conform to its proposed life-model, you'll broadly have a fairly good time, and if you don't, you won't.
It's OK to recognise the pros and the cons as part of the assessment, in a quest for a more fulfilling and long-term-sustainable model for society and human existence. I'm not sure many have the open-mindedness and maturity to participate, though.
I loved the mini and bought both the 12 and 13 mini. Also bought it for my siblings. Unfortunately after its sales Apple is very unlikely to ever make a small phone again.
The configurator is interesting and something I haven't heard of before!
It's a double edged sword because the amount of time I spend online (X) has been directly responsible for the most valuable opportunities and generally knowing enough of what's going on to leverage that for big financial and career returns. It was pretty easy to drop all non-X social media though (all meta) and just avoid short term video generally.
I've been tempted to try the lightphone 3 though - theory being if I have a separate hardware device that might be enough to help because I can leave the iPhone at home. In theory the Apple Watch could do this, but in practice it hasn't.
Another thing I think can work is committing to avoid using it for one day a week - you get a lot of the benefits, it's more doable, and the downside is minimized.
Literally got my current job through a mufo on X, so I feel obliged to stick to it for the same reasons. That being said, I’ve curtailed a lot of my time on it and other social media. The results have been positive.
The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to ultimately have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case.
I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.
If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off. His model is all this sort of first principles thinking, it's why his companies pull off things like starship. I wouldn't bet against it.
If humans had radar they would reverse into obstacles less often, and not be blindsided or T-boned as readily so long as their radar could still reach the object moving rapidly in their direction.
Elon is being foolish and weirdly anthropomorphic.
I use FSD in my Model S daily to commute from SF to Palo Alto along with most of my other Bay Area driving. It does a better job currently than most people and it drives me 95% of the time now I haven't had the phantom braking.
I'm in a 2025 with HW4, but it's dramatic improvement over the last couple of years (previously had a 2018 Model 3) increased my confidence that Elon was right to focus on vision. It wasn't until late last year where I found myself using it more than not, now I use it almost every drive point to point (Cupertino to SF) and it does it.
I think people are generally sleeping on how good it is and the politicization means people are under valuing it for stupid reasons. I wouldn't consider a non Tesla because of this (unless it was a stick shift sports car, but that's for different reasons).
Their lead is so crazy far ahead it's weird to see this reality and then see the comments on hn that are so wrong. Though I guess it's been that way for years.
The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case. I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.
If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off.
I'd really encourage people to here with a bias to dismiss to ignore the comments and just go in real life to try it out for yourself.
This is extremely narrow minded.
As another commenter pointed out, you are driving on easy mode in terms of environment and where a majority of the training was done.
This is not a general solution, it is an SF one... at best.
Most humans also don't get in accidents or have problems with phantom breaking within the timeframe that you mentioned.
Oh please - people excuse and dismiss major accomplishments, you can send a skyscraper to mars and people on HN will still be calling you a fraud.
The Bay Area has massive traffic, complex interchanges, SF has tight difficult roads with heavy fog. Sometimes there’s heavy rain on 280. 17 is also non trivial.
What Tesla has done is not trivial and roads outside the bay are often easier.
People can ignore this to serve their own petty cognitive bias, but others reading their comments should go look at it for themselves.
Auto-Pilot is not FSD. It's akin to a regular carmaker's Automatic-Braking-System and Lane-Keep-Assist. If you're seeing it used dangerously that's user error.
> you can send a skyscraper to mars and people on HN will still be calling you a fraud
To date, SpaceX has sent nothing to Mars. Not to understate the company's accomplishment, but "people on HN" are fed up exactly with statements like yours.
People here just whine and complain - yes they’ve “only” just sent a skyscraper to space for now and caught the booster on reentry, it’s a work in progress (along with their reusable rockets, earth scale telecom side project etc.)
My point is people will still be calling him a fraud when they do get it to mars, no evidence is sufficient for the HN cynic that thinks their “above the fray” ethos makes them smart.
Tesla has had massive success despite the haters, the model y becoming the literally best selling car on earth and you wouldn’t know it from HN. FSD has gotten really good, good enough to use more than not as they continue to improve it.
The best thing about capitalism is the losers here don’t matter - the winners get rich and keep going.
You downplayed what Tesla FSD can do and said I was being narrow minded and the Bay Area driving is "easy mode" and said vision isn't a general solution. I think none of this is true.
HW4 is really a game changer. I was absolutely floored by HW4 FSD during a recent test drive. Tesla is accomplishing some truly groundbreaking technical achievements here. But you wouldn't know it through all the Elon Musk noise (pro and con). I'd encourage anyone to take a test drive and put FSD through its paces. I went in with a super critical mindset and walked away stunned.
It also makes this horrible kind of sense that Elon would see them both as admirable, this idea that you're the only person who matters. Ordinary people exist only for you to exploit them, and have no intrinsic worth.
Wikipedia has major issues - there are a lot of topics with coordinated editing from bad actors. The verge article is paywalled so I can't read more than the first page + headline, but I can guess the case it makes.
It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing.
Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.
But what is better? I mean yes, reading 20 sources on a topic and coming to your own conclusions about an issue is the right answer, but the fact that Wikipedia published its edit history and discussions page makes it seem better than then what everything?
Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative.
Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better?
Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.
The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.
I think most alternative options are better.
The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.
“I seek out individuals I think are smart from a variety of places and read a lot - I'm not sure if there's another way. The more I do this, the more I have a general dislike for wikipedia.”
Right but then this isn’t the purpose of an encyclopedia. Like great! But it feels like you’re saying “the more I cook fresh meals, the less I like microwave dinners”. I should
Hope so!
“A good encyclopedia doesn’t push an ideological agenda”
But this is the no true Scotsman fallacy, encyclopedia’s are inherently biased. A good _______ doesn’t push an ideological agenda but they all do. I think I would argue Wikipedia less and more transparently than most. They just cover a lot more and are the main one so you see it a lot more.
This article suggests for instance that though Wikipedia’s does indeed have much more bias than británica, that bias may mostly be a factor if it’s length:
“ What’s more, much of Wikipedia’s bias seems to be due to the longer article length of the online publication, where word count is less of an issue than the historically printed Britannica. When compared word to word, most (though not all) of Wikipedia‘s left-leaning proclivities come out in the wash. In other words, for articles of the same length, Wikipedia is as middle-of-the-road as Britannica.
“If you read 100 words of a Wikipedia article, and 100 words of a Britannica [article], you will find no significant difference in bias,” says Zhu. “Longer articles are much more likely to include these code words.”
So again my point would be, your criticism seems nihilistic, why try to have a thing that may, like all things, be inherently flawed, how can something fail in its mission if all of its failures are normal human fallibilities.
There’s no point in continuing our discussion (are you a Wikipedia editor - this thread feels like I’m talking to one), the articles I link to show it’s much worse than you suggest.
It’s beyond inherent bias, it’s explicitly weaponized for a particular point of view which it does a lot of work to try to hide.
A, singular? Which specific point of view is it weaponized for that it’s trying to hide?
Maybe you’re not skeptical enough.
Me a Wikipedia editor?! blushes no? These days I just let ChatGPT tell me what to think, it’s more objective and rational since it’s just the thoughts of a computer and not messy human emotions.
Yes! It's fun to just order 500 $2 bills and carry some everywhere for tips. I do this all the time, it's an easy way to add a little whimsy into someone's day.
Wozniak famously went further and would order sheets of them uncut (costs more), then pay a shop to perforate them for him so he could peel them off for people (making it look really fake).
He had a funny story about doing this at a casino for a slot machine and getting interrogated by the secret service iirc where he handed the guy a fake ID where he had an eye patch and it said he was a laser operator or something. He played dumb about the bills to look more suspicious instead of explaining the truth.
Hard to tell if it was just a tall tale, but given that it was Woz it was probably mostly real.
I had a funny experience with a French cheese shop in SF for this - I tipped a $2 bill and he called me back in confused thinking it was fake, but was good natured when I showed him it was real.
Last time I was in Mexico (walked across the border so many Americans in the area and they list prices in both us and mexican currancy) I paid with twos because that is all I had, which really confused the clerk, but her manager had no problem.
I had to go to El Salvador for a work trip a while back and brought a bunch of fresh $2 bills with me. They use USD as the currency there, but they're constrained by what's in circulation. I thought it would be fun to have my $2 bills there for maybe years, I'm not sure if they have any others!
Yeah it could be insanely valuable and it'll give them an advantage by letting them add more features to the free ad supported product to expand their reach and cement their position.
There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.
More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.
Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.