I know there’s a lot of Tesla/Elon hate here. I’m not denying any of it. I’m just sharing a genuinely strange experience I wasn’t expecting.
We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.
My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.
And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).
Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.
Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.
Then v14.2 landed.
Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.
Two moments that really stuck with me:
While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.
At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.
I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.
I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”
I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
This genuine technological breakthrough is real and should be a main topic when discussing Tesla.
Admittedly, the road to a working version of FSD has been a bumpy one, with many overly optimistic timelines, but now it's finally here, and it is almost completely ignored.
It’s been “here” or “almost here” for a decade according to Elon. The world and media are sleeping the hype because they ate up the hype for so long and never saw results.
Other than yelling at people, how are you getting drunk drivers off the road? Even though it's not perfect this shit works better than those assholes. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Unless you're volunteering to drive Uber for free for everybody everywhere, telling people to just be more responsible hasn't worked in the whole history of humanity.
What percent of your driving is on highways vs urban? Almost all car brands today have incredible ADAS systems for highway driving. When Consumer Reports compared ADAS systems in 2023 Tesla was ranked 8th
It's great until it isn't and it runs over some kids or smashes into a school bus. It doesn't matter how good the software is, the hardware is inadequate to be safe.
Does Elon’s politics and DOGE’s impact on the US change at all how you feel? Regardless of how great a Tesla, starlink, etc is I could never purchase on myself after the gutting DOGE did.
Didn't forget. Just don't think it makes sense for these things to try and do both jobs. Slides that work as documents are bad presentations. Slides that work as presentations are useless documents. Even Slideshare's own description of itself isn't "for people that missed the original presentation here's your missing thing".
Its: "Slideshare is the presentation-sharing platform for anyone looking for slide inspiration, to showcase their knowledge, or to build on their own ideas."
So for people to:
1) get inspired building their own deck?
2) "Showcase knowledge" whatever that really means.
3) "Build on their own ideas" => get a bullet point or graph you could use?
No one is learning how to do anything from Slideshare because you missed a presentation. Instead, you're coming to this place to read blogs and actual long form content or watching youtube videos.
My dad is 85 and this article hits hard about what he fights going on in his body. What sucks is how much of a downward, self reinforcing spiral it all is. It's so hard to see the curbs to walk over or how to get to a thing himself, so he just naturally chooses to do fewer and fewer things. Watching TV is safer and kinder and becomes the default to anything. Which just makes his brain less and less stimulated and active, and you can imagine the drag that adds to keep figuring out life.
But like the empathy found in this article, it's caused me to be incredibly more patient with anyone struggling to walk in front of me on a crowded or narrow sidewalk.
Aging is rough. Thank you to everyone working on accessibility and aging related tech and science.
My parents have similar issues due to hearing loss, it really makes any kind of social interaction a chore which results in a similar spiral. For years I've wanted to try to make, or hope someone else would make, a set of AR glasses that's purely focused on providing accurate real-time subtitles, no other gimmicks or features that might affect the wearability/usability. I think that's the biggest QOL boost most old folks would get from a single product, and it seems much more realistically feasible than other potential QOL solutions like robotics, but I wouldn't know where to start with building it. As a bonus, it would just need an LLM/Google Translate hookup to become an amazing travel tool.
Those look bulky, to support exactly the kind of feature creep I think will always be a problem with this category. I think there are a LOT of people who would simply not consider wearing them until the form factor is close to normal glasses, but it would be hard to convince any product manager not to expand into videos/games/music/AI/etc.
The Xreal front page is people playing racing games and watching movies; I'm imagining something that can be used nonchalantly in public, and I'm assuming every feature beyond a bare minimum speech-to-text display would increase the size.
I've seen R&D demos of universal subtitling and translating, in video conferencing, but it doesn't seem to have taken off or it's hidden behind more paywalls. I did suggest that people use good microphones when giving presentations over MS Teams for the purpose of transcriptions, archiving, searchability and AI summarization, but real time translating would be the other use case.
That said, I don't believe it would work as smoothly if used in AR, as speaking and reading are two different brain things. Plus, if it's aimed at older people, they likely have sight issues too.
To a point this is already possible, just ask people to speak into your phone with e.g. Google Translate or some other text-to-speech engine. But that's awkward, because it's a context switch to a device and the processing time required.
I know my folks already watch movies with subtitles for this reason, and I would think sight issues can be calibrated for if the product is a pair of glasses? But idk how AR tech works with e.g. farsighted people who use reading glasses.
While it is challenging, looked at one a life time scale it is kind of a neat thing. It isn't a purely linear decline and that means while the later years kind of suck, you get a lot of decent time before then.
Yes, we should try and work against this but I am just looking at the silver lining.
There's quite a lot of aging research going, maybe will get something concrete in the next 10-20 years (maybe too late for her) but it's at least something
This! My grandmother adopted a dog late in her life. She walked 10km a day with that dog for nearly 20 years! (That dog was the oldest dog I've ever known). At 92 she was famous in my small village, she was in better shape than some of the 30 year olds!
Then the dog died. Instead of walking 10km per day, she lay on the couch staring at the ceiling. About 3 months later she started getting lost on her way to the supermarket. Fifth time she got lost we decided to put her in a home for demented people. We simply couldn't provide the care she needed any other way. Took a few more months and she stopped recognising us.
I think she outlived her dog by about 18 months, iirc.
She stopped walking, and then age came fast for her.
I'm 63. I make a point of walking 5Km (3 miles), every morning. I'm usually out the door, by 0530, and back in about 50 minutes.
I was running, but kept getting injured, so it switched to walking, several years ago.
I think keeping my mind occupied is just as important. It's entirely possible that the visual stimulus of her walks was as important as the exercise.
For myself, I make a point of constantly working on shipping software, and constantly learning new stuff. LLMs have been a godsend, for the latter. I had pretty much given up on trying to ask questions, because of the awful, sneering responses that I was getting, more and more.
Yeah I think you're right! And it's not just the visual stimulus either! She'd walk through pretty much the entire village, including a few homes that smack in the middle of nowhere. And she'd say hello to everyone she passed! Once in a while she'd stop and have chat...
After the dog died she only talked to people if they came into her home.
I think the social aspect of her walks was very important for her health too. Like you say, it's all about exercising that noggin',as well as the body!
A couple of neighbors adopt older dogs. We never discussed that specifically, yet it seems to be a smaller commitment lifetime-wise (few years instead of 10-15 for a young dog), and you'd have to train and deal with a puppy energy (which is a great thing if you have the time and energy to engage in it) if you adopt younger dogs, while the older ones seem to be well set in their good behavior ways. Long walks, established routine, no drama. Also of course fostering is a gateway drug into getting a dog as well as good way to learn what dog would be a match for you.
There's an overwhelming and abundantly clear reason they are referred to as man's best friend. I guess I was fortunate to always grow up with dogs, but I can never really understand people that don't pine for dogs. Now, I can understand not wanting the added responsibility in some situations, but the amazingness of a dog companion is one of the most mind blowing things about the whole nature of human existence. The presence of dogs through evolution legitimately made humans the way they are today and the reverse for what dogs are. It's really wild. I also don't get people that treat their dogs like humans or kids though. It's a dog, don't bring it in a restaurant.
Also lots of empirical evidence that dog owners live longer.
While the video is very impressive - my main reaction was to think how incredibly cool that type of dog is. So I eventually ended up getting my own Samoyed and it's been a hugely positive impact on my life.
NB I pretty much like all dogs now - but I love Samoyeds.
My grandfather, with whom I was very close, suffered from Parkinson's in his last decade or so. For a long time he was doing OK: Occasional confusion and the slow, shuffling walk that is characteristic of the disease.
One day he had a minor operation that left him needing a wheelchair for what we thought would be just a few weeks. But he never regained his strength and was never to walk again, which led to a steep and sudden decline in his mental condition. It was truly devastating to see one of the sharpest people I knew become an angry and confused simulacrum of the man I so admired.
I wish I had realized two things then: First, as you say, maintaining mobility is the crucial to the well-being of the elderly. Second, immediate physical/occupational therapy after a fall or surgery is essential to people at risk of losing mobility. Sadly it wasn't offered to us and we didn't think to ask.
My dad is going through that shit right now. He fell a few weeks ago and hasn’t walked since.
I live abroad to make more money and feed my ego and I only see him 3–4 times a year. On top of that selfishness, every now and then I catch myself selfishly thinking I don’t want to go through that, which makes me feel like an even worst piece of shit.
Man, be easy on yourself. You already have the world to put you down, no need to add to it. Life is complicated and I’m sure that you trying to have a better life and a career is not just for ego. Love yourself a bit.
I would appreciate if the "norm" was recognized to be not having your body rot away over time.
It really is simple: aging is incredibly harmful and undesirable. It strips away your quality of life until there isn't much left and then you die. It doesn't take any more than that for it to be declared a disease.
Whether it's "natural" or whether "everyone has it" is a distraction. If everyone was born with cancer, that wouldn't make cancer any less of a disease.
Starvation used to be "a normal part of life". So was having half your children die before they hit the age of 10. That was the normal, natural outcome of having a child - if you want to have grandchildren, just make more children! Some of them would live, surely!
This is how it was - until humans decided that this sucks and something should be done about that.
I see no reason not to dispose of aging at the earliest opportunity. And this starts by recognizing: aging sucks for everyone, and should be disposed of.
It's not fightable or optional, so it's less like starvation and more like gravity. Humans have decided that we'd like to "dispose" of aging, but unfortunately reality has this annoying habit of not responding to our categorization and despite thinking of it as a disease we cannot fight it like we can other diseases. Those other things you mentioned are considered outside of the usual because we have been able to make them less common through effort; despite all our effort though, aging isn't something we have that control over. We're all gonna die, of old age or a short-sharp-shock, at least until we figure out some wild medical breakthroughs.
Once we have those breakthroughs, sure folks might start thinking of aging as a disease that's not "normal" or a thing that we can actually avoid, but until then it's a fact of life, same as gravity, the sun, or the tides.
There's way more aging research now than like 10 years ago, I think the field is also starting to understand that playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases on a 80 year old is not really the winning strategy.
It's less "not fightable" and more "no one is seriously trying".
Compare the amount of funding aging research gets with something like Alzheimer's. Which is also a degenerative disease, and worth fighting against - but nowhere near as prevalent.
I don't doubt that it would be incredibly hard to stop aging altogether. But if the effort was there, we might get a way to reduce the severity of aging within a few decades of research. The sheer benefits of being able to reduce the severity of "aging associated" things in a world with aging population would be immense.
If you want to decay and rot and die a miserable death, that's your choice. If your genuine preference is that all of your friends and family and your own children should decay and rot and die a miserable death too, then that's your opinion and you can hold onto it.
But don't you dare force that outcome onto everyone.
In my eyes, "decay and rot and the inevitability of a miserable death is a good thing actually" is a fucking insane viewpoint to hold. The only possible reason I see to hold onto it is that it's the socially accepted cope. If you truly believe that nothing can be done about aging, then "death is good acktually" makes for a good coping mechanism.
I'd rather humans cope less and problem-solve more.
It would be pretty weird if george washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc were here with us today. We’d probably still be debating if slavery is acceptable or not LOL.
People complain about boomers hoarding all the wealth and “never letting go” so younger folks can take the reins. Imagine how much worse it would be if those boomers lived until 200?
Imagine how much more fossil fuel we’d be burning if we all lived until 200?
You know how old people tend to get stubborn? Not all, but most? Now imagine if the U.S. government was comprised of mostly people age 100+. Imagine how they would do keeping up with changes that affect youngsters in 2025?
Imagine how bad the housing crisis would be in 2025.
Imagine how unmotivated people would be in day to day life if they knew they’d live to 200 years?
In summary…if everyone could easily live forever, that is not a good thing. It would drastically change society as we know it, and not 100% for the better. I’d argue it would actually make things worse.
Death is literally a biological process that affects all living organisms on this planet, and in the galaxy. Sorry if that’s hard to accept? I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.
I find it hard to imagine that an 80 years old politician today spends a lot of time thinking of what would happen 50 or 100 years down the line. And things like fossil fuel use are very much a "50 to 100 years down the line" kind of problem.
Now, if that very politician thought that with the way anti-aging technology is going, he'll probably live to 150, maybe 200 if he's lucky? That might change the equation - for the better.
I don't think that "kill everyone to avoid the risk of the political system getting marginally worse" is an optimal solution. I'd rather deal with aging and the shittiness of politics as two separate problems with a minor overlap.
>I personally find it beautiful how “energy” is recycled once we die, through the soil, and eventually into other things - like a tree, etc.
I think that this is nothing but socially accepted cope. A load of pseudo-profound bullshit that might be easier to accept than the idea that aging and death are really fucking bad and we aren't doing much to stop them. And that even if we did, we and our loved ones may not be the ones to ever benefit from it.
cope? it’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet. Including humans. Bit of a weird take if you ask me. I know my place so to speak…
I do agree with you that if politicians lived longer, they’d (hopefully) think long term. That’s an interesting point I hadn’t considered.
Lastly - nobody is suggesting killing anyone here. Feels like i’m being interviewed by a reporter with my words taken completely out of context. This is what being famous must feel like. :) If someone finds a way for humans to live longer I won’t be upset in the slightest. I’m just saying “be careful what you wish for”. That is all. There would be many unintended consequences. Viewing it as strictly a beneficial thing is naive i think.
Yes, cope. "It’s what happens to all the fauna and flora on this planet" is cope. A literal "it's more okay if I rot to death if everything else does!"
Modern agriculture has enabled the human population to grow rapidly without people starving to death, which had "unknown unintended consequences" too. As well as the well known consequence of food being affordable and available to most people worldwide.
I'd take "unknown unintended consequences" over the well known consequences of the status quo. The current consequences is that everyone dies a miserable death. It's a very easy choice.
You both have good and valid points of view but this site deserves a higher level of decorum.
We have a lot to thank for the passing of power from one generation to the next over the past millennia. We don’t know what we don’t know. I imagine the next enlightenment or the next freedoms to be won will require older generations to “move on.”
If you want the world to be run by a 700 year old Xi jinping, if you want your children to suffer under a thousand year rule of monopolistic Bezos, if you want to see Altered Carbon become a reality, then that’s your opinion and you can hold on to it.
But don’t you dare force that on anyone else.
See how unconvincing these platitudes are?
I literally cannot imagine why you would want infinite life. The short timespan is 99% of the reason life is so valuable. We need to do what we can with the time we’re given.
I never said nothing could be done about aging anyways. I think we’ll reach the point where people only die when they choose to.
That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.
Imagine if King George were still ruling England. No rules can change ever - he’s the king. Hope you like eternal monarchy.
I sometimes wonder if people are so afraid of death because they never talk about it frankly? My wife and I converse about it regularly.
I kind of agree but on the other hand I think it would also change the calculus a lot, if the dictator was going to live to 700, wouldn't it be more likely for someone to act and try to get him out because now the calculus might be that it's just better to wait it out than try to set anything up?
It's a bit hard to visualize that kind of world because so many other things would also be different, and if the politicians were chronologically like 500, they would biologically be still much younger so maybe the mind would allow for much more plasticisty and that would allow them to be more open to new ideas.
What's worse: having a 700 year old Xi Jinping, or having an extra 600 years of entirely unmitigated aging worldwide - with all the death and suffering that entails?
There is plenty of politicians I truly hate. But I don't hate any of them enough to doom billions to an early grave just to get at them.
If you think that Xi Jinping should die, then I can't help but think that a better solution to that would be to actually kill Xi Jinping. Far less collateral damage involved.
>That’s also a pure dystopia, because it’s beyond naive to think this would be some commonplace technology afforded to everyone and not just the ruling class.
There's this tendency for people nowadays to take this kind of shitty Black Mirror logic, and assume that the inevitable outcome is the one that maximizes the grimdark factor.
In reality, there's no reason to expect that anti-aging treatments would work any different from something like Ozempic or laser eye surgery. Sure, those were hideously expensive to develop - but are now affordable to upper middle class, and fully expected to get more available over time.
You earn more by selling a $1000 smartphone to everyone than you could ever earn by selling a billion dollar megayacht to a dozen billionaires looking to buy one. With anti-aging tech, the economic incentive to reduce the costs and reach a wider audience is immense. The demand is going to be there: a lot of what the cosmetics industry does now is fight the mere appearance of aging, and that's an industry worth hundreds of billions by itself.
Death is part of the necessary cycle of biology, and in no way is it bad. It’s certainly SAD, but in no way is it bad. Rotting isn’t this horrible mark on your body, it’s the beauty of nature recycling things so that the new has a chance.
Not only that, but could you imagine the absolutely incredible strain on Earth’s resources if we had 50 billion people instead of 8 billion? Global warming would’ve happened ages ago, and we’d be far, FAR beyond it now. In this scenario, it should be obvious nobody has a yacht, let alone a smartphone. There simply isn’t enough to go around here on earth.
There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides “well I won’t be sad about that one particular thing anymore”, which is… really lame when compared against the untold damage this will do.
I’m a little surprised you’re not taking any time to explain the benefits here, because I’m not actually seeing any besides you not having to cope with nature anymore.
Edit: I should also mention that I’m not looking for shitty black mirror outcomes, I’m just looking at the modern world, which continues to stratify massively, and pretty much has (with few exceptions) since time immemorial. Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?
If you think that the evils of Xi Jinping outweigh the suffering of billions, you should consider killing Xi Jinping. Plenty of people tried killing Hitler, and Xi Jinping is apparently even worse?
>There simply isn’t any positive to immortality, besides
You mean, besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies? Besides that little incredibly unimportant easy-to-overlook thing?
>Can you explain why things will suddenly become fair and equitable when nobody dies for some reason?
Can you explain why amazing technologies like cars and smartphones and air travel became available to the masses, instead of being hoarded by a dozen uber-rich uber-powerful billionaires?
The short answer is "economics". Do you expect anti-aging technology to be exempt from economics somehow?
Yeah, I dunno about you, but I’m not using the same kinds of stuff as billionaires.
It will be the same - because of economics. If you think you’ll be just as healthy as long-lived as them, you’re crazy. It’s literally not the case anywhere else in life. Food, housing, opportunities, healthcare ALREADY, transportation, and kitchen sinks.
> besides billions of people not rotting to death in their own bodies?
Man, when you’re so melodramatic about something as benign as aging, you’re really hard to take seriously.
If you can’t see my point of view by now, and how it’s a hell of a gamble to hope we stop doing the thing we’ve been doing pretty much since the dawn of man, I don’t think I have anything else to add to the conversation.
I also just think it’s mentioning that you are your body, in its entirety. We almost certainly have more than one brain, at the very least.
That's what aging is. Aging is the process of rotting to death in your own body. There's nothing "benign" about it.
Humans learned a lot of ways to sugarcoat it. Many ways to cope. But if I told you that I want to create and unleash something that would make billions suffer, getting worse over decades, and all afflicted people would eventually die?
You'd call me a twisted monster, rightfully so.
And yet, when I propose we do the opposite, you say "no, it's natural, it's benign, rotting to death is fine actually, everyone does it".
I can't see how there wouldn't be a revolution if the rich had all this anti-aging technology and the plebs would sit there and watch.
People like to cope a lot, they are fine with playing whack a mole with 50 different diseases and putting the 90 year old through chemo, but treating aging (the actual root cause)? OH MY GOD MUH NATURE
I wasn't going to respond because this comment is so dense, but I feel like it's valuable to the conversation to point out: wtf do you mean "people"? I've literally never met anyone who shares my view on this.
All living beings have protective mechanism against all the degenerative effects of aging, and this has been true for over a billion years now.
That protective mechanism is reproduction. Your viral infections, bacterial infections, broken bones, bad backs, polluted lungs, corrupted mind, and just general wear and tear, does not get transmitted. It's a clean start in life.
There is epigenetic age reset that happens during the conception that "resets" the cells to their young version like kind of a factory reset that cleans up the aging marks and other offsets that have happened during life so they don't get transmitted to the offspring. Learning to apply this process to the living human is quite big research topic. Obviously nature had to figure some kind of mechanism how to not transmit the cellural damage forward.
It is applied to the living human (or other being), when it is born.
Applying the process to already old people would be the abomination of desolation and turn this planet into a hellish dimension of unimaginable proportions, and it would of course exterminate humanity. You have to remember that when humanity is exterminated, that means forever.
Aging is part of a natural process we are already able to slow down significantly. Calling it a disease just muddies the semantic space of pathology in my opinion.
Everybody understands already that slowing down or stopping the aging process is desirable. I don't see the usefulness in lumping it in with muscle atrophy, clogged arteries, or cancer.
You're saying this as if there were no research going on about aging. We know why aging happens. That doesn't mean we can just stop or reverse the process, or that it is even possible to do so.
There are lots of instances where a soldier being 5-6 times stronger would be really useful.
I don’t think it’ll be a scenario like the starship troopers book, but having one available to a swat team or whatever, could be useful.
Still, I personally think the army would be one of the last applications, because that’s where you need the absolute lowest possible latency. Latency on a suit for an elderly person would be much more acceptable.
Beyond the obvious (medical care, accessibility, etc), I think technology has a huge amount of untapped potential to make the end of our lives a lot more bearable, and a lot less lonely. TV is one thing - and whether it's a net good or not has been discussed to death, so I won't here - but I wonder how video games might be used. They're a lot more engaging - both generally and cognitively - than TV, you can build and achieve things and feel a sense of accomplishment (yeah yeah pride and accomplishment), there are communities around them, you can play with your family, etc. Even online board and card games would be an option. Have you ever considered showing your dad some simple games?
Can’t speak to the cognitive benefits of video games in late life, but my grandma really took to our N64 one summer when my brother and I stayed with her.
She used to stay absorbed in a little battery powered draw poker game that she had, but by the end of the summer she had gone through a large part of our game collection and could put up a real challenge in Mario Kart 64.
Eventually we gifted it to her and she played it for years after that.
Aging is rough. I feel for you. My parents are a bit younger but I'm starting to pick up on things that make me realize they're getting older. Thanks for sharing
We killed growth too when we had one of these generous trials.
I worked on a (once) popular Saas app :) We were losing customers when I came in. But then started growing again (slowly) when we started shipping a bunch of great things.
But then the owner wanted to get rid of the "free trial" and was adamant we offer a free version. That would boost our growth to an incredible new level he promised. I could see the reasoning. Our free trial still required you give us a credit card up front. We just wouldn't charge you for 30 days. Asking for a credit card has to be bad for growth, right? People want to kick the tires before they become our customers, and there's a lot more of those folks.
So we ditched the collection of credit cards up front and went to a totally free plan. You could upgrade to a paid plan of course.
Growth started tanking again and we never got it back.
One theory was collecting the credit card just got the really eager shoppers and now our growth was from zombie, forgetful, monthly Saas payments. And that's valid of course. But I wonder too, if just asking for a credit card gets you to be more serious too about trying a product. If you have to put in a credit card, you'll probably focus in here for a bit and not sign up for 10 other things the same day to try. And successfully collecting a credit card while someone is in the process of choosing anything, is probably always going to be easier than trying to convince them in 30 days to come back and get into a buyers mindset again. Unless you really are selling something so deeply crippling not to have it again after 30 days.
I recommend "Alchemy" by Roy Sutherland. [0] It deals with human and behavior that drive economics and highlights ideas that would fail on paper and actually work. Example, turns out you can use Disney like characters painted on the outside of a store to reduce brake-ins at night.
It goes through similar scenarios. Example, "Offering a free version and not requiring a credit card can push the idea that your solution has no value so why should I use it?"
The problem these days seems like everyone and their grandma has read about this type of phenomenon and now we live in a world where solutions that truly provide little if any value require the credit card, email, or some other exchange of information.
Back in 2006 when I was in YC I wrote down a handful of goals. I looked at those goals daily. Just envisioned getting them or something even better than them. They seemed so lofty and ridiculous at the time. But oddly, they all became some version of true. Some of them took so much longer (and brought new problems) than I even anticipated, but some version of what I wanted transpired. So any process like this that involves setting down some goals and getting you excited to keep putting down work towards them seems like a pretty good idea :)
Been out for a few years but Seth Godin's "The Practice" is a good, easy read in this spirit. tl;dr I think of that book is just get used to showing up and doing stuff. Outcomes are fickle. But developing a love of good process can be enjoyment enough and mentally more stable. And can sometimes lead to some good outcomes.
What always surprises me is how "sleep" is the ingredient I need here. Yes repetition helps. But space out the repetition with sleep and "woah! i get it!" is often uttered. Obviously there's so much written about sleep as some kind of RAM to SSD offloading step, but it never ceases to amaze me when it happens so well.
Yeah, or just leaving whatever it is you're trying to learn for your subconscious to process while you do other stuff.
I've found myself having a lot easier time to learn difficult new concepts by (somewhat counterintuitively) stop trying to learn it for a week or two, then come back to it, and suddenly it's a lot easier to grasp, even if I haven't consciously thought about it since I left it.
I've had concepts click in my head literally years after studying them. I have no idea why. I assume I was exposed to tangentially related information at some point, then an old thought bubbles up and it suddenly makes sense.
> What always surprises me is how "sleep" is the ingredient I need here. Yes repetition helps. But space out the repetition with sleep and "woah! i get it!" is often uttered.
I really relate to this. In fact, a lot of times, when working on a difficult problem, I’ll intentionally go take a nap when I feel stuck, and more often than not, I’ll wake up feeling like the problem is much easier than I thought before my nap. I can’t explain why it works so well—it just does!
OP here: that is an excellent point! Of the eight read-throughs, four were on Friday night, then I had dreams involving some kind of TRON-like vector spaces, and at brunch on Saturday things seemed to start gelling. The four extra read-throughs were to crystallise that intuition to a level that I felt I could start writing it up. I'm 100% sure the sleep was what built some kind of intuition at a pre-linguistic stage that I could build on.
This becomes very obvious to one's self if you learn an instrument or another mechanical/procedural thing. For example, cramming 4 hours into guitar is less useful than 1 hour over 4 days cause of sleep. Sometimes I will struggle with something for quite a bit towards the end of a practice session, and then I will get it right on the first try in my next session on the following day. Hell, there are so many times when I go to my guitar teacher and I tell him "yeah so i practiced this part of the assignment over the past week and I could never figure it out" and then I try to show him the issue and I play it mostly correctly to my surprise.
With something like learning a language, problem solving skills, a code base, new maths, or wtv, it is less apparent because the mind can delude itself, and it is much harder to delude yourself with actual physical movements. You either do it, or you don't...
I gave up drinking 5 years ago. Just didn't want it in my life anymore. Started just feeling ick more often than not even with just a couple drinks. Just stopped feeling worth it. But I loved cocktails.
It's pricey, but they expose me to all the new non-alcohol things out there. It's great if you just want an easy way to get fun new things without thinking too hard about this category.
Also, our very own Justin Kan, is a founder of Woody's Wine (NA): https://woodys.wine
So many good NA beers now. Athletic, Guinness, Heineken, all play well here.
Still looking for a good fake bourbon. My favorite so far is Free Sprits https://drinkfreespirits.com/collections/non-alcoholic-spiri... Fair warning though. None of these fake alcohols drink well on their own. I don't think anyone has a bourbon anyone is going to like on the rocks or neat. But it does well in mocktails.
I highly recommend trying to make some homemade ginger beer. It’s super easy, takes just a few days to ferment, lots of recipes online. Much better than the stuff in the store which is filled with added sugar or artificial sweeteners. Plus you can brew with extra ginger if you like it strong. Whatever you do, don’t ferment it in glass bottles. Use 2 liter plastic soda bottles.
most of the time folks are fermenting ginger beer, it's just to carbonate it. ginger beer isn't usually fermented to produce alcohol like a normal beer.
since there is so much sugar available in ginger beer, fermenting/carbonating it in sealed glass bottles will result in bottle bombs.
skip the fermentation completely: 2 liter plastic soda bottles are great for force-carbonating with a co2 tank. if you really don't like plastic you could find a 1 gallon stainless steel keg and carbonate (and serve) from that.
Probably pointing at exploding bottles; I've made probably 40 batches of ginger beer and when I would 'burp' the bottles I never had an issue. Decided once to try out not doing so and had six hours of clean up. But otherwise you're probably fine. Just let out carbonation morning and night, it takes a minute or so.
You can definitely make ginger beer with wild yeast (fresh ginger root conveniently comes with lots of wild yeasts) and make delicious drinks. There are lots of recipes.
I also recommend, if anyone is interested, investigating “ginger beer plant” (GBP), which is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBY) such as that used to brew kombucha and kefir. It was once common in Britain, but almost went extinct. Some was saved by a German culture bank (DSMZ), and now you can buy some online! Makes a different, and I think delicious, drink compared to the “ginger bug” method!
You don't have to ferment it to get a rich flavor. You just have to use fresh ginger instead of dried or powdered. We make it with Fresh Ginger, Lemon juice, orange juice, cane sugar and molasses. Then force carb.
Perhaps you might enjoy making cocktail yourselves :D
There is /r/Mocktails, imbibe magazine has a alcohol free section with a lot of recipes, and there are books as well - I'd suggest good drinks by Julia Bainbridge and Zero by alinea group-.
My biggest pain point is that there is no high end past Zero. The Julia book is solid.
In actual cocktails, there are a handful of books that are _incredible_ and cater to high end cocktails. I have ~600 bottles at home (I know...) and I really appreciate those books. I'm willing to make cranberry tequila rosemary ice. Or clarify a punch.
Almost every mocktail resource is... quite frankly... too simple. "Add lemon to fake sparking wine to make a delicious French 75!"
This makes sense from sheer numbers. Way less folks making mocktails. I love that Alinea book. Just wish there were good websites out there.
I've started doing spirit free cocktails recently, but I definitely get that there are way less resources than regular cocktails. However, zero has a section on making backbar alcohols such that you might be able to use them on regular cocktails, by substituting the alcohol with their spirit free version. The taste won't be the same of course, and you might have to alter the dosage, but it's better than nothing. Perhaps you won't be able to clarify an alcohol free wine, but I'm sure there are recipes that aren't ruined by replacing alcohol with its non alcoholic version
I feel like if someone could figure out an "alcohol" that doesn't metabolize like alcohol or kill you will be a somethingillionarire. Or at least a beverage/food company another mountain of money.
Lots of drinks come close but the problem is that, despite some claims, alcohol does have a flavour.
There are some fully-fermented NA beers that use special strains of yeast that produce less alcohol that come quite close to the real thing and are very tasty, but they're just a lil off...
You mean the same inebriation effects but without the same health risks?
I believe there are drugs that act on similar receptors, and are not as toxic or at least don't need to be taken in such high doses for the same effect.
My understanding is that the drug GHB has very similar effects to alcohol, in lower doses, but unfortunately in higher doses is used as a date rape drug.
Alcohol has the benefit of being somewhat naturally occurring. I don't see many other recreational drugs being legalized or so widely used.
"Kava" is supposed to mimic a drunk, in the way that Kratom mimics opiates and kanna mimics MDMA.
I only know that if you're not careful with kratom it will hurt you thru the exact same mechanisms that opiates do. No idea about dosing or anything on kava or kanna. I tried kanna but only low micro doses. It is like a slight mood elevator at low dosages, like I imagine "a beer with dinner" elevates mood slightly.
2.5 grams of kratom feels exactly like an oxy, down to wanting to tell everyone you really love them and is that shirt felt well it is now
Kratom is definitely something to be wary of. Physical withdrawals similar to opiates with prolonged use and made up of alkaloids we don't know the full safety profile of yet (or at least didn't when it was taking off in popularity.) I would not be surprised to find out morphine is "healthier" for the body. Plus there was that scare around some of the big kratom distributers having batches of the leaves contaminated with heavy metals like lead in products they continued to sell.
Would highly advise people to steer clear of it if not using it for harm reduction though the wisdom of replacing one physically addictive drug with another doesn't seem to bode well either. Not a doctor just my two cents.
Tea is made from the leaves of trees which leech fluoride into the leaf from the groundwater where it is grown. Cessation of tea ingestion can lead to withdrawals and severe mood changes. Tea has been the proximate cause of at least one major war, but since it was about tea, it was a very civil war.
Kind of a silly comparison. Much of kratom's popularity came about because the alternative is illegal not because of how safe it is or isn't. You can't compare fluoride to unsafe levels of lead. And "cessation of tea ingestion" won't give you literal opiate withdrawals.
Calling it a safe way to do opiates is just irresponsible. It's really not that different from how manufacturers more than a century ago invented opioids and called them non addictive alternatives to morphine.
can you show me where i recommended anyone take it or called it "a safe way to do opiates"?
also can you show me a comparison between the lead levels in kratom and the fluoride (and lead) in tea?
also, don't bother. Imagine shilling for poppy seeds and one specific leaf, but lambasting a leaf from a different tree (coffee, is it because it's coffee and you're a tea drinker?)
I possibly misunderstood you. The way you talked about it initially comparing it to oxy sounded like you were endorsing it as a safe (or legal) alternative. I've seen people endorsing it on HN of all places before and just don't like the way it's often misrepresented as something safe.
I'm still not really sure what your point with the tea is. You don't have to look very hard to see that unregulated kratom being imported from god knows where had a lot of incidents of heavy metal contamination. If this was a well known issue with tea you could buy in stores in the US I'm not aware of it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24681...
And I'm not shilling for anything. I don't think people should be taking morphine recreationally either. Kratom blew up the way it did in popularity because people realized it's an opiate you can order legally over the internet. Your response about the tea to my disclaimer that it's not like the other plants you listed makes it sound like you think it's on the same level of safety as tea which it really isn't and people should be aware of that.
There are plenty of drugs that are way better than alcohol if you are looking for a specific effect. Maybe a little too good actually, the toxicity of alcohol acts as a deterrent, no one enjoys hangovers. Most of them are illegal, but alcohol would be too if it wasn't so easy to make and part of our culture. And by the way, alcohol is the most common date rape drug by far.
But most of these drugs are not enjoyable to taste, in fact, many are downright disgusting.
Ah. no. sorry. i meant really just tastes like alcohol. but no inebriation or health effects. I really like the taste of alcohol in a drink, but don't want any of the effects.
Ah OK, I often thought the opposite, that people mainly drink for the sugar in beer etc, as well as the alcohol.
But I always felt like the kick of the alcohol was just something people came to like as it preceeds the effect.
Otherwise more people might drink vodka and water.
We needed a car again. Sold ours a year ago and got by with Uber, rentals, taxis. Life changed a bit and we needed something more predictable. I was planning to buy something used and boring and didn’t really care what.
My wife asked, “What about an EV?” We can’t charge in our rental garage, but there’s a Tesla Supercharger literally across the street. Took a Tesla test drive mostly out of curiosity.
And… I drove maybe 1% of that drive. The rest was on full self driving (FSD).
Fast forward, I now own a Tesla, and about 99% of my driving is on FSD.
Important context: when we picked it up, it was still on v13. It immediately made an illegal turn and scared some pedestrians in a crosswalk. So yes, I get the concern and skepticism. I had it too.
Then v14.2 landed.
Whatever they changed in that release feels real. It’s not just incremental. It feels like a different system. Elon says “we finally cracked it” (and probably says that all the time), so take that with a grain of salt, but with my very small sample size… it kind of looks like they might have.
Two moments that really stuck with me:
While self-driving, the car clearly anticipated a bus making a massive wide turn into our lane and hung way back until the maneuver was complete. It saw that developing long before I did.
At ~70 mph, I was mid lane-change with my blinker on when a driver towing a large trailer decided to drift into the same lane without checking their blind spot. The Tesla instantly aborted the lane change and smoothly moved back, avoiding what would’ve been a nasty accident. No panic, no hard braking, no drama.
I know this probably sounds like shilling. I’m not interested in the politics and don’t want to defend any of that. But it genuinely feels like stepping into the future, and honestly a much safer way to drive.
I want Rivian, Waymo, whoever to nail this too. I hope they do. But right now, Tesla seems to actually have something that crossed a line from “demo” to “wow, this is real.”
I didn’t expect to come away thinking that. But here we are.
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