It got worse.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/elon-musk-vs-organic-farmers-bastrop/
As it turns out, Elon Musk had a bunch of farms + horses from all the land he bought in the 2022-era. Elon Musk was actively trying to get rid of horses on his new property.
Its not that Elon Musk was going to “buy her a horse”. He had tons of spare horses and was looking to dump them onto someone else.
No one is talking about automated theorem provers (see 4 coloring theorem) or symbolic solvers (see Mathematica). These tools already revolutionized math decades ago.
The only thing that came out in the past year or two are LLMs. Which is clearly overhyped bullshit.
Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.
But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.
Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There’s always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.
Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that’s good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I’ll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that’s really not much money in the great scheme of things.
At very least, Kagi now has a “Fediverse search”, and now that “search-lemmy” seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain’t so good at this yet).
I’m just gonna plug “Kagi” here.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but… as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I’ve personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
Its an all-stock deal.
Meaning its down to like $47 Billion, last time I checked. As the stock price drops, the cheaper the pay package gets!!
The layoffs were known last week though.
Sure, the news is finally talking about the layoffs, but people were locked out of their badges and complaining last week about this. So now its official today, but it was public knowledge last week when that price declined dramatically.
So the employees were nominally on the books until today. Big woop. They stopped working a week ago and complained about it online. You can’t hide a mass of 10,000+ sad and angry employees talking shit about Tesla. The stock moved on that before the official layoff announcement today.
Zoom out about a week.
Its fair to say that last week, TSLA was oversold and is now bouncing back from that. But the -55% profits and -$2.3ish Billion FCF are bad numbers.
TSLA is down from $180, where it was just a few weeks ago. $140 prices this past week apparently was too low, but there’s no chance in hell that TSLA goes back up to pre-Q1 announcement numbers. Q1 2024 was awful. Declining sales around the world in all major areas: China, Europe, AND USA. They’re weak everywhere.
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
Early wikis were wild.
“We” implemented forums by just repeatedly editing a page and leaving a --Username, and it was all on the honor system.
Kinda emulated like this --User2WouldReply
Yeah, like this --User3
FSD is the $12,000 upgrade package.
This isn’t the “free” Autopilot package included in every Tesla. This is literally an upselling maneuver for Tesla. If this were a “learning” kind of thing coming from Tesla / Elon, it’d only apply to people who were interested in the $12,000 FSD package, not the entire damn customer base.
This is dealership-level bullshit. Actually, its far worse than any dealership bullshit I’ve ever seen. Its not like Hummer sales-reps are going to force me to sit through a “Crab Walk” demo or Toyota sales reps are going to have me sit through Toyota-features when I’m shopping with them. There’s a bit of upselling going on in any car buying process, but $12,000+ upselling maneuvers (like FSD advertisement) is well into the bullshit territory.
This isn’t about “proper operation” of a car though. Every car buyer has a drivers license after all.
This is about Elon Musk trying to sell a $12,000+ upcharge onto customers (or a monthly payment of $200/month).
But the two people most important to the contract are the salesguy and the customer.
The sales guy can say “Hey, sign here stating I gave you a FSD demo”, and the customer says “Wait, why??”, and the sales guy says : “If you don’t sign that, I’m forced to take you out on a 5 minute demo”, then the customer signs it.
So they’d just easily avoid the whole endeavor anyway.
TSLA has a PE Ratio of 42. Toyota has a PE Ratio of 11.
If Tesla becomes a “normal car company”, we’re looking at 75% declines in the stock price. The only reason why its being propped up at all is because of Elon Musk’s cult of personality.
Yeah, Elon Musk has successfully tied himself to the company like a suicide pact. The Board is also largely under Elon Musk’s control.
Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO.
Nah. “X” had $Billions in cash from the buyout deal + loans. X will simply not fall until all that cash dries up, and they reach the end of their loans. Even then, Elon Musk can just command Tesla to buy a whole bunch of Twitter-advertisements to transfer money to Twitter/X and keep the party alive a bit longer.
I don’t know how long it will last. But Elon Musk was over $200 Billion in assets when he bought the company. He’s lost a ton of that money, but Elon Musk still has a long way to go before he runs out of options. It does seem like Musk’s wealth is collapsing before our eyes however (their big bet on China / Gigafactory Shanghai looks like its about to go bad this quarter), but I don’t expect X to fall until after Elon Musk runs out of money.
There’s a lot of money that needs to be deflated / lost before this whole thing collapses. But like gravity, it should be inevitable. No one can lie, steal, and cheat money forever and get away with it IMO, eventually people catch on. But it can last for more decades than people expect.
He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010’s. I wasn’t a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.
Elon Musk didn’t build the company.
Elon Musk invested into the company, and then sued Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning into giving him “Founder” status. When Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning left the company, it all started to go to shit. Sure there’s some momentum, but by 2015+, its clear that Elon Musk’s buffoonery has taken over (ex: using Tesla money to buy his cousin’s company SolarCity) and today we have 100% Elon bullshit like Cybertruck.
Please show me a built up area where you have clear line of sight for 3 miles
Avdiivka.
The vast majority of these battles are fought in the open planes of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMx051QX7mU
I like your attempts at turning this into a 300m problem instead of a 3-mile problem. But I’ll take it that you know just how worthless a drone swarm would have been in the practical battlefield at Avdiivka, or other similar locations.
Your gun can fire 10 rounds a second. That’s 50 rounds in 5 seconds. 200 micro drones, hitting from all sides could easily overwhelm it.
It takes 3 minutes for a 60mph drone to travel 3 miles.
It takes 1minute 30 seconds for a 120mph drone to travel 3 miles.
So no. I’ll literally run out of ammo (70 seconds of firing) before you arrive.
Common 30mm systems carry 700+ rounds and fire 10 per second.
So no on both cases. As I said, gun and bullets are the answer.
Note that these are programmable airburst rounds, meaning the system is self-exploding once it hits the desired range. It wouldn’t take more than 5 shots to blanket the area of a smokescreen.
There is no mix and match here. You have yet to describe a system that can handle a typical 30mm gun, let alone two or four of them working as a team.
The actual teammate is a helicopter. The anti-helicopter is a stinger missile. Etc. Etc. And so the war games continue. But I see no role for your hypothetical drone swarm.
By the time you have enough drones to saturate a freaking machine cannon on aimbot that modern AA guns are, I’ll add a 2nd or 3rd gun as a teammate. Bullets and AA guns are pretty cheap.
Drones can’t effectively fire rifles because of physics. Sorry, just not stable enough. 30mm guns weigh a half ton, easy for ground equipment to move and is why 30mm systems can fire for 3mi out.
Any small gun you put on a drone won’t have the range, stability, or accuracy of a ground based autocannon. You need to upgrade all the way to a CAS system like A10 before you compete, but missiles have negated that role on the modern battlefield.
And missiles don’t need a drone to launch.
3mi range is distance to horizon on the ground btw. No drone can fly lower than the ground. Any amount of elevation means more range on the AA gun.
You can’t armor up a helicopter, and these drones are mostly quadcopters.
I’ve never heard of Kevlar stopping a 30mm round before either. Note that a 50cal is 12.7mm bulltet. A 30mm bullet is considered a cannon an an effective 118 caliber weapon.
50cal is well beyond the size where Kevlar is useful, let alone a 118 caliber airburst round. You need thick steel or Aluminum plates and a drone can’t carry that kind of armor.
Smokescreens work on the ground where terrain can provide hiding. I’ve never heard of an air platform using a smoke screen.
Maybe a flare to draw fire / RADAR, but quadcopters move too fast and cover too much ground for smoke to be useful to obscure sight. AA guns engage at about 3mi or 5km away, who cares about a few meters of smoke?
I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of personal computing device would fit in these power envelope.
I dunno if this is what I want, but I like the idea anyway. ESP32 is like 500mW class or so (very rough estimate because I don’t care to look it up right now lol). So you can get more than 24-hours of processing with 4x AA cells or 18650 Li-ion.
I feel like there’s something ‘under’ the classic smartphone that might still be useful as a personal gadget. But alas, smartphones are an always in your pocket device today. Bluetooth keyboard + Phone would be a more practical note taking application.
Maybe this same thing, but instead as a minimalistic SSH shell for computer IT tasks? I like the design of this things keyboard at least.