mehrdada

> Every Tesla sold enables another gas guzzling SUV to come into existence

This is a very reductive and static worldview. First, on the surface of it "enable" is factually false: ICE SUVs existed before Tesla so Tesla is in no way enabling those. To steelman your argument, at best you could say it makes ICE SUV slightly more economically feasible to its customer, but the entire ZEV credit regime could have been nullified by now had Tesla and other mass-market EVs did not persistently exist. Ignoring even that, it marginally increases the economic feasibility of the SUV while transitioning one vehicle (the Tesla sold itself).

Mmm... to be clear the baseline is not after you burn it to the ground, but before the acquisition.

At this point, the company was hemorrhaging cash. He had no choice but to stop the bleeding. It is a messy process and time works against you; mistakes will be made.

Once he gets to stabilize the cash flow, Twitter can provide a comp model to attract talent. About that, let's just say Geohot would not have worked for Parag, as an example. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159295542717976576...

100% agree. Once the dust settles my prediction is productivity will also soar.

COVID era supply was impacted and demand was high. US car dealers routinely sold cars way above MSRP too.

I have only experienced the US version firsthand, but hearing from EU friends, it seems the EU prices are more-or-less set in stone and the haggling potential in the US can get you a better deal if you are savvy and patient (and then say no at every “value-add”).

Of course that comes at the cost of customer experience.

If your focus is on P/E, you got to at least look at its first derivative too.

Which stance of hers that I listed do you dispute? Ad hominem much?

I attached a link to an interview describing concrete circumstances. Did you watch it before making your assertion, for example?

If you suggest that is not representative or whatever please make your claim specific. Otherwise it must be you that cannot see reality when faced with it; I cannot take your comment seriously.

Look no further than Ilhan Omar: Islam, anti-imperialism (BDS), LGBT-activism (mostly T-activism these days), and radical feminism have joined forces.

Or the extreme lack of coverage of Iran protests in the major US newspapers despite their scale and spread across the world (dare it looks anti-Hijab and exposes Islam as a threat) as another example.

I'm surprised you see this as a controversial claim. Here's how an Iranian women's right activist discusses how she's alienated by the Feminist crowd because she is against forced Hijab in Iran, making Islam look bad: https://www.hbo.com/real-time-with-bill-maher/season-20/29-s...

This behavior is par for the course of the contemporary western left narrative. A western country behaving like France restricting Hijab to some degree gets many times more exposure than Taliban and Islamic Republic mandatory Hijab.

It's not exactly that simple: Islamists (and religion in general) is also perceived to be an antidote to Marxism. At the height of the Cold War and bordering Soviet Union, the west resorted to creating and supporting religious groups "Mujahedin" in Afghanistan (Taliban v0.1) and Khomeini in Iran.

The Late Shah of Iran is on record constantly warning about "Red regression" (referring to Communists) and "Black regression" (referring to Islamic fundamentalists) as threats of the nation and the 1979 revolution succeeded by them joining forces (and the commies got the axe afterwards). Funny that in the western world, we are seeing the extreme left/woke anti-Americans and the Islamists join forces again too, despite being cut of very different clothes: the general American left narrative is silent on issues of Islam (particularly bad when it comes to women and LGBT) as it contradicts their own narrative of fighting "Islamophobia". I doubt this ends well.

You just took one angle. I find it unfair that Facebook is banned by China while China can deploy TikTok in the US market, for example, to demonstrate the opposite.

I was not suggesting SMS 2FA when I referred to "Smartphone-based solution". I meant relying on Secure Enclave or alike on the smartphone as the second factor in a challenge-response fashion that makes the "OTP" bound to a specific domain and thus unphishable.

> Secondary opinion, why is the Google app lacking? Because they really don't want people to use it. They much prefer you reveal your phone number and use SMS instead. This way they can easily identify you personally.

Sure, companies may do some evil things intentionally, but an app UI sucking is usually the default state of things and not some malice necessarily. In this case, I think part of the neglect of Google Authenticator is them trying for years to pivot to other forms of two-factor authentication that are more phishing-resistant than an OTP (Yubikey-like and smartphone based systems).

Simply unfortunate that one cannot rely on Google for critical stuff. The least one can do is compartmentalization across various Google account and keeping domain names, considering they are at the very root of the infrastructure chain, separate from other activities.

I just [literally in the past hour] had to [unsuccessfully] deal with a Google Fi mess-up while traveling (I made the mistake of running their crappy app on the iPad, which forced me to go through some “activation” steps on first run even though SIM was already active, which in turn disabled my primary SIM and moved the primary line to iPad data SIM). I had to reactivate it on my phone using their app, by deleting and reinstalling, which eventually worked, but left the data SIM on iPad inactive. Support is of no help except to suggest shipping a new data SIM to my primary address, obviously of no help while traveling.

My response was to the claim that the majority of the customers of that product was developers. It seems unlikely that the majority of the customers of that to be developers simply because of the numbers. Whether they need dGPU or not I don’t know, but I won’t be surprised that the expectation for a 16” Apple customer that doesn’t know much is to have bought a machine capable of video/photo editing and not be surprised by its mediocre performance.

> The sad irony of it all is that I bet the vast majority of purchasers were developers like myself, who have absolutely no need for a dedicated GPU.

I would seriously doubt that. Mac sales are huge and developers must be a relatively small segment of computer users.

> In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to log into an iPhone with your Apple ID and not have an iCloud backup immediately fire off

You are correct there’s a bit of dark pattern going on here, but it is possible (to the extent the code does what it says of course). To be extra sure I have a custom lockdown MDM profile to disallow iCloud backups, as well as a number of other nefarious things like analytics, and whenever I get a new device, I first DFU restore it to the latest iOS image to ensure software (post bootrom) isn’t tampered with, then activate and install the MDM profile via a Mac and only then I interact with the device and go through setup.

> GDP in the United States is currently growing strongly

Last quarter was -1.4% growth, so probably not growing strongly (but who knows, maybe just a blip...)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-economy-gdp-growth-q1-116511...

Google events are generally boring and of poor production value. Plus, what Google is known for primarily is the search engine which is not what they announce at Google I/O.

Cannot disagree more. "Making a car is expensive, so let's not do that to explore 1000 miles out. Let's just have 1000 people walk one mile and explore." Simply ridiculous comparison. But sure, let's find a way to build/experiment LHC++ less expensively.

What's concerning to me, however, is the attitude towards curiosity that this article exhibits. They should rename their domain to smallthink.com.

Sure you can reuse a cached file at a token level, but you cannot easily do that at the parse tree can be completely different based on preprocessor state.

The medium also belongs to Quincy Institute whose leadership include individuals widely considered to be lobbying on behalf of the Iranian regime.

You can do some tricks but the basic issue is that the "environment" in which you interpret the preprocessor directives for a ".h" file may change across different contexts resulting in a potentially distinct AST: simplest example is the common #ifndef guard (evaluates the true branch in the first load, false in subsequent ones).

I'm pretty sure they use that internally (when I was there Hangouts was used). However, Google work culture is (or at least was till fairly recently) centered around shared docs and email (automations send email with action buttons for example vs. hip companies were such things are fed into Slack). Hangouts was mostly used as a lightweight 1:1 or small group communication and resolving an issue. I imagine post-COVID the Slack-style Chat has gotten more use, but I'd bet Gmail is still at the center, not Chat.

This is patently ridiculous—it's like saying since everyone can post on their own blog, why would anyone publish an OpEd in NYTimes? Obviously reach and distribution of the medium is fundamental. How would you notify 80 million people that muskannouncements.com posted a new entry?

> tool of propaganda for Musk's financial interests and self-aggrandizement looks very very concerning to put it mildly

How is it any different than Bezos buying WaPo, in principle? That does not seem to have been detrimental to Amazon shareholders. And how does having a propaganda arm detrimental to Tesla financial interests? Marketing is a euphemism for propaganda after all.

(I can see legitimate Tesla shareholder concern for Musk attention being spread too thin, but to claim having Twitter makes things worse beyond his existing presence as a user seems ridiculous.)

> Can you tell me please what you mean by this?

Twitter can find an excuse to ban his account (you can easily imagine this sort of risk exists after some of his recent meme tweets for example). I believe that is a single point of failure in Tesla PR strategy and a risk to be mitigated.

> brand name's risk profile increased

Risk profile sure but has the net value decreased or increased due to his presidency? I don’t have data to say it’s one way or another but looking at the downside without the upside as well is futile.

> massive boycott of Tesla's consumer products.

I mean we could speculate at length but the condition you’re describing already exists. People have polar reactions to him. Some hate with a passion, some love him. As for boycott, I’m not surprised if a lot of people already feel like they won’t buy a Tesla. Hard to imagine it can get worse from here.

We don’t know the interest rate of that margin loan but you can be goddamn certain whoever underwrote the loan calculated that risk more precisely than HN crowd such that the rate justifies the default risk.

> If I were a Tesla shareholder and this was his actual masterplan to maximize value for shareholders

Doesn’t have to be either-or. Marketing strategy is an important part of running Tesla and given the empirical dislike of media establishment of him, ensuring Twitter won’t go against him on a whim of the board seems strategically important.

> business holdings will got tainted by his politics like what happened with Trump

Is there data on Trump businesses doing materially worse overall after the taint? I assume the half of US that like him bolster it and the other half see the taint but the vector sum is material here.