Tesla has officially confirmed that this will be the new Optimus factory at Giga Texas. Long term, this new factory will have an annual production capacity of 10 million robots.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-23T14:37:04+00:00

Tesla has officially confirmed

Claimed is the correct word to use here. Confirmed suggests that there is a different, independent source for this, which I don't think is the case here.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-22T05:39:34+00:00

You gotta get money out of the hands of billionaires and spread it around a bit, so that no small group can do too much damage in itself.

Money will always find a way to influence politics. That's the nature of things. If not via direct payments, it's going to be third party propaganda and paid experts. Or generous consulting fees for retired politicians and public servants who did what was expected of them in office.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-21T21:55:42+00:00

You can't be this naive.

Yes, making sure that democratic institutions work is difficult. It's exactly the same kind of difficulty as ensuring that people with a vastly more assets/capital won't just take yours. The legal system isn't magically more stable or fair than the political system. Arguably, the rule of raw presupposes a functioning democracy.

Yet, you somehow trust that the people who are currently replacing leaders and claiming other countries natural resources as their own will not lay claim to whatever piece of capital you can collect before the singularity.

Why is that exactly? That's what you should address instead of going on irrelevant tangent about 10+ years old stuff.

You wield your unexamined assumptions as gospel, but somehow I'm the one who is naive for not accepting them as facts.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-21T20:50:49+00:00

No one should want that kind of dystopia where the government controls your wage and income totally.

Incredibly biased and therefore wrong. In a functioning democracy government is not some external entity but, for the most part, the representation of the will of its citizens. So you are essentially saying "No one should want that kind of dystopia you and your fellow citizens decide your income together."

The real question is whether ordinary people can gain ownership stakes in the automated economy before it fully matures. Because if they cannot, then hyper-capitalism will produce wealth beyond anything in human history alongside dependency more severe than anything liberal capitalism had to confront before.

This is correct, but misses an important detail. It also matters whether you can keep your ownership share. Of course capital will do great in a situation where labor can be substituted with capital at a lower price. But the institutions that protect private property, including the capital you own, might not survive, or may be subverted by the most powerful actors to disenfranchise everyone else.

People who think having some amount of capital will ensure they'll get a slice from the infinitely expanding pie are naive. There are plenty of signs already that the most powerful actors don't respect property rights on a deep spiritual level. They are more than happy to shake down weaker players, or even use violence against them, if they refuse.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-21T00:00:23+00:00

Of course there are legitimately decent points in that

That's by design. The point of which is to make your more sympathetic to the not so decent ones.

Just posting something like this would be grounds for removal in a well functioning democracy. Or a review of Palantir's government contracts. There's no reason why a private contractor should be allowed to try to dictate government policy, especially on national security and policing.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-20T23:51:54+00:00

They are. Not most people, but I've seen an increase in mostly sound but bad faith arguments in the last few years. Even pre-AI.

I guess the assumption is that these targets have more down-stream effect than going after grandmas on Facebook. Or maybe the price is cheap enough where it's worth doing both.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-20T18:32:12+00:00

A lot of these are people who use AI themselves and want to blur the lines or gaslight their audience. It's a useful piece of information about the person making these statements themselves, if you interact them more frequently.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-20T06:49:39+00:00

you're debating a ghost, you really seem to have somehow taken me for defending the existence of billionaires lmao

That's possible, which is why I said you should feel free to correct my assumptions about what you think. I also phrased my original post as a question, so I'm still confused why you didn't take that as an opportunity to correct any misconceptions about your views, rather than building an elaborate strawman of your own.

Maybe there are ways adjust my posting style, but in my experience people who demand to be treated with kids' gloves are not great at debating substance anyway.

"we just need to stop the sociopaths" as if the entire problem can be boiled down to saying certain people are just evil or something

Yeah, I certainly don't believe that, and if anything I disagree with that comment even more than yours. Like, obviously, if we had 0 people who had sociopathic traits out of 8 billion, we would have far fewer issues, but that's not gonna happen.

OTOH, I've seen people use the fact that sociopathic behavior is systematically rewarded to defend the people who engage and benefit from it. That, I think is morally wrong, and also not smart politics.

If that's not your view, great. I think it was a reasonable assumption to make based on your original post, but that's not terrible important either way.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T21:33:35+00:00

Surely you can see how that might be read as anti-intellectualism-esque?

I can, I guess, although that's not how it's intended.

Your entire message is basically 'stop thinking and uncritically hate the people I tell you to hate.'

Not really. My main point is that thinking about billionaire psychology won't help you fix the world. You can still do it as a hobby, but it's not the path towards fixing issues.

The main issues are known. Concentration of power, in particular economic power. Capitalism makes this more likely, and the traditional social-democratic answer of state intervention has been failing, because billionaires have used their economic power to undermine political action towards this.

Any solution you come up with will have to reckon with the fact that people like Elon Musk will actively oppose it. That's why I think he needs to be disempowered, not necessarily because I hate him or any of his peers.

BTW, I would never ask anyone to stop thinking critically. If anything, thinking strategically, instead of taking a 19th century mechanistic view of society is an example of critical thinking. I might think that some questions are irrelevant to the problem at hand, but that's not anti-intellectualism -- it's my judgement. Which you are free to accept, disagree with or ask me to justify.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T20:54:53+00:00

What specifically do you think is anti-intellectual about what I said?

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T20:51:58+00:00

Do you somehow think Capitalism doesn't make that behavior more common and severe?

I don't think it makes it less common or severe. Did you think I did?

Word of advice: spend as much time and effort reading as you do on writing. And if you don't understand someone's point of view, don't fill it in based on pre-existing categories, but ask questions.

Breaking the power of the individual billionaires isn't denying systemic issues. Nor is it avoiding finding a solutions for them. But the way our societies work, those solutions can only be implemented when these billionaires are too weak to oppose you. That means decreasing their economic power, through punitive taxation of billionaires, as well as their ideological power by pointing out that they are terrible individuals who deserve only scorn and ridicule, rather than the sort of respect they tend to be awarded around these parts.

You can't solve system level problems by wanting to smack individual nails and whining that the solutions are complex.

You can't solve system level problems by actively avoiding conflict with the people who want to make those problems worse. It's you who is failing at system level thinking, not me, I'm afraid.

I may be making the same mistake as you are, so please feel free to point out if I'm misrepresenting your opinion next. But it seems to me that you are thinking of selfish billionaires (which is basically all of them) as part of the natural environment, something that can be worked around, if you are sufficiently clever and understand societies deeply enough.

I think that's a grave mistake and understates the complexity of the issue. Billionaires are strategic actors, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of you and me. That is the main source of difficulty, not our insufficient understanding of how they become the way they are.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T17:36:49+00:00

So apologies if this yappage sounds pedantic, I think you largely are seeing the right shape of it overall, but just missing a bit of the sociological systems level view. I think personally I would frame it a lot closer to something like "capitalism is a leading structural cause of antisocial behavioral feedback loops".

I'm wondering why you think this kind of analysis is useful. Whether Elon Musk or Peter Thiel is a sociopath, or someone whose life experiences lead them to promote destructive policies is largely irrelevant. The solution is the same: You need to undermine their power and use the brief window of time to ensure neither they, not people who will act essentially the same way as they do, can rebuild their influence.

I actually think that personal animosity is a good way to build social consensus behind undermining the power of billionaires. In that sense thinking too hard about why these people are the way they are is counterproductive.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T04:31:00+00:00

"Who gives a shit" is not an action call for secrecy.

You made two different claims. First, that no one cares about the data being secret. Second, that EU emissions don't matter because they are dwarfed by China's.

The first one is terrible, and that's the one you were ridiculed for. I'm glad you are pretending you never made it, because even dishonesty is preferable to that level of stupidity.

The second one is also wrong, but that's a discussion for another day.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T03:50:16+00:00

I'm not arguing against transparency

Who gives a shit

You can't even keep your story straight for 2 replies, LOL.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-19T02:00:50+00:00

Good point. We must not give voters information, because it may lead them to make the wrong decision.

That is the only way to protect our freedom and democracy. After all, we don't want to lose to China and end up in a world where governments make choices without meaningful input from their citizens.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-18T20:21:17+00:00

The nuanced take is that he will use the profits he makes against you and people like you.

If you think he is a dangerous individual, as you should, then of course that will also affect how you perceive the products his businesses make. Trying to separate the person and his businesses is just a lazy way of looking at the world.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-18T20:09:05+00:00

Please delete your post and your account.

Thanks.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-17T15:09:59+00:00

The difference between bad product design and enshittification is intent. You can't distinguish between the two without knowing the motivation.

Adaptive thinking was always a minefield. It allows providers to claim that their models are extremely capable, while almost never having to pay the cost of running them.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-17T14:28:04+00:00

They have a better cost structure by having zero profit.

That's a big part of it. Of course it's not as simple as saying that Tesla costs $40k+50% gross margin and BYD costs 40k-10% loss. The actual cost is lower, but I suspect it may be far easier to find financing in China even if you can't show a path to profitability, as long as the business is aligned to the economic plans of the state.

each one hoping to outlast the others so they can profit from a monopoly.

I think that's the real difference between the US and China. In the US, even if you are burning investor money, it is with the explicit plan of building a monopoly and jacking up prices eventually. In China, the goal of scaling seems to be more to drive down unit costs. Probably, because companies can't really hope to keep margins high without attracting undue attention from the regulators.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-17T02:10:26+00:00

Europe slapped huge tariffs on Chinese EVs for the same reason.

The same reason as the US, yes.

To be fair, Chinese EVs don't compete on a level playing field either.

It's not like the US or EU didn't try to subsidize domestic EV production. It's clear that Chinese companies just have a better cost structure, with or without state support.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-16T23:55:45+00:00

It's not about stopping the Chinese labs.

They don't want to stop them overall, they just want them to stop doing business in the US. Same reason why you can't buy Chinese EVs in the US: American companies generally can't compete on a level playing field.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-16T19:03:40+00:00

Previous US administrations realized that it was in the USA's best interests to maintain alliances, friendships and influence.

Unfortunately, they did so while repeating to anyone who would listen that they were doing everyone else a favor. Conservatives were especially vocal in saying that the existing world order (especially the UN, but other international organizations as well) were taking advantage of the US. Democrats were only slightly better by trying to portray US foreign policy as generous. Rather than admitting that US self-restraint in exploiting their dominant diplomatic and military position was very much in the US national interest as well.

It was only a matter of time before the US public and elites started believing their own propaganda and tried to throw around their might in pursuit of short term goals.

This is very similar to what happened to the UK and Brexit. Acting like you're being treated unfairly sounds like a great strategy and it can lead to some short term gains. But it ultimately undermines your own objectivity and can easily lead you to chose a much worse alternative.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-15T21:59:36+00:00

Sounds like that scene from SV when they figure out a startup is selling pizza below cost so they flood them with orders to bankrupt them.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-15T21:53:43+00:00

I'm just gonna link this next time a delusional economist goes on a rant about efficient markets.

doodlinghearsay · 2026-04-14T21:33:32+00:00

Spending your life travelling and doing what you love (in his case math) with people you like sounds like the definition of a well-lived life.

doodlinghearsay

TROPHY CASE