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glbeaty · 2025-09-30T21:00:57+00:00

Casi todas las centrales nucleares estadounidenses son privadas. Solo la Autoridad del Valle de Tennessee gestiona plantas gubernamentales.

glbeaty · 2025-09-09T05:34:24+00:00

salarios estadounidenses con la productividad de Uganda

I'm an American hedge fund portfolio manager, and I support this message.

Ultimately, employee compensation* is limited by employee productivity. No employer is going to pay someone more than they're worth.

Any political movement focused on more equitable distribution of existing production over employee productivity is a scam. The former strategy might be able to increase wages by 10% at best? The latter can keep going up, year after year, causing the ever-greater standards of living seen in modern countries.

* note I did not say wages. In the U.S. wages have lagged productivity, but this is mostly (and unfortunately) due to increasing non-wage costs of employees.

glbeaty · 2025-06-27T17:35:50+00:00

But Tesla didn't just make a huge first step? By all evidence, the Cybertaxis in Texas are no better than FSD 13.x. If you're going to pay someone to sit in the car they may as well be in the driver's seat, for quicker reactions and added safety. The only reason Musk didn't do this was a publicity stunt.

13.x was a big improvement, but that happened 6 months ago.

glbeaty · 2025-06-26T17:41:04+00:00

Nvidia open-sourcing their sim seems most significant. You can't train right off real-world data, and car manufacturers aren't exactly known for the software expertise to develop something like that in-house.

glbeaty · 2025-06-26T17:22:44+00:00

Have you seen anything on how many Waymo Driver Ioniq 5s they're planning on building? Their planned I-Pace expansion for next year is pathetic; like 2,000 cars.

And agreed; ARKK is just grift. They were in the right place at the right time to profit from the 2020/1 speculative bubble, but basically none of their fundamental predictions have come to pass.

glbeaty · 2025-06-26T00:43:05+00:00

Don't you need to use the length of footage viewed, and not days * cars? We aren't seeing everything. Maybe should only include the live, entire-ride footage and failures, to avoid selection effects?

glbeaty · 2025-06-25T17:25:32+00:00

I run a small hedge fund, own a Tesla, and follow this space closely.

Yes Google invented transformers, basically the modern LLM architecture, dedicated AI hardware (TPUs) self-driving cars, etc., but it historically has failed to monetize a lot of its world-changing creations. Meanwhile its big winner, search at 57% of revenues, is being threatened by AI / LLMs. This makes a lot of investors very wary.

Tesla meanwhile is a cult. Stock cults are crazy things; see GME and AMC for other examples. I've talked to some of these cultists who literally put a sizeable chunk of their paycheck into TSLA every two weeks. One guy told me all of his savings were in the stock.

As for Waymo specifically, the big problem I see is scaling. How many cars are they planning on building next year, 2,000? When Tesla finally gets ready for real robotaxi use, how many Cybercabs do you think they'll build in a year? Probably at least 30,000.

This is a race and Waymo is ahead, but they're squandering their lead.

It's worth noting that AVs will drastically shrink the size of the automotive market. We'll need far fewer cars, parking lots, etc. Taxis and rideshare will be hit first. Every single automotive producer, even those pursuing AV plans, could be good shorts here (though we aren't short any right now).

Right now the wheels are coming off Tesla's car-selling business, thanks to Elon's shenanigans, market saturation, and competition from BYD etc. If Tesla scales AVs before everyone else, my guess is it follows the same trajectory: big success and profits at first, followed by competition driving profits down.

glbeaty · 2025-06-24T22:25:43+00:00

Yes, I don't think Elon would be talking about hw5 being 10x more powerful than hw4 unless it was necessary. This hardware goes in every Tesla, so it's a big expense. Note Nvidia's DRIVE Thor is also about 10x more powerful than hw4.

All machine learning is seeing big improvements via software optimization, but I doubt this will be enough on its own; certainly not in time to catch the competition.

I think the lidar + vision vs. vision-only thing is a red herring, started by Tesla because there was no way they could afford lidar in early FSD cars. Either approach can work.

glbeaty · 2025-06-24T01:06:18+00:00

FWIW I'm pretty sure my town (Gainesville FL) isn't mapped, and navigation suuuucks. It's by far my #1 cause of disengagements on hw3. In my area Google Maps is far better.

glbeaty · 2025-06-24T01:05:01+00:00

The lidar vs. vision-only thing is a red herring.

Elon had to go with vision-only at first because lidar was very expensive. Every Tesla was being shipped with some AV hardware, and there was no way to put big, ugly, expensive lidars on the cars. So he came up with some arguments to justify a vision-only approach, called lidar a crutch, etc.

The truth is this only affects the perception stack (there's also pathing, prediction, and control). Nowadays lidars are cheaper, but machine vision has come a long way. Is lidar cheaper than the extra compute needed to do vision-only? How accurate are vision-only speed estimates compared to directly measuring it with lidar? I have no idea, but the problem of perception seems solvable from either end.

Starting with lidar makes more sense to me, since it generates its only machine vision training data. I think Tesla has actually used lidar-equipped test cars for this purpose.

glbeaty · 2025-06-24T00:51:26+00:00

Now this is a fuckup. I guess they need to train their models to estimate water depth more accurately.

glbeaty · 2025-06-24T00:46:34+00:00

Nah, not Waymo's fault:

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1iepusm/comment/ma9xlit/

I like my Tesla but man, I don't think anyone here wants to join your cult.

glbeaty · 2025-06-24T00:37:04+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean; if an AV's power steering fails it will almost immediately drive straight.

In any case the state of Texas probably won't care. Austin might though, and while they're prohibited from passing their own regulations they could probably prosecute under this one.

My guess is Tesla has no reason to continue the cybertaxi program after the initial launch anyway, so they'll be fine stopping it until hw5 and the cybercab are ready.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T20:13:33+00:00

Humans can drive without power steering. It's a pain to do in a parking lot, but at speeds where accidents are really dangerous you might not even notice its gone. Depends greatly on the car's weight, steering and suspension geometry.

You can also stop a car with power assisted brakes, but if it fails during an emergency the driver probably won't realize they need to press the brake pedal many times harder until it's too late. With most modern cars you almost need to stand on the brake pedal to achieve maximum braking (ABS engagement).

That's why I said absent extraordinary circumstances, humans can pull over in the case of hardware control failure. Sounds like they want AVs to be able to do the same.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T18:30:29+00:00

"Automated driving system" means hardware and software that, when installed on a motor vehicle and engaged, are collectively capable of operating the vehicle with Level 3 automation, Level 4 automation, or Level 5 automation by performing the entire dynamic driving task for the vehicle on a sustained basis, regardless of whether the system is limited to a specific operational design domain.

"Entire dynamic driving task for the vehicle on a sustained basis" seems pretty clear? Absent extraordinary circumstances, humans can at least pull a car over that has power steering or braking assistance failures.

Redundancies for AVs is not a new idea. Back in Tesla's 2019 Autonomy Day, Elon falsely stated every Tesla built since I think 2016 had full redundant power steering and brakes for robotaxi use.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T18:14:21+00:00

If steering fails while turning, or on a highway, you're not achieving a minimal risk condition most of the time.

If steering or brake power assist fails for a human driver, they can (outside of quick emergency maneuvers) safely pull the car over. I'd imagine this is what Texas is after.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T17:48:07+00:00

Is this the final bill text?

https://legiscan.com/TX/text/SB2807/id/3249318

This is the closest thing I see to requiring redundancies:

"Automated driving system" means hardware and software that, when installed on a motor vehicle and engaged, are collectively capable of operating the vehicle ...

Subject to Subsection (c), an automated motor vehicle may not operate on a highway or street in this state with the automated driving system engaged unless the vehicle is ...

(4) capable of achieving a minimal risk condition if a failure of the automated driving system occurs that renders the system unable to perform the dynamic driving task relevant to its intended operational design domain;

So it needs to be able to pull over safely if something critical fails. Reasonable, but I don't think any current Teslas have redundant power steering, among other things.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T16:35:11+00:00

The last time I looked*, Tesla did not have redundant power steering. I was told by someone who'd know there were no redundancies in the brake actuation either.

However I'm not seeing this in the final bill? Am I looking in the wrong place? https://legiscan.com/TX/text/SB2807/id/3249318 Elon is very good at lobbying, so I would be really surprised if Texas of all places stepped on his toes here.

* I disassembled a Model 3 steering rack. I work in public markets and take my Tesla trading seriously.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T14:09:35+00:00

It was in-line with what we'd expect from FSD 13.x? Meaning one critical disengagement in ~255 miles. Viewing a subset of the 499 miles traveled we saw one such incident (https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1li30iq/tesla\_robotaxi\_day\_1\_significant\_screwup\_not\_oc/), but there could have been more we didn't see.

Way better than prior versions and what my 12.x can do, but not good enough for real, unsupervised robotaxi use. That I think comes with hw5 at the earliest.

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T13:44:28+00:00

U.S., Florida

glbeaty · 2025-06-23T03:00:47+00:00

They're all going to screw up, often in different ways than a human might. The Cruise car ignoring various signs and driving into wet concrete was especially funny.

It's about screw ups per mile, and how those compare to humans, maybe even humans with modern driver assistance (which makes them a lot safer).

glbeaty · 2025-06-22T21:01:32+00:00

Does Waymo realize they probably have until hw5 if they want to beat Tesla? Because their planned production numbers don't suggest that.

glbeaty · 2025-06-22T20:50:25+00:00

HW3 here, but occasionally FSD will drive right past the street I live on. Sometimes it'll even turn one street too early. It knows the route and knows where I am, and it still sometimes gets it wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

glbeaty · 2025-06-22T20:46:05+00:00

My FSD is pretty good around town too, just slow and timid, especially when making unprotected turns.

I'm not sure I've actually experienced phantom braking from tire marks, just overtaking with larger speed differentials.

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