What you've just said is a common refrain, if you haven't already seen it please take a look at these two videos that attempt to address part of what you're saying. I found them very interesting when I came across them years ago and it changed my view of what's possible or even good!
So Canadians bike less in winter than some Finns (not all, as the author of the video himself mentions that Oulu stands out among Finnish cities in this regard) yet those Finns make only 12% of winter trips by bike. That means the vast majority of winter trips they make (88%) are not by bike. In a small town, which is 12x6 miles judging by google maps yet has 590 miles of bike paths. If anything this proves cycling in winter is not an option for the vast majority of population.
And yes, the Dutch have their bike paths and bike without helmets, we all know that. The secret is the lack of elevation and living in crumped cities: on average a Dutch person bikes 3km per day [1].
It's utterly fascinating you wrote that and yet could not make the right conclusion.
"In a small town, which is 12x6 miles judging by google maps yet has 590 miles of bike paths."
+
"not all, as the author of the video himself mentions that Oulu stands out among Finnish cities in this regard"
The right conclusion here is that infrastructure and its maintenance is clearly the defining factor. This really shouldn't be surprising.
Consider this: how many trains do you think passed through the areas rail tracks are at before the tracks were built? Or: how many trains need to pass through an area before we can justify the cost of building train tracks there?
You simply can't point to just any winter cycling stats without first making sure the infrastructure is there. "Cycling in winter just ain't working out!" — no, you literally are not putting in the minimum of effort — "we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas" vibes.
And here's the kicker: You assumed these statistics are from a city that's a cycling paradise, but I'm willing to bet Oulu is a car-infested shithole, just like all of the Netherlands is. No, I'm not kidding in the slightest. And it's pretty much confirmed in the video the parent linked: [1].
Sure, those areas are as good as it gets at this time, but they're nothing to what things should look like, so since your conclusions are based on faulty assumptions, they are automatically invalid.
What these cycling-friendly areas are doing is slowly grinding away at the overbearing behemoth that is the already existing car infrastructure with the eventual goal of getting to at least parity. But they're still decades of work away.
The simplest example is free parking. You expect to get to take up 2m x 5m of public space with your private property for free and forever, almost anywhere in every city in the world. If anyone so much as touches it, they're strictly legally liable. That's normal though, right? Yeah...
Another, literally the snow plowing mentioned in the video: [2]. Imagine you woke up one day, got in your car to drive to work and... uh oh! There's 20cm of snow on the road! Can you imagine the uproar?
I sure can't, because 20cm of snow is normal on cycle paths in 99.9% of the world. And you're comparing those two realities with each other. So "not a lot of people cycle in winter" is actually "not a lot of people cycle through 20cm of snow". No shit.
Overall, the amount of information in the very video the parent linked you just straight up ignored makes me think you either didn't watch it, or didn't want to pay attention to a lot of the points made, like the one on population density: [3].
> yet those Finns make only 12% of winter trips by bike
Yeah, during Finnish winters. How many countries do you think this directly applies to? If 12% of Finns during their harsh winters can cycle just fine in -20C weather conditions then what does that say about the cycling stats of e.g. California?
> The secret is the lack of elevation...
I like to quip that bikes have gears for a reason and it's worth learning to use them, but these days the existence of e-bikes and e-scooters nullifies this argument entirely.
> ...and living in crumped cities: on average a Dutch person bikes 3km per day.
Yes, we're talking about cities here. So, the purpose of pointing out that biking over long distances in say, rural areas, is not viable is what exactly? We can pivot to talking about trains instead if you'd like...
Young kids carrying whisky on the school grounds isn’t really a threat where I live.
But to answer your question directly - kids having whisky and I can go after whoever sold/provided it to them using existing legal means if I think it serious enough.
This is a quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..
"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
This reads to me like someone saying “you can’t dump me, because I am preemptively dumping you.” It is a forced pivot to avoid having to admit failure.
China is absolutely crushing everyone mostly across the board in technology these days. It's comical today, but will just be embarrassing soon.
The only bit visually we see China a little behind is AI but I suspect they have much better closed/unreleased models, and the fab/chip space, but they'll close that gap in a short few years I'd expect.
Yeah, that's the most impressive thing about this performance, the robots were safe enough to "interact" with children.
Even if we take into account the smaller size of the robots, it's still impressive, a bad input at the wrong time could easily cause of one of the robots to seriously injure someone, the fact this didn't happen and the producers and the company were confident that it wouldn't happen is the real breakthrough moment.
This is amazing! I WISH somebody would take 15 seconds of this clip, add China flag in the bottom, then add scratching sounds of a vinyl disc and forward to this, with Felon Musk/American flag:
Real business people keep running production lines if they are profitable and build additional production lines for new businesses. Real business people do not shut down profitable lines because they are making a pivot, that is what failing startups do.
> but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
I don't know how well that's going to work out for them. I saw these robots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVX6vq0RSnY) on the Chinese New Year Gala, and they look way more dexterous than any Optimus video I've ever seen.
Optimus is not a leader in humanoids; but that china demo is not really all that impressive; They are lightweight, reduced scale, and not all that dynamic... No idea how adaptable the control would be either.
See how poorly the sword one moves compared to the others.
Optimus hand dexterity is interesting; and the handling capacity is targeting useful weights (10s of kilos).
Boston dynamics is the most interesting; targeting "fit human" manipulation, 50kg. Their adaptable movement and walking are the best ive seen demoed as well.
So long as they don't give them the capability to consume arbitrary biomass to fuel themselves, I think we're safe from a Faro Swarm situation for the foreseeable future...
That escalated quickly. No I meant that owning a Tesla, like Apple or Prada is a status symbol. Income status. So if maintainance costs a lot it will reinforce that.
by no mean calling this out is advocating for status signaling , I myself would never buy a Tesla for this very reason.
Can someone enlighten me WHO the customer to those million Optimus robots are?
I've been working in robotics for years now, I've talked with ex Optimus developers, FigureAI devs, some Japanese humanoid devs, researchers, talked to people in conferences and no one. Absolutely no one I've met take Optimus seriously. If a lab is considering buying a humanoid they'll go to China. Hell, even MIT professors that have been crucial to the development (Boston dynamics etc) seems to not put too much emphasis on Tesla.
But I've also been to industrial robotics conferences, mostly for customers and user focus and not developers and usually the perception is different in those circles.
The same customers as grok. In the future where humanoid robots see some level deployment, there might be some people that need their robot to make CSAM and say the n-word.
Federal US government & to some extent local law enforcement. They most likely won't be able to use them, but they will buy them and put them in a warehouse. Long tradition of US government doing this with tech, going back to SGI workstations in the 90s if not earlier.
I think those are just two of the models that aren't pushed particularly hard. As I understand it, Model 3 and Model Y are the major models in recent time?
I think S, X and Cybertruck are just 3% of 2025 deliveries?
The whole pivot to Optimus is insane. I can understand the market following Elon down all the other paths he randomly skips down but Optimus... Really?? The only way to explain it is it's not being taken seriously but Elon seems to be taking it very seriously...
It's especially strange considering the amount of work that Tesla (the company) put into becoming a car manufacturer which is certainly no easy feat. I'm sure some of the know-how, process, and tooling/supply lines could be transitioned to general purpose robot manufacturing - but why would you build these supply lines and factories just to screw it all up like this?
Judging by the news isn’t the pivot to creating autonomous driving systems for other manufacturers cars?
If I’m understanding correctly the pivot is to sell just the autonomous driving systems. This way it can be trained on more data. It’s a hard sell to do this while competing against the car makers whose business they are trying to court.
Selling actual cars was like Uber when they started with a black car service. Get into the luxury market then leverage that so get into the mass market.
Perhaps this is why Elon has been so adamant about not using LiDAR
I got confused between Optimus and Dojo and assumed that Tesla had a seperate internal AI division called Optimus.
In light of this I think it makes sense though. Tesla lost the government subsidies so it can't compete. Possibly the only way it can would be to have an autonomous workforce then to leverage that into selling picks and shovels (Optimus humanoid robots) to other automotive manufacturers.
Actually if you run the tape back Tesla spent over a decade on trivially preventable manufacturing fuckups by attempting to ignore a century of industry knowledge on the subject and just wing it silicon valley style. That they have infrastructure that is capable of performing manufacturing at some scale is not in question. That any of it is sufficiently optimized for sanity to be repurposed remains to be seen.
The Giga Press and battery factories (to some extent) seem pretty heavily tied to automobile manufacture. Regardless - there are many automobile production lines that found a second or third life producing down-market brands or moved to other countries because they still have some value.
I guess I'm just continuously baffled by the complete fuck-up that is/has-been Tesla motors.
The world has changed. Cars belong to a consumerism-driven, globalized economy. Humanoid robots and AI belong to a technofeudal, fascist-like state with a government-driven economy. The ruler relies on his elite. The elite relies on AI, humanoid robots, and drones to project the ruler’s power and maintain the status quo. The peasants are no longer needed. They are now seen only as a burden.
I think the only thing he can do now is have Tesla "acquire" SpaceX. He already had SpaceX "acquire" the AI thing, so that would roll all three up into a pubco where he can hide things about the business as needed (no fear of SEC problems).
I suspect it would be the other way around - SpaceX is gonna IPO in a few months at a similar valuation to Tesla right now, and once the Elon pump can go wild on the public, who knows how quickly SpaceX will go to the moon.
The average price of a new car in the US is now ~$50,000 and the average monthly payment is almost $800. All people want is an affordable car and it is clear that won’t happen any time soon. It isn’t strange at all that prisoners to this system are cheering on the Chinese disruption.
You're definitely not alone! I just took delivery of a new BYD Shark 6 on Monday. It's amazing and I paid $41k USD ($57,900 AUD) for it. Before that was available I was planning on punting on a used Hilux.
I'm charging my Shark right now and I couldn't be happier. I expect my fuel bill (it's a PHEV) to drop by 70-80% when compared to the 2010 Commodore wagon I was driving last week.
Thank you! I'm in WA, so in some respects if I'm not driving a landie or hilux my bogan creds are still somewhat lacking, but at least I'm looking down on Ranger drivers now lol.
When Tesla dropped the 'Model 2' car because 'the future would be all robo taxi' I dropped my remaining position in the stock. The idea that car sales would collapse by 50% because robo-taxi would happen just around the corner was crazy.
Do you have a good guide for balancing quality and size? I’ve searched but never found something that really nails it for me. I have until now just been keeping everything as it streamed off the dvd or bluray in mpeg4 or h264 in an mkv and yeah, time to re-encode in to something more reasonably sized.
Yes, I wrote a python script that uses FFMPEG and detects the bitrate of the file and determines approximately what CQ to use. If the original file has a low bitrate, by reencoding it with a high CQ you can actually increase the file size (lol).
Normal CQ = 28
Aggressive CQ = 34
# Thresholds to detect ultra-low-bitrate inputs (use more aggressive encoding)
# (width, height) → min sensible bitrate (bps). If stream <= threshold, use aggressive profile.
LOW_BITRATE_THRESHOLDS = [
((3840, 2160), 13_000_000), # 4K ≤13 Mbps → use aggressive encoding
((2560, 1440), 8_000_000), # 1440p
((1920, 1080), 5_000_000), # 1080p
((1280, 720), 2_500_000), # 720p
((854, 480), 1_200_000), # 480p
]
You’re going to end up running down the same merry path that DRM companies do - and you can’t patch the wetware layer. Inevitably thousands of ‘human tokens’ will end up in the hands of actual humans working in call centres with 300 phones in front of them.
I guess the point is that they got this level of success (which GOG didn't reach) because they're based in US.
And I tend to agree with that, there are some reason, including the fact that it's a huge country with a wealthy population that use loans and credit cards to buy even more that they can afford. That creates a strong domestic market that you can leverage before having to look at international sales.
Nothing to do with the US government policies of course...
Good example. I’d want to look at the first-mover(ish) advantage Valve had and other differences in product timing/delivery before I concluded it was impossible to found a company like Valve in the EU.
reply