You know, this comments page saddens me. I came to hacker news years ago because every single post had careful, intelligent discussion. Countless times people clearly put their emotions aside and carefully followed the guidelines - be kind, don’t be snarky, be substantive, and when refuting a position don’t say that’s idiotic; say 1+1 does not equal 3.
Shock about the standards that led to cybertruck wheels falling off? Totally right. Discussion about Tesla engineering practices, servicing and business operations, and the influence of their leader on product - absolutely.
But statements like “No one is hauling anything in these anyway. The Cybertruck is a midlife crisis car for white-collar Indian dudes with money.” (Which, to be fair, was flagged so 100% thank you to the community)… or another user I won’t name who has multiple 3-4 word replies like “no it can’t” which is totally helpful in a discussion, are growing.
I know this is a messy topic; hate on the cybertruck and Tesla overall is high and we are all in a different headspace vs pre-covid. And I still come to hacker news because this is the best discussion forum left… but I’m sad about what we’ve lost along the way.
I think the outliers have burned them more recently and even Apple loses historical memory over time.
That said I remember everything you said and 100% agree - the nano killed everything around it. It’s been awhile since Apple had a similar home run; not an excuse for the clear lack of vision/leadership but a factor nonetheless.
For me, a expanded duress feature would be unlocking into a fake home screen/instance where my banking apps or messenger apps are not available, but otherwise the phone works. Or even unlocking into a mostly empty phone.. but wiping the main instance in parallel.
As someone who had their passport forcibly taken away while on foreign soil, when you are at the mercy of deranged people every option has its value. The key is to have those options… better than none at all.
Once upon a time you could live in a world of Windows apps designed like Notepad++. Launchy or other apps gave you the spotlight style of opening apps fast from the keyboard, and the start menu was for edge cases... and life in windows was good!
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I tell this to everyone who will listen. This... paragraph? Statement? Whatever is pure gold.
Quit watching YouTube videos, quit reading tutorials, quit listening to podcasts. The only way you learn is by doing something, and by doing something I mean fucking up doing something. Over, and over, and over.
Just do the thing. That's how you learn. And after you make a whole ton of things that suck, you'll start making a few things that don't.
I think the safety of other humans eyes (lidar exposure) is the real negative for lidar use.
The MKBHD YouTube video where he shows his phone camera has burned out pixels from lidar equipped car reviews is revealing (if I recall correctly, he proceeds to show it live). I don't want that pointed at my eye.
I love lidar from an engineering / capability perspective. But I grew up with the "don't look in a laser!" warnings everywhere even on super low power units... and it's weird that those have somehow gone away. :P
The issue is the ingestion (extracting the right data in the right format). This is mainly an issue in PDFs and sometimes when there are tables added as images in Docx too. You need a mix of text and OCR extraction to get the data correctly first before start chunking and adding embeddings
Slight tangent counterpoint; sometimes conveying knowledge requires the prettier / flair of a miro/lucid/figma or even full infographic style solution.
I like md, and I like mermaid, and I like text / simple. But I know to help others, sometimes the visual medium and storytelling justify the alternatives.
Yep. Totally agree. It's situational. IMO, a marginally prettier presentation is rarely worth the opportunity cost of what else I could get done with the time, but sometimes it is.
This is a high area of focus for me and I agree: following a complex convo, especially when it gets picked up again 20-30 min later, is difficult.
But not impossible. I’ve had success with prompts that ID all topics and then map all conversation tied to each topic (each seperate LLM queries) and then pulling together summary and conclusions by topic.
I’ve also had success with one shot prompts - especially with the right context on the event and phrasing shared. But honestly I end up spending about 5-10 min reviewing and cleaning up the output before solid.
But that’s worlds better than attending the event, and then manually pulling together notes from your fast in flight shorthand.
(Former BA, ran JADs etc, lived and died by accuracy and right color / expression / context in notes)
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