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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • It’s happened before

    https://history-education.org/2025/01/29/jackson-and-the-constitutional-crisis/

    The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that Georgia had no right to enforce laws within Cherokee territory because Native American tribes were sovereign nations. The ruling was a major victory for the Cherokee, affirming their legal right to remain on their land.

    Jackson’s Response

    Instead of enforcing the ruling, Jackson allegedly responded: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” (Though there’s debate about whether he actually said this.) Jackson sided with Georgia’s state government, which ignored the Supreme Court ruling and continued its efforts to remove the Cherokee people.

    Congress viewed Jackson’s decision as a matter of executive discretion. Jackson was popular and nothing happened to him for defying the supreme court. This exposed the inability of the Supreme Court to force a president to comply, if they didn’t also have the support of Congress.


  • Their insurance is (was?) kind of like that as well if you get the saftey score one. While some things are more general and concrete like following distance, time of day driving, they have one for forward collision warnings.

    I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent in a Tesla, but that system is notorious for going off incorrectly. It’s specifically really bad with parked cars on the side of the road on turns. So you’re driving along a city street with cars parked on the side and it goes off and now your insurance premiums are more expensive.

    I don’t think you could find a single Tesla owner who hasn’t had multiple false warnings, and consistently in certain circumstances.

    So someone of course starts a lawsuit and Tesla initially defends itself, but just last week or something like that, it’s no longer part of the safety score


  • I was just looking through the linked PDF and I’ll actually retract what I said earlier about not finding it wanting, and them just listing limitations.

    In the research paper linked it is more explicit

    “Despite these promising results, EMMA is not without its limitations. In particular, it faces challenges for real-world deployment due to: (1) limitations in 3D spatial reasoning due to its inability to fuse camera inputs with LiDAR or radar, (2) the need for realistic and computationally expensive sensor simulation to power its closed-loop evaluation, and (3) the increased computational requirements relative to conventional models. We plan to better understand and address such challenges in future work.”

    This is more clear that it’s not just listing limitations, but it also finds it not doing as well because of it.

    That I’d call wanting.




  • Psst… you know that Waymo is also looking into AI models that don’t use lidar? And it’s not just Tesla and Waymo now either, there’s some others as well.

    https://waymo.com/research/emma

    We introduce EMMA, an End-to-end Multimodal Model for Autonomous driving. Built on a multi-modal large language model foundation, EMMA directly maps raw camera sensor data into various driving-specific outputs, including planner trajectories, perception objects, and road graph elements.

    Thats not to say that it will be a success, but ya know, maybe it’s actually possible, and even Waymo seems to think it’s possible and worth researching. Thats a lot of people looking into something thats clearly “fundamentally flawed”


  • The story goes that when Tesla was new, no one wanted to work with them since new auto companies generally fail, and it was EVs at that. Additionally, there wasn’t a supply chain to support EVs either.

    So in addition to setting up new supply chains (which did involve overseas stuff) they ended up making a lot of their own things, becoming very vertically integrated from the start. That learning to support themselves has persisted ever since.

    They were always pretty focused on keeping the supply chain as local as possible as that reduces all the shipping costs. There are actually parts you could buy overseas for $X but when you look at the life cycle of that object it’s actually gone around the world many times before it becomes what you want. You can save a lot of money if you find a way to avoid that. That could for example involve finding a raw material company locally, and then convincing a local manufacturing company to build this new thing for you using raw materials from the other local company. It’s not simply oh we just find someone already making this existing thing in USA instead of China (but it can be that too), it’s actually putting the supply chain and manufacturing capacity together so it becomes local.

    It’s probably one of the biggest reasons why they make more money on their EVs than others.

    They’ve literally built a lithium refining facility as an example of the level of vertical integration they have. They plan to extract their own lithium in the future (they own land in Nevada with it), refine it themselves (this year), they build their own cathode, and put it into their own battery cells.








  • You think it’s going to be hard for Tesla to convince a city in Texas to let them do autonomous rides?

    Texas.

    I’m not suggesting they’ll do a lot of rides, but there will be at least a handful until something goes wrong sooner than it should and they force a pause.

    Edit: and to be clear, something very wrong. Waymo does wrong things all the time and it’s allowed. It’s going to have to do enough wrong things in a short time or a very very bad thing sooner than it should. But they’ll do rides until that.