Yeah, I bought it in 2018 with full knowledge that it would be many years before it worked at all. Today I used it for more than an hour around town. It's amazing. I won't buy any car without an equivalent feature in the future. And today there's nothing equivalent in any other car you can buy.
A friend of mine just got one, ex-Chrome core dev so a fairly sharp guy, his one month review was that it was incredibly capable but had already done two maneuvers that would've led to an accident without intervention.
Sure, it still needs supervision. Today. But it has definitely passed a threshold where it is now safer to supervise it than to drive without it. And it continues to improve quickly. I expect it to work unsupervised within two years (and unlike Elon I have not been saying this every year for the past decade).
The feedback I heard was definitely not that. The mistakes it makes are incredibly hard to predict, and they were lucky that no one was on the side of the road as they could've killed someone if a person had been there and they'd been a half second late.
That's the point. It's actually worse than a dumber system, because it's not even past the margin where it can go a month without a mistake, but you don't have to correct most days. The absolute worst possible scenario for safety.
From the very beginning of self-driving people have been making this claim that supervised systems would cause complacency that would make them perversely less safe. A lot of people believe it, but it's always been just an opinion based on speculation, not data. It's actually an empirical question. The data is in and this claim is definitively disproven. There is no increase in crashes when people use FSD. Not back when it was actually bad, not recently when it was just OK, and still not today when it's actually quite good but not perfect.
With all of the videos circulating online of the Tesla self-driving getting itself into extremely dangerous situations (like increasing speed once a child appears on the road), I'm not really sure that their self-driving tech is there yet
It's less of a bet against him.
It's more of a bet for the future of humanity.
And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.
Elon helped save the future of humanity by causing a massive shift in how people treat opinions that don't goose step with the rest of the media. That happened when he bought Twitter and it continues with grok being balanced (and confirmed as such by independent testing of multiple models).
When I was a 20-something big-4 consultant traveling weeks on end for work, I took up smoking for exactly the reasons you suggest. I had nothing to do in my down time and knew nobody, but I could sit in hotel bar with a smoke and strangers would trail over.
Yep, I’m old enough to have been working when you could still smoke in hotel bars. In Monaco you could order a pack of Marlboro Reds at your dinner table back in 2006.
Some +20 years ago one day at a local radio show there was the daily topic about how people went into smoking. One guy called and told that he had to go everyday early to his classes at uni and before going in there was a kind of convenience store where people piled up and asked for a hot coffee and a cigarette.
But the thing is that, according to him, it was a lot. Lots of people went in and asked for the same thing, a cup of coffee and a cigarette.
Allegedly he went into smoking because he got so used to hear people saying "one cup of coffee and a cigarette, please" for so long that one day he, unconsciously, asked for the same.
Some of us are old enough to remember smoking sections on planes. (And yes it works out exactly as bad as you’d expect it … great way to past time on a transatlantic flight though!)
I love going to restaurants that were built when smoking indoors was a thing and trying to figure out where the smoking section (or non-smoking section in older places) used to be. There are a few bars around that still have smoking sections in my area but the requirements are more stringent now (closed room, seperate air handling system).
One of my favorite bars in college allowed smoking upstairs (and still does, although how many college kids actually smoke?). I really do miss having a cigarette in one hand and a frosty beer in the other.
Only thing I can remember is a blue 3½ floppy with "trek4" handwritten on it so it must have been "found" by my relative that owned the st at the time.
Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.
It's not ready for orchestration yet, but most fundamental layers are already working great.
Create your agents using the LLMs of your choosing, directly from your smartphone of you want full privacy, and with no ads, no paywall, no sign up required.
Manus was ahead of its time. But the directions are parting ways.
We are a sandbox provider company and we have a manus like agent deployed to "showcase" our capabilities. You can build one too -- maybe we will open-source it. For now, you can try it for free at https://showcase.instavm.io/
I’ll take those bets.