Also seems unfair that my root level comment was flagged, dang?
1 karma · joined October 28, 2025
Maybe world coin has thought of these problems? Maybe not, but I wouldn’t trust the author to have done any due diligence.
There’s an interesting article to be written here, but this isn’t it imo.
Even ignoring that, I think it's still a good outcome for Tesla - they effectively own and control a large percentage of all charging infrastructure in the world. Every other car company adopting their standard means they have a lot of customers that will pay them to charge at their stations (even independent of the licensing).
That plus avoiding a future where without making this transition they could end up isolated with an obscure and incompatible charger that would eventually become a liability rather than an advantage.
I think you can get there with something like Urbit IDs that are easy to ban. If IDs are not infinite you can some protection against abuse - pairing that with some proof-of-humanity and you can get closer, but there are still issues of someone doing the proof and then selling their ID to a bot. At least if it's easy to ban you can try to make that not economical. Doubly true if the IDs have a non-zero (but low) cost.
Helps make you resistant to a sybil attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
The problem isn't trivial though - it's not obvious what will work best and it'll likely always be somewhat of an arms race, especially if you want to keep privacy.
Make a human go to a place for example (though even this has difficulties with fraud). I'm not making any specific claims about world coin other than the goal they're trying to solve makes sense as a goal in a world where bots are increasingly capable of mimicking humans successfully, we want to know when something is human and when it isn't.
Attempting to solve that problem now before it becomes critical makes sense, not every attempt will be good.
A better article than this one would have dug into that problem.
They also charge a higher rate to non-Tesla EVs.
The other benefit is if they continued to refuse access they could have ended up like blackberry. The other companies would have adopted the CCS standard and (eventually) would have a competitive network. Then what was once a Tesla advantage would become more of a liability as the transition to EVs gets more complete.
Few companies make this strategic shift at the right time imo and I think Tesla did. By leveraging their advantage now it’s a win win.
Even better, strategically Tesla created the "NACS" or North American Charging Standard which is a clever name for their far superior Tesla charger. They also pivoted from the superchargers being an exclusive reason to buy a Tesla to licensing them for other EVs - now Ford is onboard, Electrify America is switching to NACS, GM too.
They pulled off this switch perfectly in a way most companies fail to do (ex: blackberry bbm) and as a result their investment in these will remain dominant and everyone will be unified around a superior standard (the EU charging standard CCS plug is a committee designed monster that's worse categorically). They're also continuing to expand.
I love manual transmission sports cars, but EVs today are just superior for regular use and Teslas are the best option for most people (especially when considering their lower cost), putting subjective opinions about their mercurial leader aside. There's a reason the Model Y was the best selling car in 2023 Q1 across all categories globally [0].
HN has historically been poor at objectively evaluating this sort of thing especially about Tesla.
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/31/best-selling-car-worldw....
If you got a Tesla you'd get a better sense for how many superchargers there are.
What you're saying is relevant though and why until recently I didn't really consider non-Tesla EVs an option to recommend if it was your only car (though now that Tesla has pivoted to opening up the superchargers to other car companies this is less of an issue).
It’s a bad idea in a gas car too, my friends that have run out of gas did so because of driving on E.
Though at least with gas it’s easier to bring it to the car.
It’s been this way for a couple years, really not something necessary to think about.
Add in at home or destination charging and it’s even less relevant since you need fewer stations near areas where people live.
With the superchargers, range doesn’t really have a material effect anymore and most of the time the network isn’t necessary anyway.
It’s not a real issue.
In it the Knights were the devs, CEOs were earls, Kings were presidents/dictators.
Users (naturally) were serfs.
It fits pretty well to current megacorp structure.
Some employees that capture a piece of that wealth funnel it back into more startups/growth (Silicon Valley) creating more jobs, more growth and more wealth (not to mention whatever the new startup is doing is usually creating a new thing people want too).
Software salaries are extremely high, but software companies in the US pay a lot in non software roles too.
On net you end up way in a way richer society that operates this way vs. one that incentivizes not operating this way.
That doesn't mean there should be zero protections from abuse, but it's important to be cautious about the net effect of these sorts of regulations and how you can end up trapped in a worse local maximum because of them.
In a society where you can take bigger risks, make bigger bets, you can get a lot bigger wins at scale. I think that's a good/important thing.
I suspect the labor protections in Europe are part of the reason there aren't many billion dollar software companies there and the salaries are low, hiring is risky when firing is hard.
If you're a bad programmer and produce nothing, it'll (usually) quickly be discovered (though not always) even if you're good at talking. It's also easy to spot check in the interview before you hire them.
If you're a bad PM, but good at talking - it's easier to pass the interview and it can be harder to know they're bad and fire them.
Great PMs support their teams and make things better for the engineers they work with (especially by avoiding people working on stuff that doesn't matter). Bad ones make their teams miserable and add negative value. The role can also vary depending on the company (sometimes it includes product design work and sometimes it doesn't).
The best PMs I know are also really good at debugging/troubleshooting and have a technical background (I think necessary to be really great).
The most dangerous driving I’ve witnessed was in Jamaica and the UAE, but that was a while ago.
The US does seem somewhere in-between those and Europe/uk.
Waymo in Phoenix and current cruise cars in SF seem like good counter examples.
The bar is also a lot lower - human drivers are pretty bad.
Same with doordash as an earlier example, endless articles about how terrible doordash and Uber are while a large percentage of people in SF use it.
I hope cruise overcomes this and the people putting traffic comes and such on the cars are stopped.
It needs to be a lot easier still (particularly the mobile experience isn't there yet without a fully formed app), but if it's been a while it's worth checking out again: https://tlon.io/
It'll be insanely hard to actually pull off, but it's the only attempt in this space that I think has a legitimate chance of a successful outcome. The others are dead on arrival because they don't actually fix the underlying issues. (Success being widespread adoption of software the users actually own and control.)
I personally self-host mine which has also gotten a lot easier too: https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/product-review-nativ...
The UX needs to be just as good as a centralized service - I think urbit is the only design where that's really plausible (without recentralizing).
You need urbit or something like it to fix it, the problems are deeper.
https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/tlon-urbit-computing...
The irony to me is that any chance of relevance for a protocol is obviously going to need big players like meta to sign up (and that's a good thing for the protocol).
A weird set of circumstances might have aligned where meta sees an advantage in being part of a federated protocol to commoditize a threat to themselves (twitter, bluesky, etc.) and still hold a dominant position in quality of the end user clients (which is the only thing 99% of users care about).
It's a little funny a lot of the mastodon hosts are up in arms about this, but not that surprising when considering what they're actually getting out of being part of it (the identity stuff that comes along with being a mastodon user).
I'd guess similar stuff was said during the eternal september era of the web itself - simply being an internet user was no longer an identity that meant something culturally specific.
There's strong selection bias with drug use because drug users tend to cluster together, I suspect it's a lot less common than people think.
Stuff I have seen:
- LSD usage is pretty common relative to where I grew up (midwest-ish), but usually rare (once a year, burning man, someone has tried it once) even so, I'd still guess this is a pretty small minority - I guess 15% max? I'd guess mostly this is curiosity driven, reading about it, etc. I've never seen anyone seriously use it as a productivity drug.
- Adderall is more common, but that's because it's prescribed (and it works well so everyone thinks they have ADHD if they take it) - I haven't seen it abused, I've heard people talk about modafinil but have never met anyone that was actually taking it. Even in the adderall/adhd case, I'd guess 20% max? Most people I work with do not take it.
- Ketamine I don't know anyone that's tried it beyond someone in the therapy trials and non-techie druggie types.
Maybe it's more common and I'm not in the right circles, but I don't really buy it. I think it's rare and elevated by articles like this because it's salacious not because it's common. I'd guess my made up percentages are also too high.