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For things like remote heating or auto trunk operation, the cost I’d be willing to bear is gated mostly by how much the delta to just buying a new car would be. Especially since having kids, a lot of this stuff makes my life a lot easier. If I’m trying to carry a crying toddler and a large bag of groceries into the house, I don’t want to be struggling to try to get the trunk closed. Being able to completely de-ice the car from inside while I’m getting kids dressed for school instead of needing to spend an extra five minutes doing it manually is likewise huge.

The Tesla (like any EV I’ve driven) is also fun to drive, but I’d trade away the instant torque for the other features if you made me choose.

Even this example is terrible, I don't "remote unlock" my Tesla, it's just unlocked when I get close to it. It used to be 95% reliable (not great), but now that they added an Apple Watch app, it's 100% reliable (either my phone or my watch unlocks it via proximity).

> and then I need to wait 3 seconds to see if it actually turned them on

If you want to unlock a Kia with the app, first you need to pay $15/month, and then you need to press and hold for one second the unlock button, after which you have a 30-50% chance of the unlock request going through. To let you know that it went through, you will receive an email. It's the most user-hostile app I still have on my phone.

So no, Tesla is not as shitty as other automakers. The bar is so much lower than you can imagine.

I would say the place where I differ is here:

> I want to get in the car,

I don't want to have to get in the car to do any of this. I'm able to get the climate control started in the car by saying out loud "Hey Siri, warm up car" (a shortcut I set up exposed by the Tesla app). The location is always up-to-date so if my wife is driving the kids in it, I can see their current location and ETA. I want to be able to open the door without unlocking the car manually. I want to be able to close the trunk remotely if I carried in a load of groceries. Etc.

None of this is some kind of alien technology that Tesla invented, but rather the vast majority of legacy car manufacturer apps are just total garbage piles that were outsourced to some low-bidder somewhere. It shouldn't be that hard.

> One "statement" per line is bog standard

This isn't really true. Most non-Lisp languages I work in, like JS or Ruby or Python, have things like long_expression =\n long_other_expression, or long_expression\n.another_long_expression\n.another_long_expression.

It really just isn't, especially when it comes to the app. I've dealt with Ford in the past and Kia in the present, and it's like having a carrier-supplied dumb phone vs an iPhone in 2007. Completely separate experience.

Nobody wants to hear it in 2025 but this is one of the reasons Tesla is still a much better experience than most of the legacy car manufacturers. Car People like to think of apps as a weird Tech People affectation, but in actual day-to-day usage, they're invaluable.

Wealthy people, huh? Well now I’m against it!

That’s a good explanation of how Elon is also wrong, I guess, but the NYT or EU is still wrong too.

> Unlike Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, which are publicly traded, X is owned solely by Mr. Musk. EU regulators are considering using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX. That increases the potential penalty to well over $1 billion, one person said.

Is the NYT wrong here or is the EU? It's private but it's not "solely owned" by a longshot. Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.

> So there's a lot of luck involved here

App Quality and Luck are not the only two factors that go into App Success.

> I'm not in the US but doesn't that downplay it a bit?

No, not really. There are a couple municipalities (Portland, OR, e.g.) that have famously not fluoridated their water forever, but for the most part this is not something most places argue about. UT is an exception.

Tell that to the European health agencies, I guess, they seem to be confused too.

The "big political fight" here is that one out of fifty US states changed its mind, to be clear.

Agree, it's a little bit like child Covid vaccinations. Not much evidence for either benefit or harm, recommended in the US but not most of Europe.

"Well, whether it's better to fluoridate the water or not, ~half the world got the answer wrong. But the important thing is they didn't argue about it."

What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth-1, there's no right thing, and countries all over the world have "by and large solved" the issue by doing completely different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country

> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.

> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.

> If your mouth is full of cavities you’re more likely to build up bacteria that cause downstream effects as serious as heart disease.

I don't know that you have the causality here correct.

The article says Sutskever was blindsided by the rank-and-file being on Sam's side. Presumably he thought the outcome was going to be business as more-or-less usual but with Murati or someone as CEO and then panicked when that didn't happen.

> And why wouldn’t the board just explain their decision if Murati herself was imploring them to do so?

I think because they were in over their heads. They were on the board to run a non-profit and then it metastasized into a high-stakes Fortune 50-sized company.

> I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason.

The users aren't the issue, the developers are. Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS in order to get users into their dark patterns where you have to call to unsubscribe; can you imagine what shady game developers would do?

To the extent that it's worse, it's worse because they try to layer more stuff on top of it that ends up conflicting with the basic set a timer, trigger HomeKit, send a text message functionality.

> The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs

Isn't the PhD program where you're supposed to generate the track record of research?

Well, the definition of 0ºC is based on the freezing point of water at one atmosphere of pressure, which isn't super relevant on the Moon. You could give it in K but that's not very relatable.

Trunk.

No, American cars have no part called a 'boot.'

The candidate who spent more money lost, though.

> Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.

The trick being played here is counting all charging stations in the US and pretending they're part of the IRA's funding.

Ok, but taking two years to come up with a big document of standards while Tesla was able to just do all that by themselves and then build more chargers for less is kind of the issue. I appreciate that it's not easy, but the not-easiness is the problem.

Ok. It's the failure to build that's the issue more than the spending.