> There's no question that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures," she said. "There's a convergence of what we're all trying to accomplish in the future."
I think there are other reasons and am capable of critical thought. A variety of synergies have been discussed publicly for at least 9 years. This article lists several of them.
Yeah I'm definitely questioning what synergies there are between Tesla and SpaceX. What do electric cars and rockets have in common? Are they going to me a rocket powered car? Put a Tesla on the moon?
The only thing I can think that makes any sense at all is Teslas coming with Starlink terminals built in. That seems like a stretch though.
Tesla claims to be pivoting away from cars in favour of producing their Optimus robots. And SpaceX's IPO valuation appears to be predicated on them being an AI datacentre company.
So I guess the "Musk plays 4d chess" view would be that there are obvious synergies between humanoid robots and AI.
Ugh. Honestly, that makes it seem worse than the purely cynical financial engineering takes.
Tesla has a problem. Its sky-high valuation is based on the potential upside from “visionary” sci-fi future programs. However, the narratives are losing credibility.
Once upon a time, Robotaxi and Optimus sounded like visionary futuristic ideas. However:
We now live in a world where Waymo exists, and autonomous taxi hasn’t proven to be as socially transformative as promised. No huge latent market exposed. Aslo, Tesla is lagging behind.
We now live in the world where Unitree exists, and is shipping! Again, Tesla is on the back foot. The technology no longer seems quite so futuristic. Disruptors usually disrupt from down-market— that puts BYD cars and Unitree robots in the better position.
With a merger, the joint sci-fi future proposition is colonies on Mars. That one is likely to stay in the future for a long time. From a stock valuation point of view, the goal is for the promise to be forever in the future. That way, the investor thinks the upside is still to come. Once the promise is delivered, it’s time to cash out.
Fantastic write up. To what degree is all of capitalism actually built on this premise? Why can't I buy the same damn running shoes I bought in 2015? Why can't I buy a dumb TV?
Yeah, it's all scifi posturing. Same with the "Optimus will begin colonising Mars in 2026" line that they were still pushing just a few months ago.
There's perhaps a chance that some part of it might happen someday, but right now the main thing is to distract attention from Tesla's lack of model development and SpaceX's much-vaunted AI business being based on reselling datacentre space at a loss.
> What do electric cars and rockets have in common?
Electric motors? I imagine there are differences but the super heavy grid fins are electrically actuated (I have heard these motors were sourced from Tesla, though I don't have a great reference for that on hand). The thrust vectoring is also electrically actuated... again, I imagine there are differences of what's on the rocket and what's in the cars... but there are cross over areas of research and engineering.
Also, in a hand-wavy way, rovers share some traits with electric cars; again electric motors, wheels, steering, etc.
So while I don't believe a traditional car company is exactly trying to build space hardened/ready equipment in the normal course of business... it's not as far fetched as some combinations could be.
Why? Well, as Cory Doctorow said at the talk I attended earlier this week, they do this for the same reason a dog licks his balls: because they can and no one will stop them.
If a child goes through the checkout at the grocery store with cash, can the parent march in and demand a refund because "he's underage so the contract is void"? A credit card was used. Why should aws care about the details? (Other than the potential for the card to be stolen ofc.)
Obviously the specifics vary by jurisdiction, but usually contracts that are 'necessary' (e.g. grocery store purchases) or beneficial to the minor (e.g. an employment agreement) cannot be voided simply because someone is under 18.
The further you go away from this line, e.g. a mortgage, the more likely a court of law would void the contract. As with many things in law, the specifics (if it makes to trial) is case-by-case and "it depends"; with settlement being generally based on a party's estimated chances of succeeding/costs should it go to trial.
> If a child goes through the checkout at the grocery store with cash, can the parent march in and demand a refund because "he's underage so the contract is void"?
Depends on the jurisdiction, of course. But for example in German law, the contract is not void exactly because and only if it was about daily necessities of low value - the law does, in fact, care very literally and explicitly about those details. So it's completely unfit as an example to generalize, and the contract with AWS would in fact be void. Their problem if they don't verify users' identities and age sufficiently - and it's almost certainly a deliberate business decision not to do that in order to reduce friction. and occasionally write off an unenforceable bill as cost of doing business.
Can a German child buy non-essential expensive things, like a concert ticket, console, Warhammer or whatever? (Or a video game, back when those were sold in shops.)
I bought these things while a child in the UK. I'm sure Games Workshop would have offered a refund on something unopened if my parents had demanded it, but I'm fairly sure the ticket agency would not.
The generally agreed limit (also established in court cases) is the amount of pocket money a child of the given age typically gets per month. For a 10 year old, that's about 20 EUR, for a 16 year old about 50 EUR. A console would definitely be too expensive, as would be big name concert tickets. Unless it's a recent AAA title, video games would be OK. No idea what Warhammer costs these days.
Most retailers are probably willing to take the risk of maybe having to do a refund, unless it's something really expensive (or perishable/consumable).
There are definitely limits in some countries relative to the US. I was in university at 16. My parents were covering a lot of costs but I was certainly making regular purchases of all manner of things. My understanding is that would perhaps be something of an issue some places.
Well fair enough, although I find that rather surprising. If I understand you correctly selling anything more expensive than cheap food to a child carries a high degree of risk in Germany.
Then again, maybe making it impossible for a child to pawn expensive items for cash isn't such a bad idea. At least there shouldn't be any loopholes given the way Germany went about it.
Doing any business at all in Germany carries extreme business risk, by American standards. The attitude of Germans seems to be to just live with it and maybe get insurance. If you just have to accept courts will void 1% of your transactions (costing another 2% in legal fees) then you just make everything 5% more expensive to cover it.
This is why there's not much big tech in Germany. A single legal dispute can theoretically bankrupt any company, completely at random, at no fault of the company, but practically doesn't. It may be a low enough chance to justify investing thousands but nobody would invest a hundred million dollars in that.
> If you just have to accept courts will void 1% of your transactions (costing another 2% in legal fees) then you just make everything 5% more expensive to cover it.
That's an absurd exaggeration in regard to the issue at hand. Almost certainly far less than 1% of purchases by minors are voided, and NONE of those involve legal fees unless the seller chooses to go to court rather than refund.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet money that there are overall far less purchases refunded in Germany than in the USA.
> If I understand you correctly selling anything more expensive than cheap food to a child carries a high degree of risk in Germany.
Basically yes - the limit is generally considered to be the amount of monthly pocket money children typically get, so around 20 EUR for a 10 year old. And it would be possible for the seller to ask for a signed note of consent from the parent.
And of course the risk is limited to possibly having to revert the sale, which would be fairly rare for things that are just somewhat over that limit. Educated guess about how high the risk is for any given case are probably not hard.
I knew that in Germany contracts with minors are voidable. After some checking they apparently are voidable in the U.S. as well:
> Contracts with minors are voidable at the minor's discretion but exceptions exist, such as contracts for necessities (e.g., food, health, and transportation).
Could they enforce them against their legal guardians (under the theory that they have neglected their duty to supervise their children appropriately) though? I think this is a thing in at least some jurisdictions.
In Poland legal guardians are responsible for neglects in guarding child. What is "proper custody" depends on child age. Parent cannot close child in basement, it is expected for child to have freedom appropriate to is age.
I doubt that AWS could justify that part of proper child custody is to watch what child do with newest AI feature dedicated for processional IT. AWS neglected proper verification of user age.
I switched from Ansible to Pyinfra for my homelab, and continue to use Ansible at work.
The biggest difference is that Pyinfra is simply Python code. It's incredibly easy to control the system in whatever manner you need to. You can probably do the same thing in Ansible, but it's never quite as obvious how to do it. This also means it's much more clear where and why things work the way they do in Pyinfra, where in Ansible I end up digging through numerous role files to try to find where some variable gets injected.
Just having "home/docker.py" instead of "collections/ansible_collections/home/dev/roles/docker/tasks/main.yml" is reason enough. Which one of the 300 main.yml files do I load when doing a quick open in any modern text editor?
If Jinja templating for data manipulation gets too complex or inconvenient, you can create your own module in ansible and use python code for data manipulation. But at this point you are better served with plain python which I think is where pyinfra should shine. I want to take a look though at how hard it is to implement your own module for it.
I used ansible for building simple logging appliance (something like Elasticsearch + Dashboards + other tooling) and I found it very difficult to reason with specifically python code snippets within YAML.
Switched to Pyinfra and the difference is day and night. You write python code you can organise your stuff into functions, classes and whatever you like and then instantiate them as you like. Highly reusable configuration.
You have full pwoer such as you can call boto to fetch the list of servers to target, filter base on tags and what not. Only sky is the limit because it is NOT a DSL (or YAML) rather full blow real python.
At a previous job we used it to test our ansible playbooks via molecule, which were part of a CI/CD pipeline to create AWS AMIs.
It worked well and was nicer to deal with than test kitchen for testing UNIXy things (is service running and/or enabled, does file have right permissions, does file include $TEXT, etc). It was very useful for us during big linux upgrades, such as when ubuntu went from upstart to systemd. It can also be good at capturing edge cases with brittle outcomes (especially as ansible went through enormous changes after the red hat acquisition).
I used it between 20016-2023 and since we were not a python shop, I never used any other package managers. It was never an issue with CI/CD pipeline, but iterating locally was always a fight to getting molecule to pick up the right pyenv. It got better towards the end, though.
Honestly the bigger issue was testing x86 docker images on an arm mac, as molecule didn't cleanly support cross platform images and we did pull in x86 binaries for our playbooks (by the end of my time at said company, I was also directly managed by product managers who didn't care about tech debt and I couldn't deal with the otherwise desirable idea to move our compute to ARM - a rant for another day). This may also be fixed now.
Adding to sibling comments: I used to use Ansible professionally and PyInfra for homelab. Ansible is ridiculously slow.
The only issue was I had to implement some facts and operations myself that probably were available in some Ansible package but to be honest it was trivial.
You correct, you are allowed to "break" patent law in Germany, if the use is private and non-commercial. This does not encompass schools and science though.
Research is permitted, if the protected invention is commercially available, as far as I know. E.g. medical research. I believe, this means use for research cannot be restricted once commercially available. I am not sure, if it's limited to medicine in Germany. The US has similar exceptions for medical research AFAIK.
Sadly there is indeed no blanket permission for public research and education in Germany, either. There is little point mentioning it, but HN rate-limited my account, so I couldn't edit or comment to clarify in time.
I am not advocating for the German patent system, I just think the US is particularly ridiculous prohibiting personal reproduction and use. Like, you got a lathe, lab, computer or 3D printer and are literally prohibited to use it as you please, not allowed create certain mechanisms, substances, shapes and functions, for your own use, or even survival, without (possibly) harming anyone else.
Accomplish a ludicrous valuation above all else?
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