Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it’s not as bad as feared.

Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That’s the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won’t grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

For a typical car company that’s well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla’s stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn’t as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.

It’s a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.

It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot’s fault. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they’re misled by the chatbot. That’s excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.

Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don’t have competitors, you don’t have to work as hard to provide search results – especially if you’re actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they’re interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn’t responsible for the decline of search quality.

Yeah, this is why polling is hard.

Online polls are much more likely to be answered by people who like to answer polls than people who don’t. People who use Duck Duck Go are much more likely to be privacy-focused, knowledgeable enough to use a different search engine other than the default, etc.

This is also an echo chamber (The Fediverse) discussing the results of a poll on another similar echo chamber (Duck Duck Go). You won’t find nearly as many people on Lemmy or Mastodon who love AI as you will in most of the world. Still, I do get the impression that it’s a lot less popular than the AI companies want us to think.

I mean, that’s such a broad take, any system can change, doesn’t mean it’s inevitable

It also doesn’t mean that they’re all the same system. So, if capitalism is one of the many systems that can backslide into authoritarianism doesn’t mean that authoritarianism is a part of capitalism, despite your claim to the contrary.

We have had systems of feudalism and monarchies that have stayed steady for hundreds of years. In pre history, people lived in communes for thousands of years.

Yes, in the modern world things change much more quickly. Technologies didn’t change for thousands of years. That meant that the number of people a farmer or a plot of land could feed stayed constant for thousands of years. That meant the maximum size of a city was pretty constant. That dictated the kinds of governments that were stable.

It was technology that has made systems unstable, not capitalism.

You’re claiming that if capitalism tends to backslide into X, then X is part of capitalism. My point is that every system can backslide into something more primitive where a strong man makes the rules. They’re not all the same, so your idea that X is an inevitable part of capitalism is wrong. Capitalism is what we call it when it has a certain set of characteristics. If it no longer has those characteristics it’s no longer capitalism.

I’m claiming that capitalism in particular is one of the most corruptible systems

And you’re wrong. There’s nothing about capitalism that makes it more corruptible than feudalism or oligarchy. In fact, those systems are much more corrupt in general.

It tries to harness the power of greed and turn it into positive sum games

Whereas feudalism doesn’t even try to do that. It just skips the positive sum games part and accepts greed. At least with capitalism there’s an attempt to make things better.

I think greed driving society maximizes corruption

Maximizes corruption? You think capitalism is more corrupt than a strong man system where everybody is forced to constantly flatter and pay tribute to the strong man? A system where the rules are whatever the strong man says, so bribery is baked into everything?

think we should replace that with something else

Sure, let’s do it, what do you propose? And how do we get there from here?

Nothing is inevitable. Backsliding is always common. Most forms of government tend to backslide towards a strong-man at the top who is above the law. This is exactly what’s happening with the American democratic republic that was previously a mix of capitalism and socialism. That doesn’t mean that a strong man is a natural element of capitalism or democracy or republics or socialism or capitalism. It’s that a strong man who’s above the law is a common feature of human communities.

Pretty much every form of government that allows for more participation by the people being governed tries to put constraints on the rulers. The US called theirs “checks and balances”. The British started with the Magna Carta.

It’s like saying you like playing monopoly but then after all the properties are bought out you turn around and say it’s no longer monopoly.

You’re talking about monopoly, the board game, previously called “the landlord’s game”, a game designed to teach about the dangers of monopolies?

It’s not baffling when you realize that there are only 2 remaining car manufacturers in the US, and fewer than 20 worldwide.

Look at the number of car companies established just in 1900:

• Auburn: 1900 to 1937
• California Automobile Company: 1900 to 1902
• Massachusetts Steam Wagon Company: 1900 to 1901
• Dodge: 1900 to 1928
• Friedman Automobile Company: 1900 to 1903
• …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Vehicle_manufacturing_companies_established_in_1900

When there are only 2 manufacturers in a space, it’s no surprise if they ignore certain consumers. If there were a hundred different manufacturers like there were in the early 1900s, then there would almost certainly be someone offering something closer to what you want.

For example, instead of a lever to flush, you get a button. If the software isn’t up to date, the button won’t work.

But then they have the audacity to FORCE us all into it by outright destroying anything else

That’s because there’s no competition. Capitalism requires competition. Adam Smith thought it was the job of the state to step in and ensure that monopolies were broken up so that capitalism could work.

You cannot buy a good car anymore

There are only 2 US car manufacturers, 3 if you want to count Tesla.

rolling malware that is unfixable by the user

Because they’re weaponizing section 1201 of the DMCA to prevent people from competing with them.

What you hate isn’t capitalism, it’s that you can’t even get capitalism because the government refuses to regulate businesses. For capitalism to work, the state has to ensure that there’s healthy competition in the marketplace. But, when there’s competition a rich person who owns capital might lose. So, a rich person much prefers feudalism or a corporatocracy to capitalism.

Could be.

Sure, but you still have to respect the form of the statement. You have to pretend that something happened to someone else.

For example: “How would someone remove a 4 1/2 inch cylinder that’s stuck in an m&m minis tube. Asking for a friend.”

Not: “I got my dick stuck in an m&m minis tube, how do I get it out? Asking for a friend.”

Everyone knows that you’re talking about yourself, but you’re supposed to pretend that it’s your friend who’s the idiot.

Aside from everything else, apparently this guy doesn’t understand how “Asking for a friend” is supposed to work.

Not every big change is necessarily something you can meaningfully break up into small changes. Sometimes when you could break it up into small changes, you have to change its structure in a meaningful way to half-implement it and test out that half-version. It takes experience to know when it’s best to get the whole structure expressed it code, then to go back and tweak it based on any compiler errors. Most of the time the compiler errors are very minor things like a typo, so you don’t lose any meaningful time fixing them.

Sure. Racism will always be a factor.

Minneapolis: Check.

On video: Check.

Massive uproar: Check.

White victim: Nope.

George Floyd’s death shows that what matters is that it happened in front of witnesses who were recording on video, not the colour of the victims’ skin.

Small change and run works for small ideas. Sometimes you have a big idea that’s hard to break down into small chunks.

Most programmers I know compile a program when they have fully expressed an idea they have in their heads. It might just be the first outline of the idea. But, it’s a solid first sketch that contains all the key details. Unfortunately, often that’s a complex idea so it can be somewhere on the order of an hour before they stop coding and try compiling. One reason for that is that compiling the program is a context switch, and when they context switch they can’t keep all of their thoughts about the program in their head, instead they have to think about compiling. And, if compiling takes more than a few seconds their attention also starts to drift to other things.

Coding for something like an hour without making a single typo or braino is difficult. This is especially true if the programmer is attempting to express a creative idea. Their focus won’t be on getting every single detail correct, it will be in sketching the shape of the idea as completely as possible. 99% of the time, those mistakes are entirely obvious and take no time to fix. But the compiler is (luckily) unforgiving of errors, even if the fix is obvious. But, that’s why it’s suspicious if the code compiles perfectly the first time.

It’s possible that some people have different workflows. Maybe they write out the entire program in comments and pseudocode before using an actual programming language. If you do that, then you can probably afford to take a break from the actual coding more often and compile what you have so far. Maybe you’re compiling every 5 minutes instead of every 30, in which case it’s pretty normal not to have any compiler errors. Maybe some people use a super advanced IDE that effectively compiles the code in the background all the time and flags errors that will become compiler errors. I think a lot of people who became programmers before that kind of thing was popular find that sort of thing to be distracting. If they’re trying to write something on line 50 and the IDE flags something from line 45, they might have already shifted their context a bit, and having to go back and fix that will distract them from the thing they’re currently trying to express.

Personally, I’ve often had no compiler errors when writing tests. Tests are often very small, self-contained bits of code that don’t take long to write, and aren’t very complex, so it’s pretty normal to have a test compile and run perfectly the first time.

The point is, programmers who have been programming for a long time are the ones who are more likely to be surprised if their code compiles perfectly the first time.

Anyone who doesn’t complain about code not compiling on the first try likely writes dead simple programs and could be replaced by an LLM. Writing simple programs is easy, writing complex programs is hard.

Mainly because if he even managed to collect 5% of the actual value of the jewels he stole, he’s now got generational wealth in Ecuador. Why bother?