Their website now prominently states “supervised” since they got into so much hot water overselling the capabilities.
Tesla FSD is really in a pointless middle ground where the steep $99/month they ask for it is just not worth it.
It does basically nothing for you on the highway to alleviate fatigue above and beyond a standard adaptive cruise control system you can find in a Volkswagen Jetta.
The FSD on city streets is not autonomous enough to take away supervision so for the 10-20 minutes people typically spend driving in city traffic situations before reaching their destination it’s not saving a whole lot of effort to just…drive yourself.
I would think if I owned a car that wasn’t an old ass beater like I have I would mainly benefit from adaptive cruise control on long trips and perhaps some convenience stuff like automatic parking.
Well I didn’t exactly make some kind of claim of “no grievance ever,” I’m just saying that it’s not that hard to find countries that have good relationships with the US, China, and EU all at once.
Example: most member states within the RCEP trade agreement (e.g., Australia)
India
Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey all deliberately hedge relations between blocs.
Japan and South Korea are heavily economically intertwined (not conflict-free obviously)
First we blamed AI for layoffs, next we are blaming AI for the AI bait and switch.
It's entirely possible this CEO sincerely believes this, but that means you as a potential customer should stay away: now you know that the CEO of this company has no idea how technology works even at an executive level and/or that he doesn't consult his experts before making decisions.
That's literally not it, a CEO can know how technology work and not apply it for its management, many people do things they "dislike" or don't believe in everyday.
Well, that's what I mean, this guy is using this issue as an scapegoat to close source the software and increase revenues as a result.
The pipeline goes like this:
Use open source license to gain traction and credibility > establish a customer base > pull the rug on open source to get everyone who depends on your product but isn't yet paying to pay.
With my respect for you as a person, I think your idea here is demonstrating both ignorance and cynicism to the way the law works.
This type of interpretation of law is by design.
When lawmakers write a law, it’s specifically the judicial branch’s job to interpret it, which is exactly what is happening here.
It’s also exactly how you describe by design: legislators can pass laws that say whatever they want. They can pass a law that says that all left-handed people are subject to a 50% income tax even though such a thing would clearly violate the constitution. Legislatures can make illegal laws just by having the votes to do so. The role of the judicial branch is to interpret the constitutionality of laws that are made.
Critically, a lawsuit has to challenge a law’s legality and constitutionality in order for it to be interpreted as unconstitutional. There also has to be a harmed party that shows they have standing to make that lawsuit.
It’s entirely possible that nobody brought this specific argument to a judge in the last 158 years. It’s also entirely possible that what is acceptable by reasonable people in society has changed over time, which can alter the interpretation of laws. That is normal, expected, and by design.
I think comments like yours unnecessarily demonize “activist judges” when this is the designed function of their role.
“They can pass a law that says that all left-handed people are subject to a 50% income tax even though such a thing would clearly violate the constitution”
I think that would be constitutional, but in conflict with other laws.
How so? Left handed people aren't human. Just like how criminals aren't treated like normal humans with equal rights.
Seriously though, I don't think it technically violates anything given that we do have a set of humans (criminals) that we treat unequally. Culturally we believe theft and murder gives us the right to treat such people who do such things unequally and we've encoded that into law. It is simply another culture shift to interpret left handedness as the same thing.
I mean the example is absurd but it's a valid example. Maybe a more realistic example is pronoun usage and the forced recognition of multiple genders other than two. Taken to the extreme we would have to accept that anyones made up gender is real and we will be forced to recognize their beliefs that these things exist.
In CA you can already get this classified as harassment and get fired from your workplace.
And just to be clear I agree with the whole made up gender and pronoun thing. If you want me to refer to you with they instead of she or he that's fine, but the point is that all of this is clearly culture/opinion based and none of it is a universal right because what is "universal" is ALSO an opinion.
The left handed tax law could be passed and declared unconstitutional almost instantly under a challenge brought by any individual that referenced the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, to any federal court. if the government appealed it at all, the appeals court would agree with the lower court, if the government appealed it again, the Supreme Court would also agree with the appeals court and lower court, and it would be a phenomenal waste of time.
That's the only validity of the example.
Nothing occurring in the court system matches the angst of people that view recent appointments and decisions to be invalid. Anything overturned only affected the day to day life because there was never an actual federal law passed at all. The courts are operating much closer to how people imagine them, than in prior times, despite people believing the opposite is occurring. Media.
You're missing the philosophical principle that the more laws you have the wider the breadth of the domain that laws can interpret becomes, and that laws generally accrue. This is not by design, and there are jurisdictions which explicitly curtail this by having sunset laws.
The overwhelming use of civil instead of common law by the world would beg to differ that there is any consensus on this.
I agree with a lot of the advantages of common law that can sort of legislate through precedent. But it does make it basically impossible to be on notice of what is illegal and what isn't, particularly in the modern world where not only are there hundreds of thousands of law and thousands of pages of federal "regulations" bound as law but you also have to know all the precedent and asterisks to the interpretations to know what is actually illegal.
If the user didn't put it there, it's hidden. Nobody routinely inspects the detailed configuration settings of their backup system, especially when it does appear to be working if you see it transferring data to the cloud and spot-check a file or two.
Any addition to the exclusions list that wasn't added by explicit user action is a hidden change and a data loss bug.
At some point the user is responsible for verifying their backups, right? You can’t just buy a product, login, and close your eyes.
I’ve witnessed my parents’ Time Machine backups (the simplest backup system of all time) sitting stale because they unplugged the hard drive. They are ultimately responsible for paying attention to the little icon that tells them that the system is overdue for a backup.
I agree that there might be a bug if the exclusion list was modified without user intervention, though I don’t think this blog post convinces me that that’s guaranteed to be what happened. For all we know the author just didn’t notice this exclusion before.
And, again, I think excluding OneDrive and Dropbox is sensible. Most users are not intending to duplicate those backups.
I think this is a lot of fluff supported by a weak anecdote.
Chris' company's assumptions are no longer true, but that doesn't apply to everyone's startup. This is mostly a Chris problem.
No, not every product can just be a chat window like in the silly little screenshot.
If the author actually wrote software they'd realize that, no, AI isn't speeding up development by any more than a modest amount. It's great that we have it and it's removing tedium but it has replaced zero engineers at my company or at any other company of anyone else I know.
And no, your company laying off some people isn't because of AI, your startup idea not getting funding is not because of AI, it's because we've been in a regular old recession which is now a developing oil crisis. Interest rates aren't 0% so nobody wants to lend money to infinite startups.
It’s even more superpowered than previous implementations of this strategy.
When they made the iPhone, iPod, and Apple Watch they had no specific hardware advantage over competitors. Especially with early iPhone and iPod: no moat at all, make a better product with better marketing and you’ll beat Apple.
Now? Good luck getting any kind of reasonably priced laptop or phone that can run local AI as well as the iPhone/MacBook. It doesn’t matter that Apple Intelligence sucks right now, what matters is that every request made to Gemini is losing money and possibly always will.
This is especially true in 2026 where Windows laptops are climbing in price while MacBooks stay the same.
All three of those products launched with custom hardware made by partnered manufacturers.
At iPhone launch, I seem to remember Apple still having quite a bit of the flash ram market tied up from their exclusive iPod contracts - Apple basically helped finance new factories to be spun up in return for exclusive access to their production.
The Apple Watch had the S1 system on package, which included an Apple custom CPU. There were a number of miniaturization techniques and custom parts Apple used which I remember competitors lagging on being able to replicate due to the broader market tendency to integrate off the shelf products (but I don't have more part examples or timelines).
Since they try to stay secretive about upcoming products, competitors may only get hints about what Apple is doing through your typical industrial espionage channels until the product comes out. That creates quite a bit of lag then you are starting a new product design cycle based on a product your competitor just hit the market with.
I think we can’t overestimate how lucky Apple got with the success of the iPhone. It really wasn’t a guaranteed hit by any means, and despite the success of the iPod it was launched by a much more modest company than today’s Apple.
Samsung literally makes flash memory and was one of the primary competitors of the iPhone along with its Microsoft Windows Mobile/Phone and/or Android products of that era.
Are you saying that iPhone competitors couldn’t have made similar investments in factories and couldn’t have secured flash chips? These were all mega-corporations like Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Nokia.
Android had been in negotiations with companies like Samsung and LG in 2005 before Google acquired them. In a very slightly alternate universe, Android could have been acquired by a powerhouse phone OEM like Samsung rather than Google, who I would argue squandered Android’s potential. To this very day Google struggles to make competitive hardware with their platform.
The iPhone launched as one of the most expensive smartphones on the market. The iPhone launched from a company with zero experience in selling cellular devices and a very small list of cellular networks who would even work with them.
Their competitors had ample opportunity to respond, but simply could not execute. In a very very slightly alternate universe, something like the Nokia/Microsoft partnership would have obliterated Apple.
The Apple Watch had no hardware advantage in the sense that it had no special capabilities above competitors. Yes, Apple custom-designed the SoC, but it wasn’t considered ahead of its competition. The LG G Watch and Moto 360 were available contemporaneous or earlier than the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch had no specific advantage in terms of performance, battery life, etc.
What made the Apple Watch a lot different from the iPhone was the ecosystem that Apple had built up to this point, Apple’s focus on watches as a fashion purchase and failure of competitors to recognize the same, and Apple’s arguably-illegal restriction of competing smartwatch devices on their dominant mobile platform (which the EU is forcing them to open up on now).
They can't break it out because it is embedded in other services.
But to quote:
> Overall, we’re seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board.
and
> Revenue from AI solutions built by our partners increased nearly 300% year-over-year, and commitments from our top 15 software partners grew more than 16X year-over-year.
Operating margin has been declining since approximately 3/2025 at Alphabet.
You think Google has no ability to tell us whether a traditional search makes more revenue than an AI Summary search? I think we would be naive to assume they don't know that.
They're talking about free inference like Android and Google Home devices. No one is paying subscription fees for these and they're running their inference in the cloud. Apple Intelligence, for the most part, is running on the device.
I think businesses like this should rarely listen to customers asking for cheaper prices.
If your price is higher that’s fewer people you need to convince to pay. Fewer customers also means lower support burden.
Obviously it’s a balance, but I think customers asking for lower prices may just be an indicator that people actually like what you’re doing and want to buy it. That probably means someone else is going to just buy it without worrying about the price.
The lowest priced option isn’t always the most popular, either. The F-150 sells a lot better than the Nissan Versa.
Psychologically people can also perceive a low price as an indicator of low value and quality.
To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing.
I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.
I'm pretty sure people who give in to subscriptions are usually forced to use a tool (or adobe) for one reason or another. New tool, that does one small thing, would not force many people to go into that absurd payment model.
Tesla FSD is really in a pointless middle ground where the steep $99/month they ask for it is just not worth it.
It does basically nothing for you on the highway to alleviate fatigue above and beyond a standard adaptive cruise control system you can find in a Volkswagen Jetta.
The FSD on city streets is not autonomous enough to take away supervision so for the 10-20 minutes people typically spend driving in city traffic situations before reaching their destination it’s not saving a whole lot of effort to just…drive yourself.
I would think if I owned a car that wasn’t an old ass beater like I have I would mainly benefit from adaptive cruise control on long trips and perhaps some convenience stuff like automatic parking.
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