Stand up now, Diggers all!
He/him. Indiana x Granada, SP
Joined November 2007
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Honestly this is at least the kind of wild swing should be taking. I'm sick of this milquetoast cyberpunk dystopia. Even the eschatalogical AI-worshipping sex cult manages to go about all of that like they're filling out a spreadsheet.
Subjectively, going viral since the election has been less miserable than expected. I think a lot of bots have been shut down to free up the GPUs.
Nick Simmonds retweeted
Fighting hackers is like this but if you use AI it's like you have TEN THOUSAND hands on the keyboard.
I knew the numbers in NYC were so bad that Waymo won't release them, but I didn't realize there was a precedent.
I wanted to prove FSD is safer than human drivers. Genuinely. I went to the data expecting to find the number everyone quotes: one accident per six million miles on FSD versus one per 670,000 for humans. Nine times safer. Case closed.
The claim cannot be made. Not "the data is weak." The comparison itself does not exist.
Start with the equipment. The "human driver" baseline is every car on American roads, and the average American car is over twelve years old. That baseline includes bald tires, worn brake pads, cracked mirrors, and drivers with no emergency braking, no blind spot warning, no lane keeping. A modern Tesla is a rolling sensor suite with the best crash-avoidance hardware ever sold to consumers. So I went looking for the honest comparison: FSD miles versus miles in comparable modern EVs with the same braking, comparable sensors, comparable warning systems. That dataset does not exist in any usable form. Nobody publishes it. Tesla certainly doesn't.
Then the miles themselves. FSD engagement is self-selected. Drivers turn it on in good weather, in daylight, on roads they trust it with. The owner's manual itself warns the system "may not operate as intended" in rain, snow, fog, and low light, which happen to be the conditions where humans crash most. So the FSD number is computed over the easiest miles in the newest cars with the richest, most insured drivers, while the human number absorbs every drunk at 3am and every teenager in a beater.
And it's supervised. Every mile in the FSD column had a human babysitter whose interventions, whose saves, get credited to the machine. The comparison isn't machine versus human. It's machine-plus-human versus human alone, with all credit assigned to the machine.
Darrell Huff described this exact move in How to Lie with Statistics in 1954: if you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. Rolf Dobelli in "Art of Thinking Clearly" calls the other half of it the swimmer's body illusion: swimmers have great bodies because bodies select swimmers. Teslas crash less because new luxury cars with safety suites driven by affluent middle-aged owners crash less. Selection, not software. When Forbes decomposed Tesla's own 2020 report by road type, the Autopilot advantage shrank to about four percent, inside the margin of error. Tesla has refused every request since to release the breakdown.
So here is where I landed. I wanted the claim to be true and provable. It is neither provable nor disprovable with the data that exists. The honest sentence is "we don't know." Anyone who tells you FSD is statistically safer than humans is guessing. Anyone who tells you it's statistically more dangerous is also guessing. The difference is that only one of those guesses is attached to a stock price, a monthly subscription, and a man telling you the feature will be finished next year, every year, since 2016.
When someone quotes you the nine-times-safer figure, ask one question: compared to whom, driving what, in what weather, measured by whom? The silence is the answer.
Nick Simmonds retweeted
I'm so glad Haley Stevens self immolated. There's long been a feeling on the left that dems would rather lose than win with a leftist. Seeing the entire institutional democratic party circle the wagons around Abdul should be a good reminder that dems really really do want to win.
Really incredible that the tech industry managed to, almost overnight, turn software from a high-margin, low capital business into a null margin, high capex, land-bound industry. That will have knock on effects no one is talking about.
I would love if we could channel the datacenter backlash into curbing the excesses of Big Tech in general. Get screens out of cars. Get computers out of refrigerators. Stop surveilling everything all the time, stop forcing me into the app, stop trying to steal my data.
Nick Simmonds retweeted
talarico should study ossof & aocs constituent services (some of the best from what i understand) and draw up the juxtaposition between cruz. almost as important as his legislative track record. we cannot lose this seat. if we keep tx the reign of republicanism in the us is over
Nick Simmonds retweeted
If moderates moved to the progressive stance, that means the progressives won, and progressivism gets the credit. Thats why this discourse is so stupid, because moderate fanbois are pretending this didn’t happen
Big misstep here. You use ballot measure when they drive your voters to the polls, but this issue isn't a driver. Instead, this gives them a vote where they can ground this sentiment without having to vote for the Republican, letting them split their ticket.
Hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians voted for Dems then voted for a trans sports ban.
Having that option on the ballot let voters separate their policy preference from their R/D vote. MGP's opponent ran on his support for the initiative - it passed in her district while she flattened him. opb.org/article/2026/10/21/w…
It's fascinating to phrase this as "put transgender kids in sports" when in fact there is no "put transgender kids in sports" lobby, there's instead a "ban transgender kids from sports" lobby and other people who think the status quo is fine.
Okay so it turns out people are mostly doing this to fuck with the Republican, it didn't actually trick much of anyone.
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If nothing else, let's let this and the Platner campaign be the grave of "go find me a messy, scruffy white guy and we'll run him for senate". It was never a strategy, it was a psychosexual obsession of certain podcasters and staffers.
