Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
No, the same couldn't be said about smartphone keyboards. The space in a smartphone is at an extreme premium and having the ability to display a keyboard or something else is very valuable. In a car this problem doesn't exist - you can have a touchscreen AND a normal glovebox latch. Removing the glovebox latch and replacing it with a touchscreen is nothing but idiocy, with zero benefits for anyone, ever, at any point.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
Yep that's why everyone is using 6" touchscreen keyboards on laptops and desktop PCs - oh wait, they aren't because there is plenty of space for physical buttons that work better.
> Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.
When people are too stupid to recognise satire, you get tremendous support for stupid things.
In 1930, laws were proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis to ban radios while driving. According to automotive historian Michael Lamm, “Opponents of car radios argued that they distracted drivers and caused accidents, that tuning them took a driver’s attention away from the road, and that music could lull a driver to sleep.”
It's true but the physical buttons on my car radio let me get things over with very quickly.
The more complicated and sophisticated you make the UI, the worse it is while driving. A touch screen invites excessive complexity the same way enterprise java invited excessive complexity.
Nope. I bought phones with physical keyboards for as long as I could, because they work better for me. But I'm not in the majority, and manufacturers didn't want to keep selling phones with moving parts, so here we are.
And no way does a touch screen have benefits that outweigh the benefits of dedicated tactile controls for the driver.
> Same could have been said for smartphone physical keyboard yet here we are.
The safety aspects are quite different. It is mildly annoying not to be able to touch type text messages; it is deadly to have to fiddle with a touch screen for a car’s basic functionality.
1/ thermal management system works for temps -50c to +50c
2/ see above
3/ fast DC charging will give you 300+ KM of range for 30min of charging. 99% of the time you charge at home so over a year, you end up saving time with an EV.
3) 30 minutes for 186 miles isn't great. Normal for an ICE is 5 minutes for 300-400 miles (482-643 km).
4) I have two cars. One is 15 years old, the other is 25. They are cheap, they are reliable, and I get 30 mpg. An 8-15 year lifespan is again, kinda sad in comparison to ICE.
I'm looking forward to electric cars being generally feasible. But the battery tech needs a lot of help. Charging times and lifespan needs to match ICE cars.
Hey, I felt exactly the same way about ICE vs EV. I have a V8 that I tinker with on weekends. I have 4 other ICE vehicles.
The kicker for me was borrowing a friend’s EV for the day. The driving experience was so completely different to my cars it was mind-boggling. The only other time I’ve felt the same way was picking up the first iPhone.
We bought an EV a couple years after that (6 months ago, now) the first couple of weeks we struggled with range anxiety and suffered from inconvenience. Now we’re completely in love and wouldn’t ever buy another ICE. (Except maybe another old Saab…)
This is much less of a problem than you think it is.
30min to add ~200mi of range is enough for 99% of people. Most people who take road trips need to stop every 3hrs for food/bathroom etc. By the time that's done, your car is charge. Remember that typically you charge while your car is parked, so the net time loss is usually less than that of an ICE.
8-15 years is to get to 80% battery degradation. Total loss of vehicle probably around the 500k to 1mil mile mark.
If you have a 15 and 25 year old ICE, you are far better off driving them into the ground than buying an EV. Don't try to dissuade people about the concept of EVs because of your personal circumstance. If you are in the market for a new car circa $40k USD, buying anything other than EV is financial insanity.
this will be the winner purely because Apple devices are the lowest common denominator. That is, one must support iOS and if iOS only supports LL-HLS but other devices optionally support LL-HLS then LL-HLS is the winner.
Are people purposely ignoring the fact that Twitter are clearly lying about the % of non-human users? They say its less then 5% but in reality its between 5% and 25% based on multiple independent research studies.
If it really was < 5% why don't Twitter just release the data Musk is asking for?
Not only that, his biggest argument for buying Twitter was literally that there were too many bots and that he would solve it. Now that he's waived due-diligence and the market is tanking, he's "concerned" about the number of bots? It's such transparent BS that it's embarrassing.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I don't follow your reasoning. If you thought there was a large bot problem, part of the appeal would be that there's an opportunity to fix that problem. That would increase the value of the company after you've fixed the problem. Assuming that's the case, then finding out there's not a big bot problem would mean there's not as much of an opportunity.
It comes down to not being able to state that he was unaware of a bot problem (as an argument for walking out of the deal) if he has very publicly said that he's doing this because of and to fix the bot problem.
yeah, maybe he could have spent a little time looking into this stuff before committing. Oh well, I'm sure his lawyers are happy to take the billable hours!
No, the SEC agreement directly addresses this. Section 5.11 ("Parent" and "Acquisition Sub" is Musk, "Company" is Twitter):
> Each of Parent and Acquisition Sub has conducted, to its satisfaction, its own independent investigation, review and analysis of the business, results of operations, prospects, condition (financial or otherwise) or assets of the Company and its Subsidiaries. In making its determination to proceed with the transactions contemplated by this Agreement, including the Merger, each of Parent and Acquisition Sub has relied solely on the results of its own independent review and analysis and the covenants, representations and warranties of the Company contained in this Agreement
So, in essence:
1) Musk has been afforded the opportunity to address any concerns he has with Twitter
2) Any concerns of Musks have been satisfactorily resolved by Twitter
3) In determining said satisfaction, Musk is relying on his own judgement and analysis, and is not relying on any analysis by Twitter.
There is absolutely 0 ground to his complaints today and claiming he "isnt being given the information hes been asking for" or that "I was going off your numbers but I want to run my own".
I'm curious about the nuances of this, I haven't seen this argument made elsewhere yet, but it does seem to make sense that you would make that kind of exception. Even when you buy a house as-is, exceptions are generally going to be made for existential threats (leans on the house, title issues, etc.) outside of the _condition_ of the house. But it still feels like posturing, especially since he knew this was an issue before he made the offer, why not explicitly call this out in the contract? It definitely feels like the weight of the economy collapsing is the substantive issue.
the poster is defending Twitter be able to lie on their public filings. If their bot % is materially higher then 5% they have committed securities fraud.
Twitter are stuck. If they admit a bot count of say 25% and say "sorry Mr. Musk but you committed to buy no matter what... buyer beware" then yes, Musk should be force to continue the sale but they can't because it raises much more serious questions.
It is a little more nuanced. Twitter is claiming than fewer than 5% of the monthly active users they report are spam bot, not that fewer than 5% or those on the platform. If they “don’t count” them but also don’t ban them, that would leave room for bit theories to be “true”
There's also a deeper set of definitions at play. Twitter the corporation cares about monetizable active users, as stated. Or, in English, "what fraction of ads served are really going to robots?"
Twitter users don't give a fig about Twitter's ad impressions. They care about what fraction of comments or interactions are in fact with bots or astroturfers. From the perspective of Twitter as a communications medium rather than an advertising channel, this is the relevant statistic.
it’s a nonsense argument, most people (including musk) couldn’t even articulate robust criteria for measuring a “non-human” user — musk himself has undermined his position on this topic multiple times.
Twitter has never claimed that the number is accurate nor important in absolute terms (“we aren’t sure” features prominently in their filings!) rather it’s a number that is important for understanding growth and evolution of the platform. The number matters quarter-to-quarter, not in isolation.
Active human users matters in the context of advertising, it’s a pointless distraction that musk is employing to back out of the deal.
Let’s imagine there is a real measure of “non-human users” and lets say it turns out that Twitter underestimated by 50%… so? Musk long said he wasn’t buying Twitter as a financial move, and that he has a plan to be wildly profitable off of a small proportion of twitter’s users so unless 95% of twitter’s users aren’t real, it doesn’t impact his (absurd and ridiculous) plan.
That’s not how advertising works, advertisers don’t care about “quality of the audience” in the abstract because digital advertising is results driven. There’s a great deal of fraud in advertising across the industry, and it’s certainly not good, but it’s a cost of doing business for advertisers and is factored in: when an advertiser pays Twitter $100 to generate $150 in revenue, it doesn’t matter if $50 of that $100 was spent because it “non-human users”. Twitter could reveal tomorrow “oops our numbers are wrong, our non-human user count is actually twice as high” and it would have zero impact on advertisers. Not a single professional in the space would care, because advertisers are not measuring their value from Twitter based on twitters KPIs. Advertising is a means to an end, advertisers measure the end.
That's completely false. I've worked in both the media buying and inventory side of advertising and the large accounts definitely care about the quality of audience. Nike, Apple, Nestle etc have huge internal agencies that are tasked with finding brand safe platforms to advertise against.
The type of attribution based advertising you are talking about certainly also exists whereby the advertiser pays $x per (milli)impression, then a further $x for click-thru and then a final $x for a conversion. However the vast majority of twitter's revenue is in the first bucket (CPM) which is entirely valued based on the size and quality of the audience.
You’re drawing an arbitrary line. The majority of digital advertisers are using digital advertising because the value is quantifiable through attributable revenue.
There are certainly a minority of major brands that operate as advertisers with awareness campaigns — sponsored hashtags are a good example — but if you read the Twitter filings, it’s very clear that their focus is performance based advertising — and that’s where they see their future, too.
Maybe a decade ago you could have said that advertisers were just trusting platforms to deliver value, and that ad-fraud could make or break a platform if they got caught, but that’s not true anymore, it’s a much more sophisticated market. Advertisers aren’t (as) dumb (as they once were).
Brand safety is a whole other kettle of fish — that’s a concern across all types of advertising, and not relevant to the audience, rather the content of the platform.
>You’re drawing an arbitrary line. The majority of digital advertisers are using digital advertising because the value is quantifiable through attributable revenue.
If you are talking about the majority of ad impressions being programmatic/attribution based then yes you are correct, however if you talking about dollars spent that direct sponsorship with large internal agencies is still very much king.
To give some context, large corps would routinely drop $5 million on a direct deal with Twitter for a combination of promoted tweets, hashtags, trending etc. This was also almost pure margin as there was no middle DSP/SSP taking a cut. To get the same profit from the method you are purporting to be most common would take years.
>Maybe a decade ago you could have said that advertisers were just trusting platforms to deliver value, and that ad-fraud could make or break a platform if they got caught, but that’s not true anymore, it’s a much more sophisticated market. Advertisers aren’t (as) dumb (as they once were).
Maybe a decade ago? So the people who are now in senior positions at the agency and call all the shots are the ones making the major deals. Well then it would stand to reason that the biggest profit comes from deals that are structured like they were 10 years ago.
It would be interesting to know exactly what the definition is for a bot / fake account.
For instance, I have 5 accounts which automatically tweet out the latest posts from 5 of my websites. They are automated and probably technically bots, but that seems different than an account that is meant to give fake likes/retweets.
Nowhere Twitter claims that. For years they don’t report active users, but their own metric of monetizable active users. Elon just pretends he doesn’t know that.
Did anyone bother to check that this bug has nothing to do with Tesla before proudly announcing their EM hatred? It was a 3rd party app that asked users to hand over their email address and password.
This year? They are about to delivery 900k+ in 2021 (i.e. this year) and will be 1.5m in 2022. Toyota is declining at 20% annually and Tesla is growing at 50-70% annually.
Even if you go with the 2020 number their deliveries were 499647 so rounded to the nearest 1,000 it becomes 500k. Just shows the deep seated bias of anything Gizmodo.
The mobile key pairs via bluetooth in all Tesla vehicles built after 2018 so you don't need the server side to be working in order to unlock and/or drive.
This temporary outage merely meant you couldn't remotely turn on climate or remotely unlock the car. Guess what? No other cars can do that at the best of times.
Touch screen is a better interface because the UI can adapt to the context. I get that when you are driving you don’t want to have to look at the screen but honestly the benefits far outweigh the perceived cons.