268K of 5 top end Mercedes models were sold in 2025 (and like 1/3 of them were sold in Maybach or AMG version!). Where is Tesla S and X combined sales were only 32K in 2024 and 18K in 2025.
You wouldn't mistake Mercedes S-Class for E-class and E-class for C-class. Even BMW 7 vs. 5 vs. 3 look more distinct than Tesla S vs. 3 and X vs. Y. The Mercedes and BMW do the good job of market differentiation while in my view Tesla failed here, and thus cheaper 3 and Y cannibalized sales of S and X. Thus, paradoxically, given that Tesla started in luxury segment, Tesla hasn't recently been capturing that high margin of the luxury segment (which is doing very well overall - just look at those Maybach and AMG numbers)
> Is this once again because electric vehicles don’t get pulled into a mechanics shop every 10,000 miles for their oil to be changed and coincidentally inspected at the same time for mechanical defects that could be caught before they get pulled into a TUV annual inspection?
Last time I saw a TÜV report it was that electric cars show up with a) rather little service checks in between and b) they are too heavy for the axels and that causes wear compared to a regular car.
I think I told this story plenty of times now, but Wifi got so good, that even though we have network cables everywhere, basically nothing is hardwired in our household any more other than the TV and a few sonos speakers that were close enough to the outlets.
We have about ~100 devices connected to our home network according to my router and other than 6 devices, they are all on Wifi. I would never have expected that, but the reality is that it just got so much better over the years that I cannot be bothered with actually wiring things up any more.
That's in part because the outlets are not necessarily aligned well with the devices that would need to be connected, and then all kinds of other shit that is going on with home ethernet.
In 2020 I wrote about my USB-C adapter breaking ethernet [1]. It is still one of my most read blog posts and I get emails from it still, because apparently even in 2025 actually hooking up a USB-C ethernet adapter will cause quite a few switches to fail.
Long winded way of saying: our Ethernet does Gigabit because I never upgraded and has almost no devices left. Our Wifi does >4Gitabit because it was easy to swap and most devices are Wifi anyways.
Wireless is just fine for devices connected to the internet but as soon as you want to connect multiple devices to do a heavy load, backing up or those kinds of things, wireless really does still take a hit depending on access point density.
This has been my experience as well. I did have signal issues with cheap consumer router+AP combos, but after switching to Ubiquiti hardware coverage and signal have been great.
I'd like to mention that the cat5e cable present in your walls is rated to 2.5Gbps, and would often still work at 5 or 10Gbps over shorter runs in a home. 2.5gb equipment is very cheap nowadays. I got a couple of no-name switches under $40 each and they all work perfectly. Wired networks will always have better consistency and latency characteristics, too, if that matters to you.
Depends a lot on your house construction. I have a fancy Ubiquiti U7 Pro (on one floor, and a nanoHD on the other) but performance is crap all over my house because all the walls are reinforced concrete. In the hallway under the AP I get 1.6 Gbps on my phone but walk a few meters away into the living room and you're way under 200 Mbps because you passed 3 concrete walls.
Everyone comes home from a day out and you have several phones struggling to sync the 4K videos you shot meanwhile someone is streaming TV, open up my laptop to check the photos and now it wants to download updates...
I was able to option in Ethernet jacks where I lounge about in the living room, bedroom... - I have USB-C power bricks with built-in hubs so I stuck in cheap 2.5 GbE adapters there. Plug in to charge as normal and I automatically get 2 Gbps to the internet with no interference from anyone else, even works on iPhones with no setup.
I have three, only one is hard wired (the source). That's because I only have gigabit ethernet at the moment and the wireless backhaul is faster than the cable.
> Unless the EU member states actually impose capital controls, investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns.
You don't need to introduce capital controls to make it unattractive to invest in the US. There are plenty of options that the EU could pull that would make investments abroad very unpopular quickly.
By taking inspiration from the US. The US has PFIC for instance and many other reporting requirements that make it more attractive to invest in the US than abroad.
The EU can barely get the Mercosur FTA out the door. How can it even attempt to make such a drastic change that would make FDI in the EU less attractive than equally large and equally onerous China?
And that ignores the fact that states like Poland, Ireland, and Czechia would ferociously fight back at anything that threatens their FDI driven economies.
Even Ireland opposed the Anti-Coercion Instrument [0] four days ago, and everyone still remembers Belgium's unilateral opposition to seizing frozen Russian assets barely a month ago.
That Europe is incapable of doing anything bold is a different topic. You don't have to tell me how fundamentally screwed we are because of the consensus issue. But Europe could, without introducing capital controls, implement something. The US did, there is no fundamental reason why Europe could not either.
If something is hypothetically possible but practically impossible, then the mental exercise is a waste of time, and distracts from thinking about an actual solution.
For example, Trump could impeached and removed from office, but that isn't happening. So what's the solution?
I exclusively responded to a comment about capital controls, which are even less likely. I'm not particularly interested in a discussion about what politicans might or might not do.
I think if people were forced to invest their pensions in shitty EU stocks there would be push back. Also moving public sector pensions into EU stocks won't deliver the growth required, they are already unsustainable.
But there's a chicken and egg effect here in that the stock prices are low because of low investment and the stocks are bad because the stock prices are low.
For instance, Meta has basically doubled in price from a few years back but their business is basically identical. Doesn't seem very efficient to me, at least.
I doubt that. Investment firms exist to find an edge. Any mispricing would be eventually exploited because the incentive to do so is so huge. That's what value investing is.
> will GitHub face the same slop-destiny as mainstream social media
At the very least because it's now human + coding agent, separating out the human input from the machine output in pull requests becomes necessary in my book. There are dramatic differences in prompting styles that can have completely different qualities of output and it's much easier to tell it apart from the prompts than from the outputs given that it's basically an amplification problem.
> separating out the human [input] from the machine
I was thinking more generally and thus put the noun input in parenthesis in the quote. With agents and slop, the value for humans being there may quickly spiral down. There are also a lot of bad stuff already there, including malware and such.
If you have your own infrastructure instead of a mega-platform, you can control these things more easily.
The value in open source code was never the code. It was the trust that was created around it that it becomes a place for useful innovation, for trust, for vetting, for keeping dependencies low.
I can build my own curl in a week, but the value that curl gives me is that it's a multi decade old library, by a person that has dedicated his live to keeping the project there, keeping a quality bar etc.
The value of curl is not curl, it's the human behind it.
The human behind it, the community using it critically, and the years of battle hardening.
The great open source tools out there have handled, worked around, or influenced away many many bugs and edge cases out in the real world, many of which you wont think of when initially designing your own. The silent increase in stability and productivity resulting from this kind of thing is as vast as it is hard to see/measure. It feels like the quote about expertise saying someone "has forgotten more than I'll ever know about [subject]".
Thank you to everyone powering our collective work.
At this point I'm fully down the path of the agent just maintaining his own tools. I have a browser skill that continues to evolve as I use it. Beats every alternative I have tried so far.
Same. Claude Opus 4.5 one-shots the basics of chrome debug protocol, and then you can go from there.
Plus, now it is personal software... just keep asking it to improve the skill based on you usage. Bake in domain knowledge or business logic or whatever you want.
I'm using this for e2e testing and debugging Obsidian plugins and it is starting to understand Obsidian inside and out.
https://relay.md is a company I'm working on for shared knowledge management/ AI context for teams, and the Obsidian plugin is what i am driving with my live-debug and obsidian-e2e skills.
I can try to write it up (I am a bit behind this week though...), but I basically opened claude code and said "write a new skill that uses the chrome debug protocol to drive end to end tests in Obsidian" and then whenever it had problems I said "fix the skill to look up the element at the x,y coordinate before clicking" or whatever.
Skills are just markdown files, sometimes accompanied by scripts, so they work really naturally with Obsidian.
Hey FWIW Relay is AWESOME!!
The granular sharing of a given dir within a vault (vs the whole thing) finally solves the split-brain problem of personal (private) vault on my own hardware vs mandated use of a company laptop... it's fast, intuitive, and SOLVES this long-time thorn in my side. Thanks for creating it, high five, hope it leads to massive success for you! :)
Writing your own skill is actually a lot better for context efficiency.
Your skill will be tuned to your use case over time, so if there's something that you do a lot you can hide most of the back-and-forth behind the python script / cli tool.
You can even improve the skill by saying "I want to be more token efficient, please review our chat logs for usage of our skill and factor out common operations into new functions".
If anything context waste/rot comes from documentation of features that other people need but you don't. The skill should be a sharp knife, not a multi-tool.
I find it so incredible disappointing that discrimination by citizenship or country of birth is not just alive, but getting worse. I’m afraid if the US is starting with this, it won’t take long for others to catch up.
If the world learns anything from the celebration of stupidity that has become the US, I very much hope it’s “whatever they’re doing, we absolutely should not.”
A lot of countries already do this. You cannot get visas to most developed countries if you are likely to become a "public charge". In general, its a lot easier to get a visa if you are from a rich and stable country (or are rich yourself), and if you look at where countries allow visa free travel to citizens of another country the countries on this list are unlikely to qualify!
In that case, why not have some measurement of what makes a person likely to be a public charge that applies to every country, rather than a blanket ban on everyone from targeted countries?
They already literally review on a case by case basis regardless of country of origin. Providing evidence of financial support is a big part of visa and green card applications.
There are lots of possible reasons. Some good, some bad.
A possible good reason might be that there is a higher level of fraud (e.g. faked financial statements), or a higher level of public charge in applications from some countries - especially if it is a pause while procedures are changed. On the other hand the true motive might be something else.
That said, I have no idea why its this particular list of countries. Why Thailand or Jamaica or Nepal?
H1B processing is hopelessly backed up for the 60-70 thousand visas we give out annually. We would have to massively cut immigration inflow, from the 1-3 million annually we have today, to make those granular determinations feasible.
I don't think individualized determination are even possible. Unless you take very few people from each country, they'll inevitably find each other and form communities. And the kinds of communities they form will be driven by their cultures. The question isn't "would this one Bangladeshi be a good immigrant." It is "when 100,000 Bangladeshis inevitably form a cultural enclave in some city, will that be better or worse than what was there before?"
That is not the same as this. If you're a multi-PhD holder from Iran who's a world-famous scientist, you can get into e.g. the UK. This would forbid them, purely based on country of origin.
The article says it is a temporary pause. other sources seem to confirm this:
"Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassesses immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits,"
The U.S. already does this. Providing evidence of financial support is a big part of visa and green card applications. If this is a big problem, it's because the U.S. is approving applications without sufficiently reviewing that evidence (but more likely, it's a bogus excuse).
You need to learn your history because one of the first immigration laws this country passed was exclusively banning Chinese people for nearly an entire human lifespan.
Good. I like having distinct nation states with different cultures and ethnicity instead of bland homogenized globalized grayness - the thing that could be seen in every mall in a city that has international airport. From Jakarta trough Kenya, Berlin and NY - it is all the same. There should be breaks on the whole immigration and asylum things.
While I don't agree with the haphazard and seemingly random policy changes coming from the US lately -- this is a bad take.
You do realize that discrimination by citizenship is conducted by basically every government on earth in the context of visas and tourism and residency?
In fact, what made the US so bizarre up until about 1914 was that they were the only major country that effectively had open borders. There was no welfare state to take advantage of back then, and you literally did have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
This only started to shift after the US began constructing its welfare state (welfare state expansion correlates with increasingly closed immigration policy, hence where we find ourselves today).
Literally every country worldwide does this. The question is simply to what extent and to what countries. The whole difference between being a native an an alien is the rights you get. It's not a human right to be able to freely go into any country you please.
> The whole difference between being a native an an alien is the rights you get. It's not a human right to be able to freely go into any country you please.
The first step for genocide is to dehumanize people.
They're not humans, they're aliens. Therefore it's fine if we treat them as filth and throw them away (or gas them).
It's interesting you got downvoted, perhaps for the sentence
> The whole difference between being a native an an alien is the rights you get.
A knee jerk and uncharitable reading might make this look bad, but it does require an uncharitable reading. It is clear what you mean.
However, the claim
> It's not a human right to be able to freely go into any country you please.
is not false. The idea that open borders are a good thing is a very odd idea. It seems to grow out of a hyperindividualistic and global capitalist/consumerist culture and mindset that doesn't recognize the reality of societies and cultures. Either that, or it is a rationalization of one's own very domestic and particular choices, for example. In any case, uncontrolled migration is well-understood (and rather obviously!) as something damaging to any society and any culture. In hyperindividualistic countries, this is perhaps less appreciated, because there isn't really an ethnos or cohesive culture or society. In the US, for example, corporate consumerism dominates what passes as "culture" (certainly pop culture), and the culture's liberal individualism is hostile to the formation and persistence of a robust common good as well as a recognition of what constitutes an authentic common good. It is reduced mostly to economic factors, hence globalist capitalism. So, in the extreme, if there are no societies, only atoms and the void, then who cares how to atoms go?
The other problem is that public discourse operates almost entirely within the confines of the false dichotomy of jingoist nationalism on the one hand and hyperindividualist globalism on the other (with the respective variants, like the socialist). There is little recognition of so-called postliberal positions, at least some of which draw on the robust traditional understanding of the common good and the human person, one that both jingoist nationalism and hyperindividualist globalism contradict. When postliberalism is mentioned, it is often smeared with false characterization or falsely lumped in with nihilistic positions like the Yarvin variety...which is not traditional!
Given the ongoing collapse of the liberal order - a process that will take time - these postliberal positions will need to be examined carefully if we are to avoid the hideous options dominating the public square today.
Pardon me if I’m misreading it but this sounds like disinformation. No examples in your example, a lot of abstract reasoning unmoored from facts.
>uncontrolled migration is well-understood (and rather obviously!) as something damaging to any society and any culture.
The US was built on unrestricted immigration for a long time. Was that destructive? I guess so if you count native Americans but not to the nation of USA.
Capitalism wants closed borders to labor and open borders to capital. Thats how they can squeeze labor costs while maximizing profits. The US is highly individualistic but wants closed borders so how does your reasoning align with the news?
That's the wrong way of looking at it. We have evidence that national cultures affect prosperity, and that, at scale, immigrants bring their cultures with them: https://www.rorotoko.com/11/20230913-jones-garett-on-book-cu... ("For the last twenty years I’ve been asking the Adam Smith question: Why are some nations so much more productive than others? I’d found some new answers in my own research, summed up in my earlier book Hive Mind. But at the same time, I kept reading findings by a separate group of researchers, especially three excellent professors at Brown University: David Weil, Louis Putterman, and Oded Galor. Their work on the 'Deep Roots' of economic prosperity suggested that many of the important economic differences across countries began centuries, even millennia ago.").
The U.S. takes in millions of immigrants a year. At that scale, it's not a question of the individual merits of a single immigrant from a country. It's about the merits of the community that will be formed when 100,000 immigrants from that country come to the U.S. and settle in the same place and socialize their children into their culture. And the evidence we have is that, when that happens, they'll bring with them a lot of characteristics of their origin countries.
Am I wrong? You acknowledge that food preferences are cultural, right? Wouldn’t it be weird if culture just affected the kinds of food people like and how they dress, but not the kinds of civic institutions they form?
Not at all! I think it’s the opposite! That population was small and scattered. They had limited capacity to create cultural enclaves, develop ethnic social identity, etc. They ended up absorbing much more culturally from Americans and had little cultural and social impact on the communities where they moved.
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