Fred Lambert (Electrek founder) was pro-tesla and was using his site to get a huge number of referral credits. Then Tesla changed the rules on that referral program.
That's what triggered the beef. Fred sold all shares, took down all the pro-tesla articles, and posts nearly exclusively only negative tesla articles since.
Seems both parties were/are within legal rights, but it is clearly bias.
Literally the only people who can think that this dude is anywhere remotely objective is if you are already a Tesla hater; he posts qualifications in every title and always adjusts the wording and tone to be negative. Every Electrek's take on an article is him describing how he warned everyone about the Elon/Tesla heel turn as you laid it out. It screams confirmation bias but since he isn't a journalist there's no code of ethics he's bound to follow.
I'm bullish on EV's at large. They're far nicer to ride in. So I find his coverage informative. I've never owned a Tesla but I've ridden in hundreds and must admit (other than the original Roadster) I've been thoroughly "whelmed" by their mediocrity.
However, short of going to places like Reddit's "Tesla Lounge" or "Cyber Truck Owners Forum" I have yet to see many (any?) places that cover Tesla/Elon positively. Not because "every website is biased against him" but simply because they're reporting on events that've happened
Nicer to ride in in what sense? I find single-pedal to be nauseating because many drivers can’t control their foot raise well enough for smooth or gentle braking, and the suspension feels chunky as hell, most likely due to how heavy the car is. But maybe that’s just Teslas. Their ride is just categorically worse than most ICE vehicles.
Makes it even more impressive that Model Y is the best selling car worldwide. If you sell enough, I guess by definition you achieve mediocrity. You eventually become the average simply numerically.
Best selling car worldwide and not a super affordable one at that, but if you listen to everyone on the internet who "doesn't own a Tesla but has ridden in hundreds", they'll you very authoritatively they're mediocre cars.
Yeah. Obviously we should ask the people who own them for their opinion. Obviously they'll gleefully deride their not super affordable purchases :)
Speaking of not super affordable. When's that "affordable Tesla" coming. Or did Elmo turn on the 'full self driving' and it drove itself into a ditch along the way?
Isn't the whole idea of freedom of the press to act as a check to governmental power? With state-run media you tend to get lots of propaganda and little actual news.
Personally, I support a ban on public (taxpayer) funding of journalism. Keep it independent.
> With state-run media you tend to get lots of propaganda and little actual news
I think the BBC are a good counter to that argument. No, they’re not flawless but over the decades they’ve delivered plenty of journalism that’s held government to account.
The current government of the USA could not create a similar vehicle. Washington State would hand it off to some donor (like previously Inslee appointed a donor to ESD which then lost a billion dollars to scammers when covid hit) and the federal government, uh, goes without saying?
The BBC just like any other news organization is not neutral. It sometimes leans left and it sometimes lean right. The problem is that this "leaning" is never disclosed.
If a newspaper is comfortably right-wing/left-wing and so on, I don't care about their biases because at least you know that if you read it, you are going to get a "version" of a story that fits the overall narrative of the outlet.
When it comes down to publicly funded news outlet though, their neutrality is disputable and on top of that you end up paying through your taxes for "news" that have either been downplayed or exaggerated depending on who is reporting on it.
So as a tax payer, what is there to gain from being manipulated (at best) or lied to (at worst) by an organization who is supposed to be neutral but who isn't?
I wish it wasn't the case but there has been too many stories in the past in the mainstream media that turned out to be either misrepresented or made up and there was rarely any retraction/apologies on the subject.
And just in case you think that only right wingers have problem with the BBC (for example), the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
I also have personal experience that they're far from infallible, a friend lied to them about our farcical "Potato powered" computer† and for a while their news story about this was actually available as if it was real news not a joke.
But they're clearly trying and "not good enough" doesn't seem like an adequate justification for giving up and saying we'll just go without democracy then. If this is the best we have then this will have to do.
† The worst part is that this is kinda, sorta at the edge of plausible, which is why I thought from the outset that it's not a good joke. We didn't build such a thing, but maybe someone could have or even has.
> the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right
> of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
It's impossible for any media outlet to be considered truly neutral. Reporting that doesn't align with your own (biased) partisan viewpoint is, to you, biased.
It's often said that when both sides accuse a media outlet of being biased towards the other side, they're probably being pretty objective. It shows they're reporting accurately rather than pandering to one side over the other.
By contrast, nobody is accusing the Daily Mail of left-wing bias, nor The Guardian of being right-wing.
Just government power? Corporate media is no less afflicted by this problem. Small-time journalism is just as capable of being tendentious. Advertising also shapes coverage, as subscriptions and reader purchases never cover operating expenses.
In any case, this is not a problem to be solved. I do think the media should stop concealing or misrepresenting their political leanings. They will always be there. Everyone has a POV. You might as well openly advertise what that POV is. Then it is up to readers and viewers to draw from multiple POVs (which they might not do, but that's just life).
This position is suitable, for the 1990s. Even then, the BBC showed that public journalism != propaganda.
In fact, the evidence is that if you build institutions, you can actually have very effective public options.
However, in the current era, news is simply being outcompeted for revenue. Even the NYT is dependent on games for relevance.
And the attack vectors to mould and muzzle public understanding have changed. Instead of a steady drip of controlled information, it is private production of overwhelming amounts of content.
Most good people are fighting yesterdays war, with yesterdays weapons, tactics and ideas when it comes to speech.
The real reporting now comes from individual creators often with a gopro or cellphone camera and a youtube/tiktok channel.
It's cheap to make, doesn't require state/institutional funding. It's also quite hard to buyout all the creators and thus at least slightly resilient against the usual attack vectors.
The answer is never to have government pay, obviously it then becomes biased as you point it.
If it doesn't justify a human salary then the right answer is usually to eliminate the need for a full salary with tech. Current LLM models do a sufficiently good job of meeting summarization and will only get better. Those could be published and even reviewed by human influencers for newsworthy bits.
Definitely one of the best options. I think the biggest obstacle here is actually getting that information public so it can be analyzed and summarized. Local government meetings often have no recording to analyze, and in the cases where it is most important, there is often incentive to keep it private from the public. Additionally, government moves extremely slow, with local government being one of the worst offenders. Mandatory public recordings of government functions would probably be the biggest step towards solving this issue.
We could start health insurance companies that monitor everyone's gait and how often they exercise vs eat fast food to adjust prices. Or credit monitoring companies that watch how often you attend the casino vs. work. Or boyfriend monitoring to check for cheaters.
It's doubtful that there is currently a backdoor or anything that would fail an audit.
The problem is the software updates. Whoever controls those keys has an entire domestic fleet a single firmware update away. Probably won't even be DJI, but some either state or non-state hacker that happens to acquire the update keys.
Ah yes I'm sure it has nothing to do with the drones running closed proprietary software via OTA updates, with encrypted data connections back to China, while being outfitted with 8k cameras, gps, lidar, etc.
Much like the TikTok ban this seems like something that could be handled through actually regulating what tech companies are allowed to do, rather than just picking on specific products and saying ‘stop that, it’s making us nervous’.
Federal laws about data collection and retention, export, and algorithmic usage… as well as laws about software update channels for hardware devices, eg requiring that it be possible to replace firmware yourself… all sorts of regulations could be put in place that leave the software and hardware markets open, by making it clear where the boundaries are. If DJI or TikTok are doing something bad, prosecute and fine them and enjoin them from doing it again… but make it clear what specific behavior you have a problem with.
We're too busy taking car companies' lines that it's reasonable they don't want people going to a local mechanic because "The data your car collected on you might get hacked and sent to China!" rather than asking "What are cars doing collecting this data, if it's such a risk?"
Your tinfoil hat narrative doesn't really jive with DJI asking for audit and review more than a year ago, with no one in the federal government actually stepping up before just outright banning things they either don't want or don't understand.
The others are a rounding error in comparison to renewable energy. Yes, they've added a considerable amount of coal electricity generation capacity but not very much coal electricity generation production. It's production that emits CO2, not capacity. Coal plants that sit around not burning coal are relatively harmless.
You shouldn't trust the messengers of "the science", however the science speaks for it's self.
I got really into reading about nutritional science a few years ago and there's a surprising amount of stuff which people don't think is bad for them which probably is. Eating 3 meals a day with snacking between meals is probably a significant contributor to diabetes and CVD, for example. Yet a lot of people believe it's unhealthy or strange to only eat once a day.
Similarly fruit drinks are bad when a lot of people think they are good, and we probably over empathise problems with "red meat" these days – the main risks with there are more specifically with processed red meats like sausages and also how the meat is cooked.
If people care about their health they should be curious enough to ask questions and read scientific papers themselves.
Science isn't always "science". If it's not clear by now it never will be that there is a massive amount of fraud in the "scientific" community as a whole.
In my experience, LLMs perform significantly better on readable maintainable code.
It's what they were trained on after-all.
However what they produce is often highly readable but not very maintainable due to the verbosity and obvious comments. This seems to pollute codebases over time and you see AI coding efficiency slowly decline.
Think of the children, LLMs are not safe for kids, use our wrapper instead!
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