Richard Cowin

forever in search of context, focus, and knowledge

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

My favorite @theallinpod I have listened too so far: https://t.co/ICxRCCdt9x. Not sure if it is the disagreements, but it is worth a listen.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

@jessfraz Or, perhaps: Never trust someone that is too diciplined

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

I just checked again and the @tesla FSD miles driven will still hit 10 billion a few seconds before 11am (cdt) on Sunday.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

I just checked again and the @tesla FSD miles driven will still hit 10 billion a few seconds before 11am (cdt) on Sunday.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

@XFreeze Looks like it will hit 10 billion this Sunday

[SETI Park @seti_park]

THE CYBERCAB IS THE FIRST TESLA DESIGNED TO NEVER SEE A PAINT SHOP

Cybertruck got there with stainless steel that needs no coating. Cybercab gets there differently: the body is polyurethane, and the gold color is injected into the panel during molding.

Lars Moravy confirmed it on Ride the Lightning earlier this year. The body panels are polyurethane, not steel. Color goes in during molding, not after. The panels come out of the tool already gold, and they stay that way.

Strip out the paint shop and a lot of factory floor goes with it: orange peel, paint bleed, masking, drying. Tesla saves a building and a process. But there’s a downstream consequence almost nobody is talking about.

You cannot put a normal taillight on a car like this.

A traditional taillight is a post-process operation. You mold the panel, paint it, then cut a hole and seal a red lens into the cutout. Wire it from behind. Done. This is how every car has been built for decades.

Now try that with a single-shot polyurethane panel that emerged already colored. The cut reintroduces the exact problem in-mold coloring was designed to eliminate: edge finishing, post-process surface work, color mismatch at the cut line. The whole point of removing the paint shop was to skip these steps. A conventional taillight puts them right back.

And then the visual problem. A red lens dropped into a gold panel reads as a foreign object glued onto the body. Most cars look like this and consumers accept it because every car looks like this. But Tesla, under Franz von Holzhausen since 2008, has consistently resisted that reading. The Cybercab’s gold surface is meant to be one continuous surface. A red lens island would break it.

Two constraints, from the factory floor and from the design studio, point at the same requirement: the lighting cannot break the panel.

So Tesla redesigned the rear lamp from scratch.

WO2026076585A1, filed October 9, 2024, one calendar day before the Cybercab’s public unveiling, describes the answer. The light source sits inside the vehicle body. Its output goes to a cover lens that is positioned inside a recess, shielded from view by the body panel’s own geometry. A reflective region on the inside face of the recess redirects the light outward through a narrow slit between panels.

What you see when the brake light is on is not the lens. It is the reflective region, glowing through the slit. The lens is never visible from outside. The body panel stays continuous.

Look at the production photographs. Lights off: continuous gold surface, two thin black shut-lines, no taillight visible anywhere. Lights on: red light emerges from inside the slits.

The taillight was always there. It just isn’t where you’ve been trained to look for one.

The patent is a public record of what happens when manufacturing and design are decided by the same people, at the same time, for the same vehicle.

Five names on the cover page. Four engineers and one designer. The designer is Franz.

This isn’t unusual by Tesla’s pattern; Franz appears on utility patents across the company’s product portfolio. What is specific to this filing is that the problem being solved spans manufacturing, design language, and optical engineering simultaneously. You don’t get to that geometry by handing the lighting off to a tier-one supplier and approving their module. You get there by deleting the paint shop, deciding the body language, and engineering the optics in the same room.

Cybercab’s hidden taillight is what that room produces.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

@elonmusk Or, simply the GOAT.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

@elonmusk @lowkeydisaster The obvious answer to "How did you get that bloody nose this morning?"

[Derek Sivers @sivers]

One man believed God was on his side. He often lost his temper, hurt people, and did more harm than good. But he believed that what matters is what’s in his heart, since God will forgive his actions and see his good intentions.

Another man was full of doubt but...

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

HOLY SHIT WHAT

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

I just got back from Project Hail Mary. So glad Ryan Gosling executed on this!
It was the only movie that I went to the theater for this decade.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

Our bodies are sure seem to like stress.

[Stewart Brand @stewartbrand]

Let’s hear it for hormesis.

(It probably applies to nuclear radiation as well.)

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

I am starting on them this weekend!

[David Sinclair @davidasinclair]

Will be getting a shingles shot ASAP

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Oh and it works in all AI4-equipped cars, so your car can do office work for you when not driving.

We’re also deploying millions of dedicated Digital Optimus units in the field at Superchargers where we have ~7 gigawatts of available power.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint xAI-Tesla project, coming as part of Tesla’s investment agreement with xAI.

Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of real-time computer screen video and keyboard/mouse actions. Grok is like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software.

You can think of it as Digital Optimus AI being System 1 (instinctive part of the mind) and Grok being System 2. (thinking part of the mind).

This will run very competitively on the super low cost Tesla AI4 ($650) paired with relatively frugal use of the much more expensive xAI Nvidia hardware. And it will be the only real-time smart AI system. This is a big deal.

In principle, it is capable of emulating the function of entire companies. That is why the program is called MACROHARD, a funny reference to Microsoft.

No other company can yet do this.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

This short clip of some of the Tesla FSD training is pretty crazy: https://t.co/CGnwaa6WSW

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Well said

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

@paulg I wonder if the skill of asking good questions should be emphasized much more in our education systems. I imagine it could impact all aspects.

[Richard Cowin @RichardCowin]

@grok Can you reach escape velocity on the moon with rail guns? If so, can you make the rail gun long enough to put undo stress on a sattellite payload when compared to similar stress on the payload if it was in a rocket being shot from earth?