Eric Robertson

degening my life away

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I took delivery of a beautiful new shiny HW4 Tesla Model X today, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for 5 years. Basically... I'm amazed - it drives really, really well, smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3 (my previous car) and eons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla ~9 years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. (note this is v13, my car hasn't been offered the latest v14 yet)

On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high tech Maglev train pod - the car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the (incredible) sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes, it gracefully went around construction and temporarily in-lane stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides, it gracefully gave way to the car that went out of order in the 4-way stop sign, it found a way to squeeze into a bumper to bumper traffic to make its turn, it overtook the bus that was loading passengers but still stopped for the stop sign that was blocked by the bus, and at the end of the route it circled around a parking lot, found a spot and... parked. Basically a flawless drive.

For context, I'm used to going out for a brief test drive around the neighborhood to return with 20 clips of things that could be improved. It's new for me to do just that and exactly like I used to, but come back with nothing. Perfect drive, no notes. I expect there's still more work for the team in the long march of 9s, but it's just so cool to see that we're beyond finding issues on any individual ~1 hour drive around the neighborhood, you actually have to go to the fleet and mine them. Back then, I processed the incredible promise of vehicle autonomy at scale (in the fully scaleable, vision only, end-to-end Tesla way) only intellectually, but now it is possible to feel it intuitively too if you just go out for a drive. Wait, of course surround video stream at 60Hz processed by a fully dedicated "driving brain" neural net will work, and it will be so much better and safer than a human driver. Did anyone else think otherwise?

I also watched @aelluswamy 's new ICCV25 talk last week (https://t.co/RdaM23kvez) that hints at some of the recent under the hood technical components driving this progress. Sensor streams (videos, maps, kinematics, audio, ...) over long contexts (e.g. ~30 seconds) go into a big neural net, steering/acceleration comes out, optionally with visualization auxiliary data. This is the dream of the complete Software 1.0 -> Software 2.0 re-write that scales fully with data streaming from millions of cars in the fleet and the compute capacity of your chip, not some engineer's clever new DoubleParkedCarHandler C++ abstraction with undefined test-time characteristics of memory and runtime. There's a lot more hints in the video on where things are going with the emerging "robotics+AI at scale stack". World reconstructors, world simulators "dreaming" dynamics, RL, all of these components general, foundational, neural net based, how the car is really just one kind of robot... are people getting this yet?

Huge congrats to the team - you're building magic objects of the future, you rock! And I love my car <3.

[Tesla @Tesla]

Livestream starts at 3pm CT https://t.co/9Yr2g0z0Fa

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@stoolpresidente Go to supremo in midvale, utah. Got that nice crisp to them. Not too many other places around that are good tbh. They never accept tips and the owners are awesome

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@OzzyOsbourne Rest is peace, Prince of Darkness 🤴

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

It's pretty cool to see the company you work for do something truly impressive. Robotaxi is better than most even people could even imagine too

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

Feeling this lately

[KEEM 🍿 @KEEMSTAR]

Will you buy Hogwarts Legacy?

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@Trainwreckstv Bro these fucking parlays are some true degen shit lmfao

[MrBeast @MrBeast]

Twitter - Rich people should help others with their money

Me - Okay, I’ll use my money to help people and I promise to give away all my money before I die. Every single penny.

Twitter - MrBeast bad

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@andymilonakis These are the vibes I needed today

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@timthetatman Even got the dented head 💀

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@WatchGamesTV About 12k more to finish got about 3 1/2 semesters left

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@mrwobblesmusic

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@milkheavens Probs has a gf xD

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@TenDeep_ @JakeSucky Praise be the pillow connoisseur for calling out this lad with true detective work

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@StakeUsa 500001

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@jzux Nice try fbi

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@WatchGamesTV Ibby just about had an aneurysm seeing this tweet and then realized he got memed

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@fuckedupfoods I like how she kept teabaggin the doritos bag.

[Eric Robertson @all_iswells]

@EsfandTV