Lewis Withrow (LB) @LewisWithrow5

When AI Leaves the Screen Analysts ask whether Tesla is a car company, an AI company, or a robotics company. That question misses the point. The Information Age rewarded those who mastered bits. The next era will reward those who embody intelligence in atoms. For decades, software operated on information. Now AI operates through matter. Tesla doesn't just build electric vehicles. It builds machines that embody intelligence. Optimus extends that same intelligence into humanoid form. This intelligence isn't trapped on a screen or in a server. It lives inside physical machines. That's a profound shift, and as an FSD user I feel it constantly. What amazes me isn't that the car follows rules. It's that it finds solutions I never would have predicted. It encounters situations it's never seen before and responds in ways that feelreasoned, not programmed. Intelligence has become embodied. Plenty of companies are brilliant at making bits. Others are brilliant at shaping atoms into products. Tesla is rare because it relentlessly improves both, and each improves the other. Better AI builds better machines. Better machines generate the real-world experience that trains better AI. It's a flywheel where intelligence sharpens matter, and matter sharpens intelligence. Others are chasing pieces of this. But today I know of no company demonstrating embodied AI across vehicles, humanoid robots, energy, and manufacturing at anything close to Tesla's scale. This is uncharted valuation territory. Tesla isn't just building machines. It's teaching intelligence to operate in the physical world.

I had completely forgotten about that. The car was an AMC Matador coupe. The flight components (wings, tail, and pusher propeller) were derived largely from a Cessna Skymaster. The conversion was designed by Advanced Vehicle Engineers (AVE), which hoped to market it as a practical "roadable aircraft." For the movie: The scenes of the car driving were filmed with a modified Matador. The actual flight sequences used a real, flyable Mizar conversion piloted by a professional test pilot. The famous 360-degree corkscrew jump over the river was not done by the flying car. It was performed by a standard AMC Matador using a stunt ramp. The jump was calculated with computer modeling—quite innovative for the early 1970s—and completed in a single take. Unfortunately, the Mizar itself had a tragic history. In 1973, during a test flight, a structural failure caused the wing attachment to separate from the car. The prototype crashed, killing AVE founder Henry Smolinski and the company's vice president. After that accident, the project was abandoned.

@LaRueJohnC Our education system is not geared towards this better approach to figuring out the world.

“A good question is worth a million good answers.• For most of history, answers were scarce and expensive, so we built our schools and our status around them. AI makes answers abundant and nearly free, shifting both the value, and the burden, to the question. This isn't a new insight, just a newly urgent one. Kettering observed, "A problem well stated is a problem half solved." E.E. Cummings expressed it more beautifully: "Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question." When answers were scarce, a question was a tool for getting one. Now that answers are everywhere, the question becomes the act of judgment itself. A machine can hand you a thousand fluent answers, but none of them will tell you that you asked the wrong question. So the skill worth building now is not memorizing answers. It is learning to ask better questions: to notice hidden assumptions, to sit with a problem long enough to frame it honestly, and to resist the easy answer a fluent system is always glad to supply. •Kevin Kelly The technologies change. Human judgment moves to where the new scarcity is.

The fact that FSD v14x was distilled to run on HW/3 bodes well for the lifespan of AI4 Hardware.

Waymo technology is both the wrong approach to scale and way behind in capability. Waymo fails all together when the grid goes down or they lose their internet connection. Waymo currently leads in rides given, but that won't last for long. Tesla has true in vehicle autonomy. Write me again in six months.

@carrymonkey @elonmusk @SawyerMerritt Yes, Hyundai could take up the slack that VW is suffering now and Toyota will soon. Boardrooms seem insulated. It takes too long for them to feel the heat.

@TechOperator Yep, lot of service stations will be repurposed.

@KarenV35692848 My guess.

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was a Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer whose ideas became part of everyday life. His central contribution was alternating current (AC). While Thomas Edison championed direct current, Tesla developed the AC induction motor and the polyphase system that made it practical to generate and transmit electricity over long distances. Partnering with George Westinghouse, the success of Tesla's AC system helped settle the so-called "War of the Currents" in favor of alternating current, which became the backbone of the world's power grids. His AC system powered the pioneering Niagara Falls hydroelectric project in 1895, demonstrating that electricity could be generated centrally and transmitted efficiently over long distances. Along the way, he pioneered work in radio, wireless transmission, remote control, X-rays, and rotating magnetic fields. The Tesla coil still bears his name, as does the SI unit of magnetic flux density. His business life, however, was a series of missed fortunes. He famously tore up a lucrative royalty agreement with Westinghouse to help save the struggling company, forfeiting what could have made him one of the richest men alive. His grand ambition, the wireless transmission of power around the globe, led to Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island, funded in part by J. P. Morgan. As the project's commercial value became increasingly uncertain, and after Marconi's wireless successes drew attention away from Tesla's work, Morgan withdrew his support and the project collapsed. Tesla was a visionary but a poor businessman, more interested in the idea than the profit. His end was quietly tragic. The man who had lit up cities died alone and largely forgotten on January 7, 1943, in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, deep in debt and known in his final years mostly for feeding the pigeons he had grown devoted to. Only after his death did the world fully recognize the breadth of his contributions. In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed key Tesla radio patents over Marconi's, and today nearly every electrical outlet on Earth delivers power through principles Tesla helped pioneer. The international unit of magnetic flux density bears a fitting reminder of his legacy: the tesla.

@KarenV35692848 Yes, the one person in the world accomplishing more than anybody else is pilloried by the vulgar media. He should be celebrated and held up as an example to youngsters everywhere.

When the Light Bulb Arrived, Not Everyone Welcomed It. Gas and oil lighting interests fought to protect their businesses. Newspapers filled with stories of electrical fires and deadly shocks, stoking fears about bringing electricity into the home. We've heard this story before. When Thomas Edison demonstrated a practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, many people were impressed. Others were uneasy. As electric lighting spread through American and European cities in the 1880s, objections came from several directions. Some were economic. Gas companies had spent decades building pipelines, street lamps, and businesses around gaslight. Manufacturers of candles, kerosene, and oil lamps faced an uncertain future. Thousands of workers wondered whether electricity would make their skills obsolete. Others questioned its safety. Electricity was invisible and poorly understood. Early wiring could be unreliable, and electrical fires did occur. Newspapers eagerly reported accidents, reinforcing the belief that bringing electricity into the home invited unnecessary danger. Many people simply preferred what they knew. Gaslight cast a warm, familiar glow. Early electric bulbs struck some observers as harsh, glaring, and unnatural. Hotels, restaurants, and theaters often continued using gas because patrons found it more comfortable. Cost slowed adoption as well. Wiring buildings and installing fixtures required a substantial investment. For many homes and businesses, existing gas lamps seemed good enough. The debate intensified during the War of the Currents. Thomas Edison promoted direct current while George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla championed alternating current. Public campaigns emphasizing the dangers of AC deepened public anxiety and blurred the distinction between competing electrical systems and electricity itself. In time, the objections faded. Electric light proved cleaner than oil, safer than open flames, brighter than gas, and increasingly affordable. The electrical grid expanded, standards improved, and what had once seemed unsettling became ordinary. The light bulb did more than illuminate homes. It revealed a recurring pattern in the history of technology. New ideas are often met first with skepticism, then with warnings about safety, disruption, and lost livelihoods. As they mature, they quietly become part of everyday life until it is difficult to imagine the world without them. Mechanized farming, the automobile, the ATM, the personal computer, the internet, and now AI have each traveled some version of that same path. The technologies change. Human nature may not.

@LaRueJohnC Thank you, John.

@EvEvangelist I think the most poignant thing is that he died alone, poor, and unrecognized for his contributions to civilization.

Since I am unable to reply to Roger Thornhill@TeslaPsych directly, I post Grok's info here: The point about birthplace isn't wrong in a strict territorial sense today, but nationality/ethnicity in that era (and for Tesla) was more about ancestry, language, religion, and self-identification than the modern borders of the country where he happened to be born. The region was multi-ethnic, and the "Croatian" label often gets applied anachronistically.In short: Tesla was ethnically Serbian, born in territory now Croatia (then Austrian Empire), and later American. The most accurate short description is Serbian-American. The debate persists because of Balkan history and national pride, but the evidence leans toward Serbian ethnicity with Croatian geographic ties.No, calling Nikola Tesla simply "Croatian" is an oversimplification that misses key historical and ethnic distinctions. Your analogy about religion vs. nationality (and the US/Russian Orthodox example) is reasonable in principle, but it doesn't fully capture Tesla's situation due to 19th-century Balkan complexities around ethnicity, birthplace, citizenship, and identity.en.wikipedia.orgBirthplace and citizenship Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the village of Smiljan (near Gospić), in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire (later Austria-Hungary). This territory is in present-day Croatia.en.wikipedia.org He was an Austrian citizen by birth and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1891. He lived most of his adult life in the United States.en.wikipedia.orgBirth in modern Croatia's territory does not automatically make him "Croatian" in the ethnic or national sense at the time, as the region wasn't administered as part of civilian Croatia but as a directly controlled Habsburg military zone.Ethnicity and family background Tesla came from an ethnic Serb family. His father, Milutin Tesla, was a Serbian Orthodox priest, and his mother, Đuka Mandić, came from a similar background. The family belonged to the Serbian Orthodox community in the Lika region.en.wikipedia.org The Tesla and Mandić families had roots tracing back to western Serbia areas. This ethnic Serbian identity was central in the Orthodox communities of the Military Frontier, which had many Serb settlers brought in by the Habsburgs for border defense.en.wikipedia.orgSerbian Orthodox here refers to both religion and ethnic/cultural identity (common in the Balkans, where faith and ethnicity are tightly linked). Converting to it didn't "make" someone Serbian in a vacuum, but Tesla was born into an established ethnic Serb Orthodox family, not a convert.Tesla's own viewTesla himself expressed pride in both sides. In a 1936 reply, he said he was "equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland." This reflects the nuance: ethnic Serbian heritage + birthplace/early life in what is now Croatia.web.archive.orgModern claims and debatesSerbia emphasizes his ethnic Serbian roots and Orthodox background (his museum and grave are in Belgrade). Croatia highlights his birthplace and contributions, sometimes framing him as Croatian by territory. Historians and standard references (e.g., English Wikipedia) typically describe him as a Serbian-American inventor/engineer born in what is now Croatia.en.wikipedia.org

@RandyWKirk1 Move your vehicle a little. Radio lobes can be funny things.

@KenCCheng Energy security is a wonderful thing. As the SciFi author William Gibson said "The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed."

@KenCCheng Beautiful and lovely.

@Avatrode Thank you, Lawrence. Isn't it ironic that the invention that went on to be the very symbol of an idea, was initially resisted? Ever it has been thus.

@lucagrecoita Evolution is not sentimental. We are and this is sad.