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_ea1k

7,735 karma · joined December 20, 2010

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_ea1k··on VW is bringing physical buttons back to the dashboard with the ID. Polo EV
Tesla does something similar as their USB port for flash drives is in the glovebox. It is intended to make the dashcam drive harder to steal.
_ea1k··on VW is bringing physical buttons back to the dashboard with the ID. Polo EV
> I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was.

It isn't hard to see, tbh. Think about the controls in a Tesla from a few years ago. They had physical controls for drive selection, turn signals, cruise control/TACC, cruise control distances, volume, next and previous track, seat controls, and manual overrides for the automatic wipers. The things that were used a little less were on the touch screen, with automation attempting to mitigate the downsides of this. This largely consisted of climate, manual overrides for the automatic headlights, and things like suspension settings.

So, what has VW made better here? Well, they have physical controls for turn signals, drive selection, volume, next and previous track, etc. They appear to use the touch screen for much of the climate control and entertainment settings, including appearing to retain the much maligned touch settings for seat heaters.

I'm not convinced that this is better. By contrast, my Nissan has driving settings like lane centering and seat heater controls on physical buttons... right next to my left knee where they are nearly inaccessible while driving.

TBH, the whole debate around this needs to be recentered around actual ergonomics and less around touch vs physical.

_ea1k··on Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got
These posts fascinate me, as I must admit that I never really realized there were so many people focused almost exclusively on promotion.

Is it really that common, or do these posts just bring out those types of comments?

TBH, in this field, it seems like other problems are often more pressing:

    - I've been a developer in XX language for NN years. How do I get my next job when the company is now hiring YY developers instead?
    - There are lots of Level II jobs for YY, but I'm at level IV. Will eligibility rules even allow this transition?
    - There are some Level V positions for YY, but my level IV in XX doesn't really qualify me in a way that would pass a tech screen.
The concerns in these types of posts are just so... different.
_ea1k··on Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
3blue1brown videos are great if you want to go deep on the math behind it.

If you are struggling with the neural network mechanics themselves, though, I'd recommend just skimming them once and then going back for a second watch later. The high level overview will make some of the early setup work make much more sense in a second viewing.

_ea1k··on Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
Yeah, I'm getting the same feeling. They've announced that semi will use 4680 and Cyber Cab as well, right? If that's the case, this would point to a specific supplier issue rather than something more general.

It isn't something that I've looked into in depth, but it feels like a lot of the discussion isn't hitting the mark here.

_ea1k··on Toll roads are spreading in America
The means of collection and treatment of it as something other than tax revenue are problematic for sure. Those should be solvable problems, though.

Your point about semi-truck damage vs lighter vehicles is exactly why I think moving in that direction is so useful. The most fair taxation would accurately take both that aspect and actual miles driven into account.

_ea1k··on Toll roads are spreading in America
I don't necessarily see this as a bad trend. Eventually a tax on mileage and weight would make the most sense vs the current attempts to use fuel taxes as a proxy for those things.
_ea1k··on Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
What an absolutely repugnant article this is. It is complete slop. Is this what passes for HN worthy today? :(
_ea1k··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
AFAIK, the data center employs more people. I'm not really sure why that's the case, but neither is >1k.

I'd guess that this is also an area where the perception makes a bigger difference than the reality.

_ea1k··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
Years ago Google built a data center in my state. It received a lot of positive press. I thought this was fairly strange at the time, as it seemed that there were strong implications that there would be jobs, when in reality a large data center often doesn't lead to tons of long term employment for the area. From time to time there are complaints of water usage, but from what I've seen this doesn't hit most people's radar here. The data center is about 300 MW, if I'm not mistaken.

Down the street from it is an aluminum plant. Just a few years after that data center, they announced that they were at risk of shutting down due to rising power costs. They appealed to city leaders, state leaders, the media, and the public to encourage the utilities to give them favorable rates in order to avoid layoffs. While support for causes like this is never universal, I'd say they had more supporters than detractors. I believe that a facility like theirs uses ~400 MW.

Now, there are plans for a 300 MW data center from companies that most people aren't familiar with. There are widespread efforts to disrupt the plans from people who insist that it is too much power usage, will lead to grid instability, and is a huge environmental problem!

This is an all too common pattern.

_ea1k··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
It isn't perfect, but it has been better than Python for me so far.

Elixir has also been working surprisingly well for me lately.

_ea1k··on Show HN: Turn raw HTML into production-ready images for free
It probably means that the text was generated by an AI.

Claude Code loves to say that everything is production ready, even if it doesn't quite compile or pass automated tests yet.

_ea1k··on Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
Waymo will get better at this.

But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this.

That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages.

Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.

_ea1k··on Go ahead, self-host Postgres
I often find it sad how many things that we did, almost without thinking about them, that are considered hard today. Take a stroll through this thread and you will find out that everything from RAID to basic configuration management are ultrahard things that will lead you to having a bus factor of 1.

What went so wrong during the past 25 years?

_ea1k··on Claude in Chrome
Honestly that last paragraph is absolutely true. In general, you shouldn't have to do anything.

If your website is hard for an AI like Claude Sonnet 4.5 to use today, then it probably is hard for a lot of your users to use too.

The exceptions would be sites that intentionally try to make the user's life harder by attempting to stifle the user's AI agent's usability.

_ea1k··on Big GPUs don't need big PCs
It seems like verification might need to be improved a bit? I looked at Mistral-Large-123B. Someone is claiming 12 tokens/sec on a single RTX 3090 at FP16.

Perhaps some filter could cut out submissions that don't really make sense?

_ea1k··on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads
Yeah, I had the same experience. It made the page basically unusable for me.
_ea1k··on Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash
It is at least as reliable as the data in the electrek article. My point is that the data naturally has error margins that are clearly large enough to make drawing concrete conclusions impossible.
_ea1k··on Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash
I spent a little bit of time poking at Gemini to see what it thought the accident rate in an urban area like Austin would be, including unreported minor cases. It estimated 2-3/100k miles. This is still lower than the extrapolation in the article, but maybe not notably lower.

We need far higher quality data than this to reach meaningful conclusions. Implying conclusions based upon this extrapolation is irresponsible.

_ea1k··on Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash
Somewhat amusingly, the human rate should also be filtered based upon conditions. For years people have criticized Tesla for not adjusting for conditions with their AP safety report, but this analysis makes the same class of mistake.

1/500k miles that includes the interstate will be very different from the rate for an urban environment.

_ea1k··on Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash
Yeah, I'm glad that they are trying to do a rate, the problem is that the numerator in the human case is likely far larger than what they are indicating.

Of the Tesla accidents, five of them involved either collisions with fixed objects, animals, or a non-injured cyclist. Extremely minor versions of these with human drivers often go unreported.

Unfortunately, without the details, this comparison will end up being a comparison between two rates with very different measurement approaches.

_ea1k··on Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash
Yes, regardless of the product quality, this article really pushes hard to find a negative narrative without thinking about alternative explanations.

There are real, legitimate concerns here, but they are hidden behind a lot of assumptions.

_ea1k··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
Yeah, this company went through an amazingly bad period. They quite innovating, and also worked really hard to segment their products in a way that would extract every last $ out of the consumer. "Oh you want it not to run into things? You'll need one more step up for another $100-200" It wasn't really based on the hardware, so much as the intentional limitations of the software.

Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing.

I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.

_ea1k··on Elevated errors across many models
I remember hearing Karpathy refer to these outages as a worldwide "intelligence brownout".

Crazy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SV4DMqAJ8RQ

_ea1k··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
> Why pay for a keyboard app when the default keyboard is already good enough?

That's probably what people would have said before Swype was invented too. But lots of people use that in their default keyboards thanks to the people that _did_ pay for keyboards back then.

Who knows what innovations we are missing out on today just because we've consolidated things down to 2-3 suppliers?

_ea1k··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android?

I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.

_ea1k··on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
Honestly, I think this is a valid viewpoint, but perhaps C is too low level. The bottleneck in generating code with LLMs tends to happen at the validation step. Using a language that has a lot of hard to validate footguns isn't great.

While I am not a big fan of Rust, the philosophy is likely useful here. Perhaps something like it, with a lot of technical validation pushed to the compiler, could actually be really useful here.

Getting rid of the garbage collector with no major increase in human cognitive load might actually be a big win.

_ea1k··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
I feel like this is an artifact of some limitations in the training process for modern LLMS. They rarely get enough training to know when to stop and ask questions.

Instead, they either blindly follow or quietly rebel.

_ea1k··on Why are your models so big? (2023)
Yeah, it is insane how many people think that tuning models is nearly impossible, or that it requires a multibillion dollar data center.

It is one of the weirdest variations of people buying into too much hype.

_ea1k··on Why are your models so big? (2023)
Why would you do that when you could spend months building metadata and failing to tune prompts for a >100B parameter LLM? /s
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