rnk

That was an epic screw up. Hopefully the only one that ever happens to them. New auto (tesla, rivian, ?) have generally avoided them.

Some of the details that got out about what happened at Rivian:

Problem cause #1: to push an update, you had to cut and paste various version numbers together onto a command line. Someone messed that up, oops, meant to say this instead of that.

Problem cause #2: bad test strategy. The dev tested it before he pushed it, so no worries? Except the dev test vehicle was a "special test car" that had extra security tokens on it. So the install worked and test passed. But regular cars didn't have those certs.

So lots of obvious things to fix there. No command line mucking about to push a real production release! And test the final thing on a regular fucking car with no special dev stuff.

Tesla has multiple hardware versions, and their main panel of the original S has a v1 and v2 main console hardware. They pushed a release once that broke things in the map for the original version that caused it to use an excessive amount of cpu. I got this one, seems like it just made everything really really slow and some things failed. It took them like a 6 weeks or more because they got around to undoing the fix. I think part of that was all of them had the updated cpu so they didn't see it. It was still driveable, just degraded infotainment ui.

VW has had software updates that they would not push over the air because they took so long the 12v battery could run out before it finished, risking bricking the car (main battery couldn't charge the 12v during os update). Solution, bring your car to the dealer to do the update. Apparently also considered giving everyone a better 12v battery.

It's always the one you don't expect that gets you.

Similar capabilities, similar performance and similar (actually better performance). They don't have any of these at this time. People don't want to buy slower and maybe cheaper computation on nvidia hardware - why would they want to do this on intel hardware? Your app will have to change, it just seems like an obvious non-starter.

I'm not an expert here, am I missing something? Saying the x86 industry is motivated to move away from what nvidia provides, intel needs to tick some of these 'better somehow' boxes.

Github activity is an abstruse source of programming activity. I might do many github actions or few, separate from the actual use of the language. A lot of activity when learning is probably using online websites and online environments. People can move to other systems, use git on their own for instance.

They need another datasource. There's another classic not reliable system, survey programmers to see what they are using.

He was great fun. He also had amusing tales of his "tech character's" adventures dating etc. Back in the '90s, when we were all young, his weekly column was a highlight for me.

I thought about this for a few days. I eat meat, animal products like milk too. I feel some guilt about it, an animal died to get me this chicken sandwich. We'll face decisions about whether to continue ending the consciousness of animals to feed ourselves when we have alternatives. I'm far from the first person to think of this, but when we have some machine consciousness that compares to a chicken (I don't know how to measure consciousness but we'll face that one day), will there be a common understanding of what it means morally to be ending that consciousness?

I think one day we'll probably almost completely stop killing "intelligent" animals (in 100s of years after we develop safe and tasty alternatives). What about a software consciousness? I don't know. What about if we are able to "upload" our consciousness, will it have civil rights? Probably not at first.

I disagree, DRM actually is seen as an extremely negative thing. Perhaps people who work to create DRM don't think it's a negative but saying someone's work is DRM is actually a pejorative statement.

Yes, for Seattle a key issue is there is hardly any supporting services available for the mass of people who need it. There are just a lot of people needing services. Seattle also has a huge shortage of mental health treatment professionals. You can't just start working with one of them, you have to wait for months on a waiting list. There's not nearly housing at night.

So you have fentanyl, not much housing, not much treatment, not enough hospital space. People get addicted, at least some move here when addicted and then they are stuck.

It's also not just a seattle problem. Alaska has also been struggling with lots of deaths from drug abuse or overdose. Wasilla - https://alaskapublic.org/2023/04/10/troopers-warn-of-lethal-..., Anchorage - https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2023/07/27/anchora...

Yes, this is the key issue. It's too expensive to hire me or another experienced software engineer to do customization (except...). And doing anything significant takes me more than a few hours. There's just no market segment for me, an infrastructure engineer to help do something for even $1000.

But I do think there is a possibility of paying for a custom api or something that connects up pieces of other apps (an app build, phone or ui) - it's not that they are doing something less worthwhile, it's that I think integrating a few existing things in an existing way can with new ui elements, pics, style can yield something useful and pleasing with "just" a few hours of effort.

Back in the dawn of time, if you had a pc, you had a modem, and there were plenty of different terminal programs (that started up the modem for a call to a BBS usually), and implemented one or a variety of different terminals or bbs ui packages. I recall there were certain kind of enthusiast ones, where you could get a new feature added by paying the author $50. Maybe you wanted it to retry calls some number of times, or add somenew protocol to transfer something.

Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.

A llm can write a program to compute factorial or whatever, but that doesn't mean it has consciousness. Same for writing a poem about any topic. It is of course also not evidence of no consciousness. We just don't know but the likely-hood seems low.

For whales or even dogs or great apes, I think the chances are much higher, but we just don't know. We can't even agree on a definition for what consciousness is.

What does small mean? We have puddle jumpers (few miles between islands) already in service, like 5-10 miles. I expect it to creep up over time as efficiency slight increases but battery energy increases at the battery moore's law like rate it has. Prices go down and capacity/weight goes up.

I agree it will have limits, I doubt I'll see long flights like 200 miles. But I see no reason it can't improve by 10% a year just like the batteries. I believe the ones in service are using lfp batteries, which are safer than lithium batteries, but also have lower energy density - and these have gone up over time too in energy density.

We humans are all terrible on some level (except my mom, she was a saint), but if you have enormous power, you can help or hurt a lot of people based on your actions. Musk has a lot of power. He must be a terribly lonely person, not knowing if he can trust anyone or they just want something from him.

Just to add the basic idea, the amount of power is amps * volts. So to carry the same amount of energy with a higher voltage, you can you use less amps. The amount of amps impacts how big the wires are, lower amps need smaller wires and that means less space for wires but more importantly less weight of the wires. There is a lot of wiring in a car. Tesla claims this could be 1/4 the amount of copper wiring in an article, below.

This article describes a bit about this, but also says something I never heard, that there were 6v auto systems in the 1960s. https://www.mining.com/new-tesla-low-voltage-system-a-big-de...

Your view of history is far from accurate. The "vote" by crimea to leave ukraine was after Russia took over Ukraine in a military action. Voting to secede after someone takes you over and that Russian someone doesn't do democratic voting.

From Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum

"The Crimean status referendum of 2014 was a disputed referendum[1][2] on March 16, 2014, concerning the status of Crimea that was conducted in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (both subdivisions of Ukraine) after Russian forces seized control of Crimea.[3]"

You keep coming back to armed civilians will not accept worse living conditions. If some calamity comes, like global warming removes say the us ability to grow enough food or we run out of oil and there's not other energy sources, the guns aren't going to fix things. You are going to have a revolt against the govt because inflation is too high or China nuked us and ruined our country?

That's a great podcast and the person you replied to is foolish - any opinion piece knows where it is going when it is published.

So just take your plot request and add "make sure the plot is really sexy, sex it up a lot; smut is encouraged" ?

Is filing reports as a nonprofit an example of unreasonable expectations from the us govt?

I guess that implies you are at openai, maybe not? What does it mean that different things are at stake with ai and that "we are aligned"?

I think trying to deal with big corporations requires being somewhat firm. This journalist looked like he was behaving well to me. He gave the guy his driver's license info after all. That's the opposite of shady.

Clearly these people at openai didn't know what to do. The company is in chaos, it's almost in dumpster fire territory at this time (is the ceo sam back, do they even have a CEO or other leadership still left, did the board quit, is there anyone on the board, are lawyers in charge there?). And it is the day before Thanksgiving. But many companies that don't want to give up required information would do similar things, like say I don't know, we don't have the right people here today to decide what to do. If you are a journalist you have to require fair treatment and politely demand what is legally possible. It's just what you do to succeed. Companies don't treat you like you are Ted Kopell and just hand it over.

It's the last thing anyone at openai wants to see, but it's what people have to do to get the facts. They don't usually post the videos where they get incorrectly refused maybe but this is an every day event for a journalist. Showing these kinds of videos shows what real journalists face every day. You think the person investigating say the public expense reports of a mayor just gets them without insisting? No, she does not, without being politely forceful.

US EV sales are up almost 60% year over year! It's the opposite of a downturn. US legacy auto is really hurting on EV sales though, because of lack of product, higher prices even more unattractive because of high interest rates, low production, plus price reductions by Tesla and other more nimble companies are making the legacy auto lose out.

Losers: Ford, GM, Toyota

Winners: Tesla, Kia, Rivian. Many euro brands doing pretty well in this transition, way better than Detroit.

Near future killer car: Volvo EX30, a ~$35k smaller suv type car, also available with awd etc. This is the car that big auto should make. The Tesla Y is in this class too. [1]. I wish I was an auto analyst, it seems more fun than being a software engineer at times.

Guess when you think internal combustion (ICE) cars will reach their max annual sales? It's a trick question because it happened in 2019! Since then the growth has been in EVs. Tesla is almost at 2 million cars a year now, world wide.

That "ev sales are going down" is an amazing bit of incorrect propaganda. How about up ~60% year over year [2]

What's happening is legacy auto is doing terrible and losing market share, either not making enough vehicles (gm & ford, toyota), dealers marking them up too much over list price (gm, ford, toyota), etc. GM was moving everything to a new battery pack technology (ultium) but they have unclear problems and they can't make the battery packs at scale; gm has enormous demand for the huge hummer and they made fewer in the first half of the year than last year. Toyota can't make a decent ev (it's on purpose). Japanese brands haven't done a good job overall on making attractive EVs and they are losing major market share in China, because China loves EVs. European EV sales are also growing.

1. https://electrek.co/2023/11/05/volvo-ex30-review/

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1810g57/u....

Zhao can do new things with his billions. He can start new companies, work in new markets if he wants. If he can escape China's clutches with his money, I assume he can travel the world.

Thank you. The bloomberg article didnt mention anything what was different from conventional heat pumps.

Thanks so much for posting that. I hadn't ever come across Harry Mack. That guy is fantastic. And he gave so much happiness to those people he was rapping for! Just seeing all the delight on their faces gave me a tear in my eye. There's a lot of lonely people in the world, and for a moment, he improved their lives. We need better ways to connect; today I can VC with anyone in the world in a second, but we don't know how to connect like he does. Creators, work to make that kind of connection happen.

Define habitable. It seems hard to detect planets that are in the life zone (not too far, not too close) and small enough to be somewhat similar.

who is they? Roko's basilisk?

That was fun, kind of like a scientific american martin gardner column. When I was but a wee lad I would visit my grandfather who had a subscription (and actually read) Sci Am and he would share interesting things with me, and implement some of them on his early home computer. Those were lovely days.

Wow, you aren't kidding? Wouldn't they be afraid the training material would leak out, plus that's actually wrong.

At the big G they told us we weren't allowed to pay bribes. And then there was a long section about not giving people noncash gifts to influence them, but what about bringing them to the free lunch, I think that was okay.

ok, glad it's working somewhere. In the case of hydro cars in the us, toyota is agreeing to buy them back, giving free use of gas cars, etc.