Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Passengers and cargo vary considerably. (Score 1) 153

What SPECIFICALLY do you haul that you presume to speak for all users who "haul things"?

Four door vehicles including Suburbans (whose "bed" is internal) are popular with businesses for many good reasons. They haul a three-person crew plus their personal items, have room for cargo (which a short bed crew cab equivalent does with extra clearance for outsize items) and make excellent towing vehicles.

There are many ways to roll one's own work truck besides single cab long beds. (I've one of those, too.) Short beds do not exclude long cargo else I'd not use mine for that (I've multiple trucks in various flavors). Accessories like lift gates work well on either (and on vans and box trucks) and in the case of liftgates extend the bed when travelling with the gate down.

Is it so terribly difficult to understand buyers who already have those choices buy what we do?

Comment Re:Maybe try making trucks people want? (Score 1) 153

BEV proponents don't care about people who use trucks as trucks or why that used market requires ICE.

They don't use liftgates (I find it odd more truck buyers don't install them but attribute that to ignorance of how very useful they are) so hauling the weight of same plus cargo and often towed loads is not their concern. I quite like mine which is a major back saver.

Their sole agenda is forcing you to obey them. That's typical and a major reason people who would not otherwise vote right wing consider they've no other way to defend themselves.

Selling new trucks requires sufficient demand from the USED market to make new trucks a wise economic choice.

Comment Used vehicles win on TCO over time. (Score 1) 153

Same here but I renovated my houses and built my workshops.

I can retain my paid-for gassers for another 50 years (in the case of my '75 F350) or another ~26 years (F150s and one 5.3 Silverado) at trivial cost because they are designed to be repairable and are not vendor locked by electronic feature bloat.

Early 2000 LS drivetrain trucks and vans already fetch high prices because later years are so intensely mechanic-hostile. (Mechanic of many decades here.)

Driving used trucks let me easily pay off my homes and acreage then retire early. Buying even one new truck would have delayed my financial freedom by years.

When Slashdot was a techie site more viewers understood such things.

Comment It's simply not a good TRUCK because it's electric (Score 1) 153

Function is the issue, not being a pickup. This may be painfully difficult to understand for BEV zealots but not everyone WANTS what leftists (it's political, you want social control by regulation) attempt to coerce people into buying. Build what customers want, not what someone who is not a customer wishes they should want.

Compete or be cast out.

I and millions of others would be delighted to buy a BEV truck that equals or surpasses gassers in EVERY way with zero sacrifice of functions WE (not you) care about. When one pays that much excuses won't do.

There is no current coldly pragmatic personal reason to buy a BEV pickup truck no matter how much frothers screech otherwise. They're not good enough at truck tasks yet. People who don't use trucks pretend they know what's best for people who do and vilify gasser pickups (though the same drivetrain in a van triggers no one).

Comment Range anxiety is legit. (Score 1) 153

One add a larger or additional fuel tank to any conventional truck, or plop a transfer tank with pump in the bed.

People buy trucks to serve their use case, not to serve anyone else's. Invent a form and fit gasser replacement and they'd sell, but paying for inferior performance is absurd.

Comment Or deliberate editors... (Score 2) 34

They don't care for reasons they choose not acknowledge.
Their revenue appears unconnected to Slashdot importance, or is sufficient without the effort to restore quality. I find this interesting.

That's why they choose not to respond to (not the same as "ignore") valid criticism. The enshittification of Slashdot is deliberate. It's easy money for minimal effort.

Slashdot owners could easily replace editors with AI and arguably should since the threshold for acceptable "quality" has been so low for so long no one would notice.

Submission + - MIT physicists just found a way to see inside atoms (sciencedaily.com)

alternative_right writes: MIT researchers have devised a new molecular technique that lets electrons probe inside atomic nuclei, replacing massive particle accelerators with a tabletop setup. By studying radium monofluoride, they detected energy shifts showing electrons interacting within the nucleus. This breakthrough could help reveal why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

Submission + - Bay Area tech CEO says test project likely struck United flight at 36,000 feet (sfgate.com)

joshuark writes: The mystery object that struck a plane at 36,000 feet is likely not space debris, as some speculated, but rather a Silicon Valley test project gone wrong.

WindBorne Systems, a Palo Alto startup that uses atmospheric balloons to collect weather data for AI-based forecast models, has come forward to say that they believe they may be responsible for the object that hit the windshield.

“Yes, I think this was a WindBorne balloon. We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it,” WindBorne CEO John Dean posted on social media. “At 6am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”

The National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement released on social media on Sunday that the windscreen was being sent to their lab for testing, using “radar, weather, flight recorder data” to determine the cause of the incident.
WindBorne said the company has launched more than 4,000 balloons and that it coordinates with the Federal Aviation Administration for every launch. After presenting one of its balloons as a possible cause of the collision, the company said in a statement on its website that it “immediately rolled out changes to minimize time spent between 30,000 and 40,000 feet.”

Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for a comment about the structural integrity of the windshields on its 737 Max planes.

Submission + - Intel 8080 bottleneck made classic Space Invaders run faster as enemies died (tomshardware.com)

alternative_right writes: One of the most charming bug = feature tales is the story behind the thrilling crescendo of pacing gamers experienced when playing the original Space Invaders arcade machine. This weekend, self-proclaimed C/C++ expert Zuhaitz reminded us that the adrenaline-pumping rising intensity of Taito’s arcade classic was not due to genius-level coding. Rather, it was simply the fact that the underlying Intel 8080 could run the game code faster as aliens were wiped from the screen one by one, by the player dishing out laser missile death.

Submission + - Microsoft disbles preview in File Explorer to block attacks (bleepingcomputer.com) 1

joshuark writes: Microsoft says that the File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) now automatically blocks previews for files downloaded from the Internet to block credential theft attacks via malicious documents. This attack vector is particularly concerning because it requires no user interaction beyond selecting a file to preview and removes the need to trick a target into actually opening or executing it on their system.

For most users, no action is required since the protection is enabled automatically with the October 2025 security update, and existing workflows remain unaffected unless you regularly preview downloaded files.

"This change is designed to enhance security by preventing a vulnerability that could leak NTLM hashes when users preview potentially unsafe files."

It is important to note that this may not take effect immediately and could require signing out and signing back in.

Submission + - Analytics Platform Databricks Joins Amazon, Microsoft in AI Demo Hall of Shame

theodp writes: If there was an AI Demo Hall of Shame, the first inductee would have to be Amazon, whose demo to support its CEO's claims that Amazon Q Code Transformation AI saved it 4,500 developer-years and an additional $260 million in 'annualized efficiency gains' by automatically and accurately upgrading code to a more current version of Java showcased a program that didn't even spell 'Java' correctly (it was instead called 'Jave'). Also worthy of a spot is Microsoft, whose AI demo of a Copilot-driven Excel school exam analysis for educators reassured a teacher they needn't be concerned about the student who received a 27% test score, autogenerating a chart to back up its claim.

Today's nominee for the AI Demo Hall of Shame inductee is analytics platform Databricks for the NYC Taxi Trips Analysis it's been showcasing on its Data Science page since last November. Not only for its choice of a completely trivial case study that requires no 'Data Science' skills — find and display the ten most expensive and longest taxi rides — but also for the horrible AI-generated bar chart used to present the results of the simple ranking that deserves its own spot in the Graph Hall of Shame. In response to a prompt of "Now create a new bar chart with matplotlib for the most expensive trips," the Databricks AI Assistant dutifully complies with the ill-advised request, spewing out Python code to display the ten rides on a nonsensical bar chart whose continuous x-axis hides points sharing the same distance (one might also question why no annotation is provided to call out or explain the 3 trips with a distance of 0 miles that are among the ten most expensive rides, with fares of $260, $188, and $105).

Looked at with a critical eye, all three of these examples used to sell data scientists, educators, management, investors, and Wall Street on AI by Amazon (market cap $2.32 trillion), Microsoft (market cap $3.87 trillion), and Databricks (valuation $100+ billion) would likely raise eyebrows rather than impress their intended audiences. So, is AI fever so great that it sells itself and companies needn't even bother reviewing their AI demos to see if they make sense?

Submission + - CCP GOTION DEAD: Whitmer-funded Chinese battery maker pulls plug on project (themidwesterner.news)

schwit1 writes: While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan Economic Development Corporation contends it’s “not the outcome we hoped for,” residents in Mecosta County are celebrating its decision to nix $715 million in taxpayer-funded incentives for Gotion.

MEDC officials on Thursday notified lawmakers that the company with strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party is in breach of its economic development contract, which was negotiated in secret by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration and select lawmakers just three years ago.

“It’s about damn time,” Marjorie Steele, founder of the Economic Development Responsibility Alliance that opposed Gotion’s planned $2.4 billion EV battery plant, told Bridge Michigan. “What the MEDC tried to pull here in Big Rapids was just so egregious.”

Whitmer claimed in 2022 that the agreement, which included $715 million in taxpayer-funded incentives and tax breaks, would fuel “the biggest ever economic development project in Northern Michigan” and create “2,350 good-paying jobs in Big Rapids.”

Submission + - Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines

John.Banister writes: Teleoperated robot workers are here! No more worries about immigrants taking jobs, as the jobs themselves can be exported. Anything that isn't done by the cheapest labor can be exported to where the skilled labor is cheap. And, what better way to train AI replacements than the encoded stimulus and response of teleoperation?

Submission + - Sweden's crowd-forecasting platform 'Glimt' helps Ukraine make wartime predictio (france24.com)

alternative_right writes: Glimt is an open platform that relies on the theory of “crowd forecasting”: a method of making predictions based on surveying a large and diverse group of people and taking an average. "Glimt" is a Swedish word for "a glimpse" or "a sudden insight". The theory posits that the average of all collected predictions produces correct results with “uncanny accuracy”, according to the Glimt website. Such “collective intelligence” is used today for everything from election results to extreme weather events, Glimt said.

Slashdot Top Deals

"No job too big; no fee too big!" -- Dr. Peter Venkman, "Ghost-busters"

Working...