Well, I've got a Tesla too, and I'm not at all hesitant to complain about its assorted flaws (100+ years of automotive engineering focused on keeping the water and snow OUTSIDE the car? bah!), and I wouldn't go so far as to say FSD works "great," but it's acceptable for what I paid for it. Late-term fire sale prices before they discontinued outright sales.

I've seen crazy bugs. Mine got drunk for a while. Turn on FSD on the highway, it goes fine for a mile, then starts drifting to the left, hugging the lane line. Does that for a while, then crosses the line, wobbles around a bit, and goes totally batshit -- sometimes veering rather sharply at the median. All the while displaying on the visualization screen where the car is and where the lines are -- the computer KNOWS it's driving drunk, and keeps doing it. Nothing in the diagnostics or event logs to explain it.

It's an older one, so it's still running v12, and while Tesla has said they'll be doing a "14 Lite" backport, and an upgrade path to newer hardware once it's "done," I'm not holding my breath. 12 doesn't do as many parlor tricks as 14, like backing out of my driveway or finding a parking spot for me. But it drives from the road in front of my house to the parking lot entrance at Costco, or from city to city, with little to no intervention. It would, in general, have no trouble driving from a major road to another one 50 miles away with no one in the seat, if it were allowed to. And if it hadn't guzzled a bottle of Wild Turkey first.

I've driven newer models with v14, and I believe they are technically capable of making the journey from parking-to-parking unattended, IF nothing unexpected happens, IF it's not pouring rain or pea-soup fog or blizzard. Doing it safely, maybe not yet, which is why they still require a butt in the seat and eyes on the road (they have a camera to track that), said butt being intended to prevent a tragedy or be liable for one if it happens anyway. That's kind of the big sticking point, I think -- if my car hits a pedestrian while I'm not in it, who is legally liable? Also, it's limited by charge, since there's no infrastructure in place or on the horizon for automated charging. That'd be handy even for manned trips, if I didn't have to get out in the rain to plug in a charger. But then autonomous charging might be how we get Skynet. Do you want Skynet?

I'm still waiting for them to build "banish." They have Summon, and it (usually) works. 14 has the ability to find a spot and park in it when I'm in the seat -- it isn't always the spot I would choose, but if I don't have to walk, I don't care. The pieces are there to enable me to get out of the car in front of the store and tap "park" and let the computer deal with it, then Summon it back when I'm done. I think a lot of people are waiting for that. Seems an easier lift than coast-to-coast unattended.

Lately I find myself contemplating the differences in tone between the original 99 Luftballons and the English translation. The original seemed more focused on human failings, paranoia and bravado, the English version blames the computer.

They should have used more relatable units, like "as heavy as 12 Teslas" (bonus for name checking actual somewhat-related yet totally inappropriate unit of measurement!) or "a whopping 1/18th of the International Space Station." Really, who goes around weighing humpback whales these days?

As for the cables, clearly "the thickness of a standard woodchuck" would be far better, or perhaps for the Florida audience, "Burmese-Python sized". Unless of course they've developed some technology where they just pour the energy into a cantaloupe-sized sphere and it emerges elsewhere. That'd be pretty cool.

Apparently it's a dazzling 320583 smoots in length, too. That's nearly 6000 football fields!

I've lately been using Copilot in VSCode to build a custom CRM/ticket management app to replace an ancient thing that was built in the early 2000s, in COBOL, and has various conniptions running on anything newer than XP.

I'd say the agent has autonomously written.. probably 95% of the code for a FastAPI backend and Vue.js frontend. Mostly with the model selection set on Auto. It seems to mainly use Codex and Claude Sonnet, delegating lighter tasks to Haiku. I can manually select some of the free models if I know a task is easy.

Frankly, I'm pretty amazed and slightly disturbed by how "smart" it seems -- "Here's a table schema. Make some API endpoints to get, put and post this." [working ... done] "OK, that mostly works, but (some constraint that maybe wasn't obvious from the schema)" [working.... done] "Nice. Now make a UI to display existing rows in a tabular format" [...] "Add an edit button to each row that opens a modal dialog to edit those columns" [...] "I don't like that layout, move the comments field to the bottom and put the two phone numbers side by side." [working... done] "Huh, cool. It'd be nice to have edit history. Alter the schema to include system versioning, then create some endpoints to fetch historical data." [working for quite a while... done] "Now present that in a nice UI." [working.... Here's a page that shows a reverse-chronological history of the selected row, including which columns where changed, from what to what, when, and by whom.]

It even came up with some SQL constructs that were better than what I would have done by hand (I'm competent but by no means guru-level in SQL).

Had less luck using it to do harder stuff like embedded microcontroller projects. It's all dependent on how commonplace is what you're doing -- FastAPI and Vue are everywhere, it's good at that. Arduino, pretty good. ESP-IDF or STM32Cube, less so. Needs a lot more handholding.

Would I trust the output if I didn't know how to read and critique the generated code? Absolutely not. Or maybe I would, if I were at the right point on the Dunning-Kruger graph to not even know what I don't know. Does it do stupid stuff occasionally, like implement an API endpoint correctly but forget to require authentication on it, even though all the other ones in the same file have authentication? You bet. It reimplements functions that are already implemented in shared includes, then later notices that it did that and offers to consolidate them.

Gotta watch the context windows, break stuff down into manageable chunks, generate an action plan and then execute it in steps. Gotta keep everything in manageable commits, so if it does something completely boneheaded and breaking, you can roll it back and have another go. (the VSCode UI also has some functionality for this, showing every agent change as a color-coded diff for review)

It saves a hell of a lot of time doing the drudgery of cookie-cutter HTML/CSS, and it's pretty decent with the backend stuff.

I'm using the minimum paid Copilot Pro plan, and used about 65% of one month's premium requests on this project (and a few brief digressions). I think I've gotten more value out of that than I paid for the whole year, and I'll no doubt be continuing to use it to work on little projects that have been languishing forever because I just don't have the time.

Not a lot of great solutions. Reducing the power a lot is probably the best one. Then the car needs a receiver near each wheel to get the data. Some already have this, that's how they magically figure out which tire ended up where when you do a rotation. Randomizing the IDs could work in this scenario, too, but then the car has to relearn the IDs every time they rotate, which could be error prone.

Anything involving fancy crypto is going to take a bite out of the sensor battery life, and require them to be replaced more often. AirTags do this, they randomize their BT addresses and transmit encrypted packets. And their batteries last a year or so. Could put a bigger battery in a TPMS, but the more weight, the harder to balance, etc...

This mode of tracking isn't really a threat that average stalkers are going to execute, but it's definitely something state actors and Big Surveillance could exploit. Flocks have a bunch of extra radios in them they're not using most of the time, they could easily sniff Bluetooth, and could be adapted by hardware (or possibly software) modification to intercept the 433/315 MHz signals often used by non-BT TPMS.

It has to be that way. The people over there smelling flowers and having picnics hate American freedom, and would storm the embassy in a heartbeat.

Either that, or the bars and guards were put there by the Norwegians to keep the Americans from escaping.

That sounds HORRIBLE! That poor money, all locked up in a liberal hellhole. Sounds like they need to be added to the Liberty List.

Small difference between canceling a contract and declaring the company a national security threat, or threatening to nationalize it. Anyone who's happy to see this sort of thing going on should ask themselves, "how do I feel about Putin doing this same thing? How would I feel if Kamala Harris did it?"

Pretty sure that first quote was directly related to the wrong sort of folks, i.e. Black Panthers, openly carrying firearms in public. I haven't found a concrete source for the second in 1968 (got one?), but it seems to fit better with his later attitudes on the topic.

Well, without this speaker thing, the shopkeeper has to either look at their mobile device and verify every transaction, or take the customer's word for it.

I've seen street vendors in NYC that will accept showing my phone with a Zelle confirmation displayed as proof of payment, and another poster says that's pretty common in India as well. This is, of course, dead easy to spoof. It's probably harder to spoof exactly the right tone of synthesized voice, coming from exactly the right point in space, to a sufficient degree to fool the merchant reliably.

Couple this with the ability to side-verify larger transactions, or spot-check any transaction, possible penalties or shame for being caught cheating, and a relatively small percentage of the population who are willing and able to cheat, and it's probably a win for the merchants. And there's some value, as another poster above said, in the whole thing being controlled by the payment network, so both parties to the transaction can more likely than not trust it.

I'm not so sure the payment network should be renting them out, perhaps they should be free to anyone with a merchant account, or one-time purchase, assuming the network makes its money on transaction fees. I don't know the Indian economy, so I can't estimate the value proposition for the merchant and network.

We've finally reached, nay, surpassed the Star Trek future! We no longer need a living person to repeat what the computer just said, we can have another computer do it.

By being covered with grass, trees, bugs and other things that don't have an immediate, measurable positive impact on corporate profits, of course. Much better that they be covered with pavement and data centers, and later on with gray goo.

That's why they classify them as "critical national infrastructure," so they can surround them with their own drones, shock/lethal fences, armed guards, dogs with bees in their mouths that when they bark they shoot bees at you, etc. Can't just have Cletus out there taking potshots at the rooftop chillers, or whatever the British equivalent of Cletus uses without guns everywhere.