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Submission + - Tesla imports $29,000 USD ($39,490CAD) Chinese made Model 3 Premium to Canada

Submitted by ArmoredDragon
ArmoredDragon writes: After Canada dropped its 106.1% tariff on Chinese imports to 6.1%, (which is Canada's standard tariff rate for most favored nations) and raised 25% tariffs against the United States, Tesla moved its inventory manufactured in Fremont, CA back to the US and began importing its Shanghai produced Model 3 to take advantage of the lower rates. This presented a problem for the Canadian government, which currently has a 49,000 unit cap for Chinese vehicle imports, as Tesla already had all the necessary infrastructure in place to begin shipping and distributing cars, where the Chinese competitors such as BYD do not. By becoming the first mover, Tesla would consume most or all of the 49,000 cap before any other competitors have a chance to sell any units.

It's worth emphasizing that this is the premium version of the Model 3, not the newer but lower cost Standard version. It also appears to be made to the same specification as Tesla vehicles that were already being sold in Canada, including using the US EPA standards for EV range estimates, as opposed to the more internationally used WLTC or NEDC standards, or even the Chinese CLTC standard. Deliveries are expected to begin no later than June.

Submission + - Chrome silent install of 4GB AI model without consent gets expensive. (thatprivacyguy.com)

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: Widespread unasked for downloads devour bandwidth squandering energy:

From the parent article:

"Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.

This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.

The legal analysis is the same one I gave for the Anthropic case. The environmental analysis is new. At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4 GB binary they did not request."

Submission + - Should schools get rid of homework? Some educators are saying yes (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.

Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn't spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.

Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.

Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.

Submission + - A Talking Robot Guide Dog Could Change How Visually Impaired People Navigate (studyfinds.com) 1

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way.

Real guide dogs are incredible companions, but they can only respond to a handful of short commands like “forward” or “left.” They can’t tell a person what’s around them or explain that reaching the kitchen means passing through two doors. And the supply problem is staggering: only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs, partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate. In China, the gap is even wider, with roughly 400 guide dogs serving more than 10 million visually impaired people.

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