Killing Flock won't kill the concept or the capability and more than demolishing Napster stopped music copying. I bet within 5 years, this scanning will be common in most dashcams and phone apps will be available.
Lashing out in anger without having a plan or knowing your target is juvenile.
Whoops -- accidentally moderated it. Undoing...
Not specific to data centers, but too often legislators ignore the will of the people who voted them in. We could use more of this type of accountability.
If only voters would get this worked up about corruption.
There's obviously a massive large-scale backlash here, and it is pretty bipartisan. Part of it is concern about water use (which is largely overblown) and part is concern about increases in electricity cost (which is much more reasonable). But it is clear that two related things are happening: 1) People are reacting this way to all data centers, whether or not they have anything to do with AI. 2) People are blocking data centers rather than trying to take reasonable steps to make them manageable with their concerns, like requiring that they have solar panels. There's room for compromise here, but we're not getting it.
People are also ignoring the benefits. Data centers don't bring a lot of jobs after construction is complete, but they can generate a lot of tax revenues for counties and cities. Huge amounts of money that can be a real game-changer for the local budgets, and could be very beneficial for the locals. By itself that's not a reason to accept them, but it should be part of the overall calculation, and the net cost/benefit of the projects should be reasonably and fairly evaluated, and negotiated.
But this isn't what's happening.
No buttons for the mirrors
The thumb wheels on the steering wheel do that. You do have to use the touch screen to put it in "mirror adjust" mode, but really that's something you only do once. Set up your driver profile, set your mirrors, then the car just always changes them to your settings.
No buttons for the wiper. If you leave the auto-wiper on it randomly activates and smears the windshield in the driest of weather
I find the auto wiper works pretty well... it is important to keep the windshield fairly clean, but I like to do that anyway.
The door handles are terrible.
Yeah, the Model 3/Y handles are weird. The S/X handles are pretty nice. In theory the fact that they're motorized could make them a maintenance problem. In practice, little electric motors are extremely reliable. There was a problem with the wiring harness getting fatigued and breaking about 10 years ago, but that's been fixed.
The lack of any kind of physical controls for climate and entertainment is terrible
Those are also on the thumb wheels on the steering wheel.
Before I came up with my current system I spent a lot of time looking into actuators for windows. They exist but they're expensive, often bulky and look like a lot of work to install and maintain. Then it occurred to me that I already have a whole-house fan (HVAC system)... if I could just get it to draw from outside rather than from the air returns. That part woks great and I think it does give me a pretty good single point of control. The only problem is that the house is pretty tight so I also needed a way to create some negative pressure, hence the laundry room to attic fan. I think that's still my airflow bottleneck.
As for whether I've crunched the numbers.... no, I haven't. And since I installed solar last year it maybe doesn't even matter any more? Throughout most of the summer I'm actually giving away nearly a MWh per month of electricity even after running house, A/C, car, steam shower, etc. So it's really more of a game to me than a serious attempt to save money. That said, I do watch my energy consumption closely (game, right?) and running the fans consumes maybe 400W. Overnight that's about 3.2 kWh. Meanwhile, my AC draws 4 kW, so if my AC kicks on for 45 minutes it consumes as much as the passive system does all night. And for that, the passive system cools the house by ~10F degrees while the AC will cool it by about 2F, which would indicate 5X efficiency improvement. But even that doesn't fully capture it, because the AC will cool the *air* by 2F while the passive system will cool the house and also much of the thermal mass, so it's actually moving quite a bit more heat out than the thermostat temperatures would indicate.
So, yeah, an order of magnitude more efficient seems about right. When outside air cools down at night!
I've also been thinking about building something for my shop. It's an uninsulated pole barn (30' wide x 40' long x 25' high) which gets quite hot in the summer and quite cold in the winter. I think some automated fans to exploit day/night temperature variations could probably move the average interior temperature several degrees closer to comfortable, year round. Even better if I insulate it.
Oh and one more thing. Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all. In my area there's a Winco Foods about 30 miles from where I live. They only take debit cards, not credit cards. They do beat Walmart's prices so whenever I'm nearby, I take advantage of that.
Yes they could, but they'd lose out on a lot of money. Winco foods likely saw their average receipt size and realized most of their patrons could either do debit or cash. Being a grocery store, cash is likely a viable option if you're not doing big shopping trips and spending $20-40 a trip, and more for debit.
Walmart however does sell more expensive stuff that most people will not have cash for which can be expensive. Think video game consoles, TVs, etc. Limiting yourself to debit and cast would make those transactions very annoying.
It's why Costco always retains a credit card option - because they know cash and debit only get you so far. (And because debit protections are worse, I refuse to use debit, so it'll be cash only).
Sorry, no, any touch screen interaction is requiring you to look at what you are pointing at.
Which is fine when they're things you shouldn't be touching while the vehicle is in motion.
Other controls, like HVAC, radio volume and the phone answer button have to be real buttons you can access without looking. While the car is in motion, the touchscreen should disable itself and be a view-only thing - showing things like where you are on a map or what your next turn is. Anything you might need to adjust quickly should be a knob or button.
That means changing the radio station or media source - you do it while parked (it's not an emergency if your least favorite song comes on). But if you need to turn down the volume that is something you might need. As with answering a phone call. Texts and other things, not important enough to be done while in motion and if they text you, they aren't expecting an immediate response.
Ditto HVAC controls - defogger, A/C, heating, fan speeds and temperatures are stuff that need adjustment while moving to be comfortable whilst driving.
Nothing wrong with a touch screen. Just as long as the UX designers take into account that the screen should be view only while the car is in motion, and anything you might want to adjust must be available on a button. You shouldn't need to use the touch screen while driving.
And a large screen is nice - it can display a huge map, show driving information and other things without crowding out things. But it shouldn't need to be interacted with whilst in motion. Heck, why not toss in a couple of unprogrammed buttons so you can have the option of a few more adjustments you can program on your own. Maybe you might want bass boost or something. Or a quick "everything off" button that turns off climate control, radio, etc.
To be fair, we had plenty of that even back in the glory days... but the noise has stayed constant while the signal seems to have dropped off with most topics.
I think that's fair, although it feels like the tone has gotten harsher.
I'm curious, do you think the semi-passive cooling system will still be useful at beginning and end of summer, even if the night get too warm? Savings obviously aren't going to be as attractive as using it all through the summer, but I would hope there are still seasons where the system is worth running.
Definitely. I'm actually already seeing a little of that in late August. Nights are getting down to ~62F, which is managing to cool the house to the high 60s. I'm wondering if I could get a higher-volume fan for the laundry room to increase the air flow... I'm sure that by the end of September we'll have nights in the 50s but days will still often reach the mid-80s. That's when another benefit of having it automated kicks in. If I were just opening a bunch of windows before going to bed, there would be a period of time when the house got too cold at night. With the automated system, when the house gets to 62F it turns the fans off.
Of course, as we get into winter, I pop the laundry room fan out and fill the gap with an insulated pillow of the type they sell for filling swamp cooler vents.
Speaking of swamp coolers... those have historically been fairly effective in Utah, thanks to the dry air. My first house had just a swamp cooler and it was honestly fine. I've actually thought that it might make sense to have all three: passive cooling, swamp cooler and central air. With a smart system deciding which to use when. You don't want to use the swamp cooler a lot on days when the A/C might need to run, because it raises interior humidity, which the A/C then spends a lot of effort extracting. Maybe... have to consider the cost of buying and installing the swamp cooler.
USE FUCKING FIBER.
Not hard, either. Because there's a cable you can use - the poewr lines. Fiber lines can go along with power lines quite neatly, and many power companies already have fiber network deployments. In fact, there are more than a few rural utilities where your electricity provider will also do fiber. (Typically GPON).
The power cable is being run to the house anyways, and the poewr company's portion is the triplex to the weatherhead. From there it can run down the weatherhead and end at the ONT. Fiber cables cannot carry power so running them along power cables is perfectly safe.
Chinese manufacturers are ramping up output faster than that.
This isn't the first example of DRAM price collusion either. Happened around 2000 as well, and lawsuits alleging it is happening now have already started.
It's possible. My prediction is that they're not going to find any evidence of collusion, that all of the DRAM manufacturers simultaneously shifted production to AI chips in response to clear market demand, not because of any agreement.
Yes, there was collusive price fixing 25 years ago, but the companies got slapped pretty hard for it -- not just cash fines but prison sentences for executives. I think that prior experience makes it less likely that they're colluding now, not more likely. Once burned twice shy.
Maybe you should stop panicking lie a wee baby and think from the other end: things are working as well as they can, and the problem is a lot bigger than just snapping your fingers and hoping a genie shows up.
Fabs are expensive and big, and can't be built overnight. Even stupid ordinary homes take months to build, and fans are thousands of times bigger with thousands of times the utility requirements.
Twitter was going downhill long before Musk was sort of forced to buy it to stop even more discovery during the trial. Now it's just a hellhole.
One correction: It didn't have anything to do with discovery. Discovery was complete when the judge put the trial on hold to allow the deal to close. What happened was that Musk realized that proceeding with the trial was dumb because he was going to lose and be forced to complete the transaction regardless, and possibly on worse terms than he could get by just doing it. Avoiding the public spectacle of the trial was also a consideration, I'm sure, but not discovery... 10 days before trial discovery is already done.
Mostly in the inaccuracy.
You can tell at best a "blob" walked between two endpoints that are participating in the monitoring network. You can't tell what that blob is, or even how big the blob is - you can guess based on how much distortion was caused, but telling the difference between a toddler and a dog would be impossible.
It requires a transmitter and a receiver to work. If you don't want to participate, all you have to do is not use their equipment. The gateway by itself is useless - you need their mesh network nodes and other stuff as well. And it only covers the path between the devices.
If you wanted to defeat this, you can either buy your own equipment - use your own mesh network nodes for example, or position it so the detection area just isn't somewhere you're likely to be (e.g., putting the mesh node on top of the gateway on the floor above).
Sure they could use better technology, but it relies on the body interfering with the wifi signal and better technology costs more money. It also requires a receiver capable of doing the requisite measurements and the monitored area is between the two devices. So it's basically trivially easy to defeat
We've known for centuries that appeasement doesn't work.
That's too strong. Appeasement does work sometimes... when it works we usually call it "compromise" or something similar, though. There's a book "Appeasement in International Politics" that examines a large number of cases where it worked and where it didn't. The author lays out a number of criteria that influence whether it works.:
1. When the opponents aims are limited and grievance-based.
2. When the concession addresses the grievance
3. When the conceding party is strong, so the concession is a choice
4. When concessions are reciprocal and limited.
That said, Trump's aims are never limited. That has become clear. It wasn't necessarily obvious that was the case early on, though.
We already knew when we tried it with Hitler that it didn't work. In 1939, there were already poems about how it doesn't work. But sure. This time was gonna be different. Did it pan out that way?
Maybe? There are some pretty good arguments that it did pan out in 1939. It didn't prevent the war, but it gave the British time to build out radar coverage and ramp up production of hurricanes and spitfires. Britain may actually have been better off going to war in 1940 than they would have in 1939, so appeasement may well have provided a useful delay.
If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four tellers?
