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Comment Re:My last corvette (Score 1) 218

Even as much as I love my Polestar 2, I disagree. The simple fact is that Android Automotive (what you used in Volvo) is an operating system that can be locked down by the vendor installing it. GM will almost certainly use Android Automotive but with a locked down app store so that only their apps can get installed... the ones they monetize.

Plus, there's the fact that a car's lifespan should exceed that of a cellphone. This is exactly a problem we're hitting with our Polestar 2's (and Volvo XC40's which are based on the same platform); the CPU is just too old and slow to support newer and better features, and in fact was probably borderline for the apps already released at launch. The CPU in the car isn't easily upgraded (though they are doing an upgrade for the Polestar 3 but that's a completely different computer and car) but you can upgrade your phone whenever and use Android Auto / Carplay with the latest and greatest apps at "full power".

I use Android Auto daily in my Polestar. The only thing I use the integrated system for any more is navigation on long trips due to the integration with the charging. However, with the recent addition of live integration with ABRP on my phone even this might go by the wayside.

Comment Re:Slow But Sure.... (Score 1) 94

I have a Polestar 2... about 4500lbs. My first factory set of tires lasted 30K miles, but got replaced because I got a lag bolt through one of the tires AND the rim right at actually 32K miles, and since it was about to go into winter in the Midwest I felt it safest to have matched wear across all four tires.

I now have over 70K miles on my car and while I'm looking at the tires thinking it might be time soon for some new tires it's more because again it's about to go into winter in the Midwest and I prefer to have good rubber when the snow falls. All-season performance tires, I do NOT drive like a granny and I have the performance software upgrade so I do occasionally enjoy doing the 4 second 0-60 launches for fun.

The weight difference issue is also super overblown. Note that while my car is around 4500lbs, a directly competing car at the same time with similar performance and overall practicality was the Audi RS5 Sportback (2022 model year) which has a listed weight of 4000lbs. So there's a 500lb difference but it's important too to note that car weights are listed as empty weights. 15 gallons of fuel weighs 90lbs, 8 quarts of oil add another 15lbs and so on. The difference in weight is pretty small when you look at directly competing ICE. Yes, there's definitely an issue of tire wear because of the power the cars put down, but I've driven powerful cars since long before I drove an EV and they are all in the 3.5-4.5 second range and had tire wear similar enough that I don't seriously believe it's a factor.

Comment Re:You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score 1) 72

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Comment I don't think he's far off. (Score 2) 129

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

Comment Why does it matter? (Score 1) 213

Seriously; I mean I understand people's desire to understand a thing that affected all our lives so significantly, but I seriously just don't understand why the source of the virus really matters. Whether it leaked from the lab or jumped from a bat in a market, the Covid that affected our lives and continues to affect our lives isn't the same virus. It mutates, has mutated and is now a distinctly different virus than it was when it first arrived. Even if some lab in Wuhan has a sample of the original virus in a freezer it's unlikely that virus would be useful except as an historical footnote.

So again, why exactly do we need to know this and why should any of us care?

Comment Re:my observations (Score 1) 94

Well, first of all think of it as an electric enclosed motorbike, not a car. Then a whole lot of it makes a lot more sense. I too am a bit dubious of their 500 watts of solar power, but there have been some interesting developments in panel tech recently that they could be using that could make it feasible. The proof is in the pudding so to speak.

It almost certainly has turn signals. I don't think that's a question as adding them is cheap, easy and with LED highly efficient.

The side mirrors do seem small, and you're right they could well be cameras. I know that's legal in some countries and they might have applied for some sort of exemption? The footage on their website shows much larger mirrors so I don't know what the status is of those.

The brake lights flickering is super common with video footage shot on a lot of modern cameras. Check any car review and you'll see the lights flickering. It's the nature of LED's and does in no way represent how they look in real life.

I think most of the reason they're not showing it from the rear is because it does look sort of awkward from that angle... the video is all about marketing LOL.

Again, this is a commuter vehicle and can be thought of as more akin to a motorbike than a car. Almost every commuter I know has no real world use case for a rear seat... hell I know I don't. In fairness, I do often commute on my motorbike too. The trunk is a decent size for a backpack and a few grocery bags. This isn't a hauler... again think motorbike but with a much larger storage than most motorbikes offer.

I agree I find this interesting. I already have a perfectly good EV so I'm not looking to make a move to an Aptera, but I could see a world where something like this could replace 99% of my use case, even being a more comfortable commuter than my motorbike now that I'm getting into "getting too old for that shit" territory LOL

Comment This article seems a slant towards journalism jobs (Score 4, Insightful) 141

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Comment Re:Who wants their useless AI? (Score 4, Insightful) 81

I have a use for AI, specifically OpenAI's. I have a ton of legacy code written in (of all languages) Forth. This is for embedded devices and it's complicated by control loops that are written in machine language in order to keep the performance up on these controllers with low cost industrial grade CPU's. The code is pretty slick all things considered, but it's a really hard to maintain mess mostly because I'm not a Forth programmer, and especially with the machine language stuff in there it's complicated.

About a month ago I embarked on a journey to re-code all our software in C. ChatGPT (paid) has been incredibly useful in both helping me understand what's going on in the Forth code, and helping to translate it into C. The new code usually isn't compile-ready but it's close enough that it just takes a few changes and I can compile and burn to the controller. Yes, I actually can have it translate the code directly into a compile-ready version but learning the process and learning how the code translates has been incredibly useful in helping me with the old Forth code and has also helped me find fixes and optimizations that mean the new C code runs better on the same hardware than the Forth stuff did.

So yeah... one good use for AI. There ARE good uses for it but it's a tool like any other. It's also great for help with writing, especially formal writing.

Comment Re:Finally something I can agree with (Score 1) 162

There's a part of me to this day that's still mad that nobody on CIX (English BBS with early Internet access) told me about Yggdrasil. I downloaded Slackware as my first Linux distro and yes; went through the hell of configuring that bitch.

I mean, I learned a lot too but the pain of that installation set back my Linux usage "in anger" by months. Though once I had it up and running it was a ton better than my Windows installation.

Thanks for unlocking that core memory BTW. I was trying to quit drinking this year... guess that's going out the window now...

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