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Comment Re:I'm all-in on keeping my used cars going. (Score 1) 241

Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.

Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.

On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.

Meh, I suppose. IMO it's not worth optimizing in a car that's able to remember settings associated with a driver. In "dumb" cars, if the regular drivers are different sizes (I'm 8 inches taller than my wife) you need to be able to quickly and easily adjust the mirror positions, because you have to do it a lot. In my Tesla, I mostly find it annoying that the main rear-view mirror doesn't automatically adjust, requiring me to reach up and move it by hand. I think the best fix for that, though, is to replace it with a screen fed from a rear-view camera.

AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.

Again, this mostly seems moot with per-driver, automatically-applied settings. I have the air flow adjusted to my liking and never touch it. I never manually adjust fan speed, either, only the thermostat... and that I do by long-pressing the left thumb wheel then scrolling up or down. I have to long-press because I like the media controls to be the "primary" use of that wheel.

Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.

I think this claim is overrated, at least for me. I end up having to look quite a bit. Obviously once I've found the control I could look back at the road while I adjust it... but I often don't do that in vehicles with manual controls, like my truck. Again, I prefer to adjust the climate control by changing the thermostat rather than playing with temperature or fan volume by "feel", and I have to see the temperature display which is in the center console. I know what temperatures I prefer, though, so I look move my hand to the control, rotate it until it shows the temp I want, then return my attention to the road.

Similarly with the sound system. I know what volume I prefer and adjust until the display shows that level. On the rare occasion I listen to the radio I don't use the tuning knob, I use the "scan" button, which requires looking while I hit the button, then listening until the right station comes on, then looking while I hit the button again to stop the scan.

There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.

"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.

Different strokes, I guess. I quite like Tesla's system. I did prefer having a stalk for the turn signals rather than the buttons on the steering wheel. My wife likes the buttons... which is interesting because she prefers to drive manually a lot more than I do, so it may be that I just haven't given them a chance. She says she likes that she can signal without having to take her hand off the wheel. I use FSD pretty much all the time except when I'm driving for fun, which I basically never do in environments where I have to use turn signals.

Comment Re:when AI fails (Score 1) 56

The key is to use the AI more sensibly. Let it find things in code. Even let it look at possible bugs in the form of where does it "describe bug". Even let it propose changes. DO NOT let it make the changes, just show them. Do not just take it's word for it, take the shown code as a starting point but re-do it for maintainability after sanity checking it.

THEN it can be a useful tool.

Comment Re:Large scale backlash, not serious discussion (Score 1) 94

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.

Comment Re:I'm all-in on keeping my used cars going. (Score 1) 241

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.

Comment Re:Hotter nights (Score 1) 115

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.

Comment Re:Hotter nights (Score 1) 115

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.

Comment What a load of crap (Score 5, Insightful) 150

"could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner."

What you are doing is exactly violating that. You set the goals based on where you want to be, not what you think the technology can do. That is what "technologically neutral" means. You are taking into account the technology when setting goals, which means you are not neutral at all. But what else would I expect from this band of asshats?

Comment Re:AI doesn't use desktop hardware including RAM (Score 2) 110

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.

Comment Re:Anyone surprised? (Score 2) 215

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.

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