Honestly most pickups never tow. According to companies that make them and have a vested interest in knowing what they need to build. Less then half of pickup owners ever tow anything.

The under half that do tow are still people though and still have needs and dollars. I tow, I early tow more then about 200 miles, I mean why would I fill a dump trailer with dirt from two states away and haul it home? We have dirt here! Most of my towing is under 50 miles. Occasionally it is 400 miles (not for dirt though).

you can make a successful product that doesnâ(TM)t address the needs of every single person.

Or to be less dismissive, people that tow a lot? My EV is fantastic to drive, and gets pretty decent range, until I tow a many thousand pound and worse yet physically large travel trailer, and then my efficiency drops to about 1.7 miles per kWh, which gets me about 166 miles on a full charge (and 0% to 100% charging is slow).

Which mostly means I don’t plan on any trips to locations much over 100 miles away with a big travel trailer. Which is ok, it is a big EV, I can sleep in it if I want. Not quite as nice as an actual TT, but it works. Other people maybe actually tow enough to that they can’t just decide to “not do that”.

Well for me it is a rare problem, say 0-3 blackouts a year, and 0-1 lasting more then a few hours. So less important then say “how does it deal with a long trip I make once a year”.

On the other hand a 3 day power outage in the winter (not normal, but not unusual) is no joke. It is enough of a “no joke” the most houses around here have an external input for a generator or other 240V power source. Mine in particular will power the house’s heating (well the water circulation pumps and the furnace ignition), as well as the kitchen fridge/freezer, and the wall outlets & ceiling fixtures in a few rooms. Which is nice because it means for around 500W you get heat, lights, and a way to keep the beer cold. You don’t get the stove (electric, high draw 240V), or the microwave (I mean you could drag it over to an outlet that has power, but a microwave is pretty hard on a portable generator), or the coffee maker (again it can be dragged to a outlet, but it is hard on a generator).

I have a big ass APEX battery something like 3kWh and does 240V output. It is way happier with the coffee maker then my little generator. It is decent in general for running the house’s limited “backup power” mode. Except it will only run it for around 6 hours. On the other hand my EV does have 120V 15A out, which won’t run my home heating system, but it will power the APEX. The EV has around 100kWh in the battery, so it’ll run the APEX and indirectly the house for a very long time.

Or to be fair a really crap Harbor Freight portable generator that will last one outage and then die a horrible death could be used to feed the APEX, and the APEX can weather all the rough loads and ramp-up/down and generally make life easier for the generator.

However that is all a bit of a diversion from my main point. It may be a bit uncommon to have a 3 day winter power outage here (although the power outages tend to happen during rough weather, so -20F ice storms tend to bring the power outages, and the bad weather makes it harder to get linemen where they need to be and equipment to them, so yeah the long outages tend to be winters!)...but they aren’t even rare. Live here for a decade and you will have about three of them. Having it well below freezing and no power and no heat means whatever water you have is going to freeze and expand. A lot of heating around here uses water to transit the heat, so the normal “nothing will freeze and burst in the first day, maybe two” you get “well at least one of those pipes runs in the low insulation areas under the roof to help clear ice sheets...and that one will freeze in a few hours. Plus others will freeze pretty early as well, maybe not day one, but you arne’t getting through much of day two without many thousands of dollars of damage.

So try not to over generalize from your local power stability and lack of winter power oriented damage. This kind of feature can be worth tens of thousands of dollars every few years.

I’m less sure that there are a lot of places you can save enough from buying power at low rate times and using it from you down battery at higher rate times (I think there are clearly places with a 3x rate difference, but even so it is around 20 per kWh, and most EVs have more like 40kWh batteries, not the 98kWh battery I have, so the savings tops out around $8/day and that isn’t a lot even if it doesn’t put any noticeable extra strain on your EV’s lifetime it has a super low payback. Then again maybe some places have a much larger kWh cost and a bigger off-peak discount? I definitely don’t know any place it is a fast payback though.

I’m in the awkward position of being a long time proponent of “hire experts and retain them, software isn’t a one and done it is a lifecycle and having someone with deep knowledge is a competitatave advantage”, and yet also after a lay-off at the big G a software consultant.

Which makes my opinion of this maybe a bit self serving, but it is appropriate to hire outside help for “OMG we have to fix this right away, no time to get approval for a permanent staffing increase, or to find someone who works for just the right amount of money to not upset all the employees who would want a raise if the new guy gets more...and we can put up with someone outside the normal corp culture for a few months as long as they aren’t too far outside of it...but never take a permian hire that doesn’t wear just the right tie and use the perfect tone to suck up”.

So: need a security fix before billions leak out of your company? Hire a contractor that can get the job done, unless you luck into a new employee that can.

Need to copy another companies feature before you lose all the market share? Hire a contractor, but keep “contract to employee” conversion in your back pocket.

Have an idea for a killer new feature nobody else has: develop that in house. If you really can’t get the resources allocated long term for that, a contractor is better then nothing, but you really want in house knowledge of how the feature works, and how many other departments it touches and all the technical and interdepartmental entanglements. So doing that with a outside expert makes it hard to support long term.

Plus the except from the article already says:

It is unclear if the 1000 contractors “remain here today” because they were hired on year long contracts for four months of work, or if they are now a roving hit squad for tough bugs and the contract is “long term”. Also it doens’t say if the 3000 people already “in that area” are employees or other contractors. So I’m not really sure if we are seeing a company not willing to invest in operations, or if they are investing money rather then time (contractors are fast to hire but tend to cost more over time then internal hires -- even if you retain them).

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

That isn’t really true. Let’s say I have a service where I sell dirty filthy smut. You want that dirty filthy smut. I require you to set up an account. So I know what account name you have picked, if it is “WankerWeasel” I can guess that it is the same WankerWeasel as is on SlashDot and maybe other places, but that is a guess. If I look at the IP address you use to connect to my web server I can assume I know roughly where you are, although Private Relay makes that a pretty bad guess (I’m in VT and everyone that looks at my Private Relay IP address is going to think I’m around 400 miles away in MA. Which doesn’t make me “hidden enough” if I don’t want it known I’m in the USA, but hey, Apple didn’t promise me that, plus the farther they drag the traffic the more latency gets introduced). In the future when you use the passkey again I’ll know it is the same identity as was used before, and very likely the same person. I still don’t know if you are the same person as is on SlashDot. I definitely don’t know what state you live in, or if you are in the EU what country. If you are on a smartphone I probably can’t figure out your movements if you use Private Relay unless the passkey continuously leaks the address (i.e. in future verifications not just creation), and even then I’ll only see it on login. If Private Relay also covered that traffic I wouldn’t know any thing about your travel habits.

So sure you making an account gives me some ability to track you, but not really much to correlate you to any other existing data I might want to link yup so I can leverage my vast store of citrus treat preferences to advertise at you at a higher success rate. Folks always looking for ways to blame Apple

Yeah, they are (now) the big guy on the block, so many root for failure, and point and jeer. Plus on slashdot they are frequently seen as the enemy of open source even though they do frequently contribute patches back to various things, or entirely open up works they do internally.

That said this is an Apple screwup. I’m pretty sure it was an accident not an intentional privacy leak so they can “look good” but still gather privacy data. It is at worst a bug someone noticed prior to release and it got filed as a P1 or a P2 and got demoted to a P2 or a P3 so the product could ship, and once shipped rather then being treated as a “fix ASAP” it got treated as “that can’t be a block ship bug by definition, because we shipped with it, so P2 at best, why should we block a future product for a bug we already shipped?”, so it is sitting in someone’s radar backlog and it hasn’t gotten fixed despite being fixable (maybe the private relay folks and the passkey folks have a disagreement on how to fix it, but it doesn’t seem like it is a hard fix, either have passkey ask PR how to route traffic PR can’t recognize as “web traffic to reroute”, or PR has a mechanism to mark non port 80 port 443 traffic as something that PR needs to reroute and passkey isn’t using it, but should -- maybe it is a little deeper, maybe PR doesn’t have a way to encapsulate non http(s) traffic and passkey’s protocol isn’t “enough like” http to work, so a general VPN needs to be used, and Apple’s private relay partners are not up for general VPN, and Apple hasn’t solved the busness side of that yet, not even the minimal “only VPN a few protocols from processes that have the right entitlement so it can be used on a case by case basis for things like passkey but not magically give everyone a free VPN that Apple has to pay for if they use it for bulk data”).

Well as you said FRAND is one reason private companies would fund research and then donate it to a standards body, and a “good” one.

Not the only reason though. A lot of things are driven by adopting standards. If you make your very own technology and other companies need to adopt it they tend to want to deal with standards not a single source product, so you get wider adoption by publishing “your thing” as a standard. It does basically burn most or all of the money you invested R&D, but in exchange you get to enlarge the market. You also get to be the first company that can supply a product that uses the standard. So investing money into a new radio strategy and having that be part of the next WiFi standard you are trading that R&D money for being one of the first companies with the “new” WiFi in your basement station (or sort phone, or whatever).

You also get to shape the future direction of a market. So for example (sticking to radio technologies again) if you contribute a low bandwidth low power long range mode for WiFi you can make WiFi more applicable for things like location tags.

SANDisk I think makes FLASH but not RAM, so from their point of view high bandwidth FLASH displacing some HBRAM demand is a huge win for them, any hardware that decides to use this and less HBRAM makes the market SANDisk participates in larger. SKHynix doesn’t get that same boost because I’m pretty sure they also make RAM. SKHynix however gets a boost because unlike say the other 15 companies that will eventually make high bandwidth FLASH SKHynix (and SANDisk) will be making it from day zero.

Yes, there are long running complex lawsuits about all manner of things you might think are intuitively obvious, however just because the last lawsuit was long running and complex doesn't mean the next one about the same thing will be. In theory if the prior court found that header files are public interfaces and don’t have copyright protection the next lawsuit involving copyright on header files will have the defense lawyer point at the prior judgment and saying “we don’t need to litigate this, it was clear two years ago, and nothing has changed to make this any different, we should do that again” and the judge doens’t have to do the exact same thing, but most will, unless the other lawyer has good counter arguments why it is different in this case (and NOT arguments about the original judgment being incorrect). Sometimes the “good arguments” are merely “that case was decided in Californian and we are in Texas, and the laws are different here!”.

Legal matters can be counter intuitive, but more frequently they actually make sense. Early cases about things are complex and long because the legal process tries very hard to make sure they have a good answer, and that they clearly explain the reasoning behind the answers they give, and the limits of the answer. The results of legal battles that reach a verdict are not just a judgment about how a clash between two parties will be resolved, but about how all similar cases should be resolved. Think of a verdict as something that has cached results (but in a system that can do fuzzy matching on cache lines). A settlement on the other hand produces a result between two parties but no new cache entries.

I’m a lot less sure. I would think a lawsuit could start based on object code, and during discovery get source code and continue if the source code looks similar enough. Doing a whole lawsuit on object code would face significant issues convincing a judge/jury that object code is “expressive enough” to manifest copyright. With the defense arguing that wholly independent implementations of something compile down into the same (or substantially similar) object code.

It should be “easy enough” if you think you have some highly similar object code isolated to convince a judge to allow a civil suit to start and to compel discovery of the source code so you can examine how similar actual code (which has already faced court scrutiny about weather or not it is expressive enough to receive copyright protection) is. Even there you can get some suprising results. Like can a Google Employee who was previously an Apple employee and implements the same function at both companies in basically the same way commit copyright infringement? (In something like a topological sort where the algorithm is a known art, it is entirely possable that writing it from scratch for the Nth time produces a line for line identical copy including variable name choices and the bulk of the comments even if the author doesn’t actually consciously remember prior version of the code!)

Just because code quality improves doesn’t mean the code looks like what a human writes. Currently AI code seems to not favor writing lots of functions, do it’ll basically expand out the same code in multiple places. Which I admit is also what jr programmers tend to do and maybe you can quality that as something that is code quality and will improve. You can frequently use a prompt to make it “don’t write the same code multiple times, define functions for anything repeated (maybe over a specific complexity)” & that reduces that issue.

I’ve noticed AI generated Swift tends to not use default arguments much, almost never uses custom operators, and uses unnamed method arguments way more frequently then most human written code. Sort of. A lot of example code and people showing things in forums and doing toy programs “in public” are similar which makes me guess those end up in training data sets more then signifiant works that do most of that stuff. Or I write atypical Swift, and have worked at places that do the same (in part because I get to set the coding standards at some of those companies!). At any rate I think _some_ AI code has “tells” which is largely independent form bug rate if not actually “code quality”.

As a practical issue commercial software is almost always closed code, so nobody can see the source and simply search for anything that might share code with anything they have copyright on. The open source code isopen. So if you have anything copyrighted you can search the open source to see if anything looks like it is worth filing a lawsuit over. Especially if you have a competing product. So if you are say Intel you can check to see if any of gcc is similar to Intel’s commercial compiler and sue claiming any recent declines in sales are directly related to gcc’s “blatant” infringement. Or if you have a non-compiler you can sue and just complain about common stanzas of code but not establish specific damages so it might be a less valuable lawsuit.

You could even sue if your closed source code got that line from AI as long as the employee that the source code control system claims they wrote that one themselves, and as long as your source code control system says that line was written before the open source project had it’s equivalent code (or if your lawyer doesn’t think to check those things, and the OSS’s lawyer doesn’t think to raise it in defense), so at least chances are rare that the OSS code invents the line and commercial closed source steels the line (via AI) and then claims the reverse happened.

Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

Yep, even when AI generated code is human reviewed to determine that the code does what it looks like it should, and has no subtle issues (or only very very subtle ones!), you still have the huge legal issues (the exact ones you identified).

I will not write it, Sam-I-Am,
I will not offer colored ham!