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.

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.

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.

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.

And you clowns don't think that your OS is a fragile pile of crap if it's that easy to fuck up?

Seriously? Do you even know what the job of an OS _is_ ?

The report included a patch, but the patch was completely wrong based on a random guess of how a certain software could behave. It 'worked' for the reporter by also swallowing all errors and silently continuing, despite the particular call failing. It was a check to see if a particular action would be needed, and so it silently assumed the step would not be needed, which happened to be true for the reporter so it looked 'fixed' to them.

Problem is that there are more than two people that are stakeholders, and and it would be nuts for me to just let the codebase get screwed up to try to prove a point for one very minor stakeholder who won't even get bitten by the mistake because their situation doesn't hit the bug inflicted by the change. If I let a random user patch a codebase, I rightfully get blamed, not them. And AI assessment of the report would likely agree with the submitter, because the AI generated a plausible rationale, and AI gives the benefit of the doubt to the material in the prompt fodder.

There actually is a project that I used to be a part of but no longer use or work on, but left my notifications active, because why bother changing and it was largely a "done" project, almost no new issues, not much in terms of code changes. Some guy decided to go all in on LLM giving free reign. Was not confident to be a developer but declared AI made it possible for him to change things. Suddenly lots of code changes, and also a sudden flurry of external issues of users who had been using it for a long time asking why random stuff was broken. Near as I could tell when I got around to disabling all the notifications, he just kept feeding issues into LLM and releasing updates and getting a new wave of issues and repeating. What was a boringly stable project became an eternally random messed up mess because he let LLM take over everything and it breaks as much as it helps. I'm not letting any of my active projects turn into that.

You are right. A screen that does not replace physical controls is a nice thing.

And I agree. Any vehicle that doesn't have a proper dashboard in front of me, where I need to look to the side to see important information, is a no-buy for me.

yes, it's a short list. But it's a start and a kind of "red line". I am hopeful they move that line to include other things that people use while driving all the time.

Are big screens nice? Sure, yes.

But if I have a choice between good physical controls and a big touch screen, I'll take the buttons and switches any day, thank you.

My 10 year old BMW has voice commands and a map that's always been more than enough for me. Sure, it's not as large, but while driving I don't want a big map - I want an indicator that tells me "next turn left in 500m" - and I have that, not on the main display but right in front of me on the dashboard. Newer models have it on a HUD.

Nothing in what you wrote makes a LARGE screen necessary.

They don't have to be better. They just have to be competing for the same ad money and users.

If only voters would get this worked up about corruption.

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.

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.

I find the auto wiper works pretty well... it is important to keep the windshield fairly clean, but I like to do that anyway.

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.

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.

Which explains a lot of very overly verbose "reports" that have been sent to me about "issues". The person thinks they are using AI to make their report more useful, but I still find the human input to be sufficient and the AI reports to be a pain to actually work backwards to the issue. Especially when it decides to fixate on what it thinks is the root cause and gloss over what the actual problem was... Which has at least once become super counter-productive, as the report got it flat out wrong and the reporter refused to give me the usual debug information because "Claude already looked it over and gave the answer, can't you just accept its findings and figure out how to fix it?"

Yes, you can use their app to pay. It sucks though.

For one, my watch can tap to pay, but not with walmart app.

For walmart, I have to open the app, wait for it to load, sometimes it randomly decides I need to "prove I'm a human", then as I'm trying to go to pay, it pops up a "you want walmart+ now!" and the "yes" button is close to where I would have tapped so I can imagine they get accidental accepts. Then finally I click and it opens the camera app to scan the qr code, which is an annoying approach in general. Even worse, their qr screen is glossy and I happen to catch a reflection of one of the glaring lights right where the code is unreadable.

Their app to purchase was just a mess of bad UI and poor store setup for a qr code based solution, very clunky compared to nfc type approaches.

Note I said incremental cost of a remote area in particular. Launching satellites doesn't even narrow down the investment to a single nation, let alone focus spending on the communities underserved. So we can look forward to subsidizing Starlink global infrastructure with money intended to improve options where they are lacking.