Um, did they actually do something impressive or is it just a really big gas tank?
I’m struggling to imagine why anyone would even want 1,300 miles of range in a PHEV. Surely it’d be better to have a smaller tank and more space inside the vehicle.
AFAIK the optics have to be regularly cleaned, calibrated and replaced. And by regularly, I mean daily/weekly for some of that.
The process is a carefully guarded trade secret and intentionally difficult. The companies that own the machines are not allowed to have employees who are trained in the process. When you buy those machines it comes with a service contract from the manufacturer. And the manufacturer is ASML - a Dutch company.
If the EU finds apple guilty of “systematic” non-compliance, which will happen if they “continue their shenanigans for every judgement”, then the DMA doesn’t call for a fine. It calls for a TikTok style forced sale. Apple could be ordered to sell the iPhone to another company or face an outright ban in the EU.
Of course that’s assuming the EU has the balls to actually enforce their own laws knowing full well the transatlantic political consequences.
It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users
Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn’t the problem.
The problem with twitter is Musk fired all the people who spent their day figuring out how to hide (or just delete) shitty content.
The real difference is you can watch what you want to watch on demand instead of being limited to their selection of shows on their schedule.
Also, you can sign up for a month, watch a series, then cancel and sign up to some other service. Pay for several services and sure, it’s expensive. But one or two? Still a hell of a lot cheaper than Cable ever was.
The fact most content is crap is irrelevant - there’s more good content available than any reasonable person has time to watch.
It runs at 120 GB/s…
As a Mac user that sounds pretty shit. RAM in a MacBook Pro runs at 400GB/s and that’s a CPU which will be obsolete in the next few months, with a new one coming that’s expected to be more like 500GB/s.
Sure, modular memory is great. But not if it comes with a performance penalty like that.
TLDR - they don’t want a transition from combustion engines to electric cars. They are saying building electric cars is bad for the environment.
It’s not really targeted at Tesla - what they want is for everyone to start using public transport/etc.
The hero photo for the article shows a camera over a road that likely is likely running number plate recognition software…
Honestly I’d be more worried about where that data is going than the tracking software in your car. They’ve got the most critical information (where did you drive and when), and they’ve got it for every car instead of just Honda drivers.
This needs to be fixed with legislation, and it needs to be fixed actively. For example by getting rid of number plates entirely and replacing them with something like the transponders used in aircrafts and ships, but with an encrypted rolling code that only shares your data when authorised to do so (by the owner of the vehicle).
Apple “Find My” works like that… your location is encrypted, and it’s uploaded without any identifying information. When the user brings up a map looking for their keys, that’s the only time encryption keys are handed over allowing the already stored information to be accessed. The car version of that could be police asking you at every traffic stop to hit a button on your dashboard that unlocks your registration/insurance details so they can run a quick check against their outstanding warrant/etc database.
I’m pretty sure Meta has been shadow-banning all news related content for years now, and anything related to Palestine is news.
They want you to share cute puppy photos and birthday invitations.
It can be unlocked, and AFAIK doing so is perfectly legal, but then your warranty is void. And with a Tesla, you’re probably going to wish you had that warranty one day.
Toyota was offering remote car start but only if you subscribed online
That’s different - it relies on having an active cellular connection in the car and older cell towers (5G has improved this dramatically) could only handle a hundred or so active connections at once, so Toyota is absolutely paying a monthly fee to access the cell network. It makes sense to pass that on to the customers who wish to use the feature.
Those fees have gone down, since not only is 5G much cheaper per customer (for the cell network), everyone switching to 5G has taken the pressure off older wireless protocols so they’re almost never crowded anymore - so they can pretty much have as many cars connected as they want for near zero cost.
you can’t ignore basic laws of the universe that oil is a finite resource
TLDR - oil might be a finite resource but gasoline is not oil and it can be renewable. But it’s also a rapidly shrinking market.
The stuff can literally be grown on trees. It’s cheaper to pump it out of the ground, but it’s actually not much cheaper. Fuel from plants, which we farm in bulk for human consumption, can absolutely be used to create gasoline. It’s also net-zero — because the plant takes carbon out of the atmosphere to create the oil and then it’s simply returned to the atmosphere when your burn it.
Most gasoline in the USA contains at least 10% biofuel, and some is up to 85%. The latter requires an engine tuned to run on it, however it’s possible (and is an area of active research) if you’re willing to spend a bit more money to manufacture 100% pure biofuel that can run on unmodified engines. Porsche in particular has started selling a biofuel that is specifically designed to run on classic cars that were manufactured decades ago. They plan to produce something like a million gallons a month of the stuff, and it will work in basically any car. And if you have a classic car (designed for gasoline that contained lead) then it will work better than the fossil fuel you can buy at a gas station
The thing is though, battery powered vehicles are way cheaper than doing any of that. And if you really need a fuel based approach (e.g. batteries are just too heavy for large aircraft), then Hydrogen is a better option than any biofuel.
So - while gasoline can technically be environmentally friendly and is a usable source of energy for the foreseeable future, in reality it’s destined to follow horse drawn carriages and steam engines, a technology some people only use for their own personally enjoyment or to preserve our history.
Everything-but-Windows?
No. Any device that implements a certain DHCP feature is vulnerable. Linux doesn’t support it, because most Linux systems don’t even use DHCP at all let alone this edge case feature. And Android doesn’t support it because it inherited the Linux network stack.
I would bet some Linux systems are vulnerable, just not with the standard network packages installed. If you’re issued a Linux laptop for work, wouldn’t be surprised if it has a package that enables this feature. It essentially gives sysadmins more control over how packets are routed for every computer on the LAN.
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ChatGPT 4 is a great assistant, I find it indispensable… I use it on my phone and computer but would like it in a dedicated device.
Privacy? Yeah it’s not great, but that’s mitigated by OpenAI focusing the product hard on areas that don’t really need privacy.
I do think these tools can be private - but to get there we need more RAM on our computers and phones, and it needs to be expensive high bandwidth RAM, which costs a fortune right now. A lot of research is being done to reduce memory requirements and more manufacturing capacity for memory is being ramped up.
need to be somewhat close to important population areas
They really don’t. I live in regional Australia - the nearest data center is 1300 miles away. It’s perfectly fine. I work in tech and we had a small data center (50 servers) in our office with a data center grade fibre link - got rid of it because it was a waste of money. Even comparing 1300 miles of latency to 20 feet of latency wasn’t worth it.
To be clear, having 0.1ms of latency was noticeable for some things. But nothing that really matters. And certainly not AI where you’re often waiting 5 seconds or even a full minute.
Yeah I call bullshit on that. I get why they’re investing money in it, but this is a moonshot and I’m sure they don’t expect it to succeed.
These data centers can be built almost anywhere in the world. And there are places with very predictable weather patterns making solar/wind/hydro/etc extremely cheap compared to nuclear.
Nuclear power is so expensive, that it makes far more sense to build an entire solar farm and an entire wind farm, both capable of providing enough power to run the data center on their own in overcast conditions or moderate wind.
If you pick a good location, that’s lkely to work out to running off your own power 95% of the time and selling power to the grid something like 75% of the time. The 5% when you can’t run off your own power… no wind at night is rare in a good location and almost unheard of in thick cloud cover, well you’d just draw power from the grid. Power produced by other data centers that are producing excess solar or wind power right now.
In the extremely rare disruption where power wouldn’t be available even from the grid… then you just shift your workload to another continent for an hour or so. Hardly anyone would notice an extra tenth of a second of latency.
Maybe I’m wrong and nuclear power will be 10x cheaper one day. But so far it’s heading the other direction, about 10x more expensive than it was just a decade ago, thanks to incidents like Fukushima and that tiny radioactive capsule lost in Western Australia proving current nuclear safety standards, even in some of the safest countries in the world, are just not good enough. Forcing the industry to take additional measures (additional costs) going forward.
the google cars few years ago had the boot occupied by big computers
But those were prototypes. These days you can get an NVIDIA H100 - several inches long, a few inches wide, one inch thick. It has 80GB of memory running at 3.5TB/s and 26 teraflops of compute (for comparison, Tesla autopilot runs on a 2 teraflop GPU).
The H100 is designed to be run in clusters, with eight GPUs on a single server, but I don’t think you’d need that much compute. You’d have two or maybe three servers, with one GPU each, and they’d be doing the same workload (for redundancy).
They’re not cheap… you couldn’t afford to put one in a Tesla that only drives 1 or 2 hours a day. But a car/truck that drives 20 hours a day? Yeah that’s affordable.
inspect the inside and outside of the truck before and after each trip.
This could easily be a full time job for a team of people who working an ordinary 9-5 job inspecting one truck after another all day, basically the way taxis and other car fleets are maintained.
I’d argue that’s an improvement over driving a truck. Truck mechanics are paid slightly better than truck drivers, and they work far better hours.
Many of them can fix blown tire or a failed spark plug
Trucks have 18 wheels. A tire doesn’t have to be fixed immediately. And I can’t remember the last time I encountered a failed spark plug… but even if it were to happen one cylinder being out of action will just reduce your horsepower by 12%. You’d fix it after delivering the cargo.
But again, roadside mechanics are a thing. And they’re paid even better than workshop mechanics.
deter theft and vandalism by often sleeping in the truck
Human truck drivers are only allowed to drive 60 hours a week. Which means for at least 108 hours a week, the truck is parked somewhere. A self driving truck would have no such limit, and would almost always park at a safe location.
First of all, you’re implying it runs latest Windows - but Windows 11 shipped a few years ago.
Second - not really a fair comparison. 18 years ago the iPhone didn’t even exist. And the oldest model (17 years old) had really weak hardware. 4GB of storage, 128MB of RAM, and the CPU was an order of magnitude slower than current spec CPUs (it was also 32 bit - and 64 bit ARM is a completely new architecture - similar to the failed Itanium).
Even if it was supported, it would be a horrible experience.