The problem is the world is transitioning to EVs, and burying your head in the sand won’t change that. Legacy manufacturers could be trying to find their place in the new world while they can, or they can stick with technology of the past, let someone else come to dominate the new technologies, and be left with a ever shrinking market until they disappear

That makes sense. Thanks for helping clarify

Maybe I read this differently than you. I don’t see this as volunteering personal time, but asking people during their work time to help iwith a different job. Not that the article says either way, but volunteering personal time seems unlikely

Lidar has strengths that complement where video has weaknesses. That seems like a good thing. However it is bulky and expensive, and not yet produced at scale. Those are bad things. Whether it really makes a difference in simplifying the machine learning, only those developers know. You have to balance the pluses and minuses, and just because one company came up with something different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Maybe it won’t work without lidar but maybe it will - in the meantime Tesla has saved like $1,000/car times however many million they produce. If they succeed, then they have a solid cost and scalability advantage

The deciding point is if someone does develop general self-driving. Will those who are behind be able to swallow their pride and modify their approach?

No. Window retracting on door opening is no different than other cars with frameless windows. Most lowering the window may damage the weatherstripping but is no impediment to door opening.

True that the door latch itself is just a solenoid. I actually forgot the the outside handles don’t do anything but give you something to pull on.

The worst part of the manual door release is that it’s different on each model. For mine, the front door manual release is easily accessible to the point I have to tell people not to use it. Back door is a problem though

Or just a snow covered road

They don’t though. Waymo runs a few pilots in a few specific geolocked locations with essentially hand built cars at a huge loss. They also have human remote supervisions. They do seem fairly successful and maybe their slow careful rollout will eventually be at scale in the areas that need it most. Hopefully it will work.

While it’s easy to argue Tesla hasn’t had those successes yet, they do have the “at scale” part down and are already profitable on the vehicles. They are close enough to self-driving them at they’re willing to try their own pilots with human intervention. If they succeed, they already have the scaling up done and are profitable on hardware so will quickly surpass other competitors.

I like that different companies are taking different approaches, so we have competition. May the best technology succeed!

Sure but if you make that argument, even relatively dumb cars have that as well. At least antilock brakes have been mandatory for a few years (in the US) and traction control might be as well. Both lead to immediate adjustments in driving, more quickly than any human can react.

More automated cars must have some equivalent feedback on balance, sharpness of turns. I don’t know what it is, but they generally execute smooth comfortable turns.

What’s your goal in using fake info? If it’s general privacy, it’s easy enough to register where your info is private to the registrar

I mean it’s all true:

• humans drive based on vision alone
• moving to one type of sensor simplifies the ai
• lidar has been much bulkier, much more expensive than other sensors.

Most importantly, since no one has self driving yet, it’s premature to talk about that as a mistake. Let it fail or succeed on its merits. Let other self-driving attempts fail or succeed on their merits.

In this crash, part of the blame was on retracting handles on the outside, not the interior locks. If the handle is retracted, it’s tough to open the door from the outside.

• model s has electrically presented handles. The car has to be somewhat functional for the handles to extend …. I haven’t heard of extend on emergency or extend on power lost, or any other failsafe
• model 3/y door handles are not electrical. You have to press on one end to extend the other. You may or may not like them, but at least they don’t have that failure case of what happens when the car loses power

I saw a video where a guy was claiming vertical solar panels can effectively generate more power more often. They can catch a little something when the sun is low in winter , or on the shoulder hours of sun-up/down, where traditional solar can’t, and they don’t get snow buildup

Does the wind blow year round? I’m imagining a similar case for wind, then you can say that for the union of these two sets, renewables are cheaper than legacy energy

Maybe bump that number slightly for places with hydro that can serve as a battery

Look at the other line on the graph. Solar alone, covering up to 60% of energy use, is already cheaper than gas in Las Vegas. Sure, other places will have their own lower numbers, but until we achieve this threshold, we’re just a bunch of reactionaries captured by current business owners. If anyone actually believed in the free market, we’d expect it to trend to that line

In general, even up here in woke-ville, punishments have gotten a lot more strict for kids. There’s a lot more involvement of police, courts, jail. As a parent it causes me a lot of anxiety - whatever happened to school being a “sandbox” where a kid can make mistakes without adult consequences, without ruining their lives? Did that ever exist?

It’s on my list to do something about mine as well. The vendor sells automated modules at a ridiculous price so I don’t want to do that. However I have the reaching poke so it hasn’t been a priority. It’s been quite a few years now so I’m starting to wonder if replacing the blinds will come up in priority before I get to automating them

I’ve got an extra tall living room, and without a 15’ ladder there’s no way I can actuate the pull down shades

Not what you’re looking for but maybe you should have as a backup plan…… I’ve got a pole that works in my similar situation. It telescopes to 12’, has a handle to simplify turning to adjust the blinds, and a hook at the end to grab hold for raising and lowering.

And it’s automated too. I can use a voice assistant to send a command to raise or lower …. As long as one of my kids is in the room. /s

Hah, I do sort of the opposite. My management has drunk the koolaid on ai - now I use it to translate my specs into something obviously ai generated for more acceptance

I’m having this argument with one of my junior guys who wants to just go with the generated code. We finally got his code functional, months late, and now need to get it maintainable

AI is a useful tool that can help speed up some of the tasks of coding but it’s not magical. It’s never a final result

AI could really help me get more done if we could weed out people following it blindly

The Bluetooth visualization caught my eye, but I’m here for the Alexa integration.

My most amusing automation is telling my teens to goto bed, at midnight on weekends, maybe I can spice it up a bit