Dave.

They also iterate very quickly.

First car design - “functional” is being polite about it.

Fifteen years later when they are on their tenth revision - pretty damn good.

Meanwhile US car manufacturers can squeeze in a revision/refresh every 5 years if they’re lucky.

I’ve test driven a few BYD models here in Australia. 50 thousand dollarydoos for an electric car that goes 400+km, can power your house in a blackout, has all the normal electric car performance (6 seconds to 100kmhr) and is chock full of user comforts and safety features.

There are a LOT of these getting around in Brisbane, and for good reason. I didn’t get one this time round, but by the time the lease expires on my Volvo EX30 in 4 years, I’ll be looking pretty hard at BYD. Especially if they get their new solid state batteries going by then.

Why?

Because people should be looking to expand their knowledge by getting into the details. By handwaving those details away with an AI summary that may or may not actually summarise the article correctly, people lose the opportunity to learn.

If your attention span or cognitive capacity can’t get you through a basic Wikipedia article you need to work on that, for your own betterment.

If you’re reading an article and you’re lost in the weeds you should be taking a step back to simpler concepts in Wikipedia (or elsewhere) first. Don’t trust a LLM to make a coherent summary about a topic you can’t understand, because you won’t be able to tell if it’s feeding you bullshit.

It’s BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.

Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the “magic packet” of wake on Ethernet.

Super convenient for “find my device” applications, also nice to be able to connect and activate the device without having to press a power button like a peasant.

It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for “convenience”. With BLE on it would be flat in about 6 weeks regardless of whether I’d used it or not , which really ruined ad-hoc usage for me.

The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially “free” to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it’s awesome.

Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.

Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.

Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we’d be set for a century or two.

showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

This is ENTIRELY because of Meta’s content algorithms that buried the content from everyone’s friends under a torrent of shit. It’s pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.

But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend’s posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.

Everything is fine in the Apple ecosystem as long as you want to do something The Apple Way™.

As soon as you want to do something differently to how Apple decrees it should be done, then you’re screwed.

This kind of reliability is huge for prosthetic limbs, fitness trackers, and robotic arms, where precision and durability are non-negotiable.

Thanks, AI slop! Sensors that have been durability tested for a few hundred cycles will be perfect for prosthetic devices that can do that in half a day of office work, or fitness trackers that can do that in five minutes, or in robotic arms that can perform that kind of movement in 60 seconds! I’m going to use them in my next safety critical robotics project for sure!

"automated decision systems "

“IF X THEN Y” satisfies this description.

Soooo basically just take the handbrake off practically every chunk of software ever written then?

Are you familiar with https://old.reddit.com/

How much longer do you think Reddit will keep an option that doesn’t maximise end user engagement metrics?

It’s much more fun to just half-ass a new control panel with only a few features, and then hide the old, fully-functional control panel.

Bonus points if you can then begrudgingly finally show the old, useful, control panel when a user clicks 6 layers deep in the new panel.

“Wuh-wuh-wuh”, using pronunciation similar to the start of “wow” or “woman”

But I need my land barge to potentially carry 9000 pounds and 6 people for at least 400 miles without a break, even if I can barely manage to satisfy one of those criteria once a year. Otherwise it’s a miserable failure that must be mocked.

Australia here, I have a 100GB plan with unlimited calls Australia-wide for AUD40 a month. With the current miserable exchange rate with the US, that’s about USD25/mo.

And any unused data rolls over each month so now I have (checks)… 4.22TB of data available, because I have a dual-sim phone and my work sim does all the heavy data usage.

Again,

Ha! Welcome to corporate

There is a catchphrase in corporate - “Minimum viable product” and it means just that, memory leaks and all.

Thankfully, science will inevitably sus those papers out eventually, as it always does,

In the future, all search engines will have an option to ignore any results from 2022-20xx, the era of AI slop.

“Ohhhh, that tired old OS was using AI 1.6. We’ve been offering the new OS -now with AI 1.8 - for 7 solid weeks now! We recommend you upgrade now, as we’re shutting down AI 1.6 on Tuesday.”

Well, anything’s possible, I say we give it a try and see what happens.

Have you tried…

you know,

(cough)

maybe just, ah …

(air quotes) “heavily implying”

the , ah, you know …

particular…

(taps side of nose)

ah, torrent

in

(eyebrow waggle)

ahem,

QUESTION?

Eh?

Ehhhhh?