Skip Navigation

User banner
Posts
0
Comments
226
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Couldn't agree more, but I'm just highlighting it seems like a much more profitable and attainable commercial goal for them in the short term than trying to enter the vehicle manufacturing space as a competitor. The fact there's an awesome open source project tackling this idea already (thanks for the link - I didn't know this existed!) says it's viable.

    They've already dipped their toes in with Car Play/Android Auto and have the relationships with third party vehicle manufacturers, so this seems like a logical next step. Perhaps that's what they're actually doing by shifting their car team to AI.

  • Instead of trying to make a full electric car, I'm surprised Apple and Google aren't focusing on making a smart AI "head unit" that's compatible with third party car manufacturers. The head unit would control all aspects of the car through the CAN bus and also take camera/sensor inputs from the exterior of the vehicle, and be responsible for things like self-driving, lane assist and all those difficult AI-based features.

    This way the car manufacturers could focus on what they do best (building safe reliable hardware) and outsource all the hard AI software problems to tech companies who specialise in this area.

  • As an engineer who's spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it's really not that bad. You're generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else's dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.

  • WhatsApp is closed source, and obviously it must be able to decrypt messages for the end user to read them. Anything could happen to the unencrypted data at this point. Therefore it's less secure allowing conversations to flow into that app.

  • Once you're in the industry and see the typical shitshow that goes on in most companies and teams, you won't think twice about not hearing anything for 3 months. There's a million reasons why you won't get a job or not hear back for a really long time that have nothing to do with you. Stick with it, times are tough right now but your luck will eventually change.

  • I like to remind juniors that you can only become an expert on something temporarily, especially on large teams/projects. Between skill atrophy and the foundations shifting beneath your feet as other developers continue working, it's not possible to truly understand a complex system in a state of flux for very long.

  • We should see an improvement in game quality for the platform once last-gen sales drop off enough that developers only need to target current-gen.

    Right now any game that comes out for both PS4+5 is bottlenecked by PS4 memory and performance, with only easy wins taken for PS5 like higher quality assets and faster IO/FPS.

    Designing a game for current-gen platforms from the ground up is when we'll start to see some more impressive features, but there's still money on the table for PS4 so it'll be a few years (IMHO) before we see PS5 exclusives as the norm.

  • We don't even need to choose! Just use hours, months, years, decades! But no, Barbie movies.

  • A programmer sitting in front of a text-based IDE with millions of keyboard shortcuts at their disposal has to be the least necessary use case for a voice assistant I've ever heard of.

  • Glass arrived on the scene in 2013. Since then recording in public has become much more normalised... smartphone camera use, cars with dashcams and CCTV/face recognition have all increased in popularity. YouTubers, live streamers, creators etc. If it were released again today, I'm not sure it would achieve the same hatred it did back then, at least on the "creepy camera in public" point.

  • It's a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. The two options I had were an IR blaster or a DIY ESPhome-based module plugged directly into the unit that controls it over the SPI bus. I opted for the latter as it gives full status info in addition to control.

    I've also got a Samsung unit in another room that I can control. For that one I use SmartThings... not ideal as it goes through the cloud, but I'll take what I can get.

    If you've got an old-school heater, you might have luck with some of the smart thermostats designed to be retrofitted into old houses.

    Edit: just looked up your heaters online. Since you've got a lot of them, and they look pretty old, I'm guessing the smart controllers are just acting as relays. So yeah perhaps an ESP32 relay module would be the way to go! Once you've got the code working for one, you could roll them out to the rest. You'd need some confidence working with relays and electronics of course.

  • The simplest automations are the best. An hour before I typically get up, if the bedroom is too cold, turn on the heater.

  • "Am I so out of touch?"
    ...
    "No, it's the customers who are wrong!"

  • I refer you to the coal mines being built in Australia.

  • Remember when light bulbs used to last decades? A phone battery that lasts that long is incompatible with capitalism.

  • I'd much rather they invest efforts into supporting customisable phones. Instead of just releasing a few flavours of the same hardware each year, give us a dozen features we can opt into or not. Pick a base size, then pick your specs. Want a headphone jack, SD card, FM radio, upgraded graphics performance? No problems, that'll cost a bit extra. Phones are boring now - at least find a way to meet the needs of all consumers.