abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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This. But I think it's better to use marine autopilot system as a comparison - aircraft autopilots are closely monitored by three people (two in the cockpit, one on the ground as air traffic control) and they are combined with all sorts of other automated systems such as ground proximity alerts/etc. Not really comparable to a car.

Autopilot in a boat traditionally just turns the steering wheel for you. And all it does is maintain a desired direction of travel. Not even a destination, just a direction. So when (not if) wind or currents steer you off course, you will have to take over the steering wheel. It also doesn't control speed. All it does, really, is allow you to keep travelling in approximately the right direction.

There are more advanced systems, but that's traditionally how autopilot works. It's very primitive and has been in use for over a hundred years.

Having said that, Tesla hasn't just used the word "autopilot". They also repeatedly refer to their system as "Full Self Driving". And it kinda does that, as long as there isn't a fire truck in the way.

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.

If you have low karma, then edits are reviewed by multiple people before the edit is saved. That's primarily in place to prevent spam, who could otherwise post a valid question then edit it a few months later transforming the message into a link to some shitty website.

Even with high karma, that just means your edit is temporarily trusted. It's gets reviewed and will be reverted if it's a bad edit.

And any time an edit is reverted, that's a knock against your karma. There's a community enforced requirement for all edits to be a measurable improvement.

Even moderation decisions are reviewed by multiple people - so if someone rejects a post because it's spam, when they should have rejected it because it's off topic (or approved it) then that is also going to be caught and undone. And any harmful contribution (edit or moderation decision) will result in your action being undone and your karma going down. If your karma goes down too fast, your access to the site is revoked. If you do something really bad, then they'll ban your IP address.

Moderators can also lock a controversial post, so only people with high karma can touch it at all.

... keep in mind Stack Overflow doesn't just allow editing your own posts, you can edit any content on the website, similar to wikipedia.

It's honestly a good overall approach, but around when Jeff Attwood left in 2008 it started drifting off course towards the shit show that is stack overflow today.

The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There's a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it's used more.

And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want... though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.

The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn't do that.

Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.

Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn't encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.

That's a real problem for sure, but I'm not a fan of the solution.

They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.

Here in Australia we've gone down that path though there was no actual lawsuit. We just saw problems starting to creep in and dealt with it proactively. The vast majority of network infrastructure is now owned by a company called "NBN Co" (National Broadband Network) which is required to provide the best available network technology to every single household/business in the country. All pre-existing network operators were forced to sell their infrastructure to NBN Co and any business can provide services to anyone for a reasonable fee paid to NBN Co. Mostly it's broadband internet, but literally anything can go over the pipes. The fee varies depending on the bandwidth and QoS level.

They are also investing in network upgrades, including state of the art DSL routers that can run at decent speeds for most people (I get about 80Mbps) and all new connections are Fibre as well as existing connections are gradually moving to Fibre (on those, you can usually get 10Gbps). Each building can have multiple connections, at least four but large buildings obviously get more. If you live in the middle of the desert with no wired networking at all, then you get a wireless one. Satellite if necessary, though usually it will be "fixed wireless" which is basically cellular with large/high quality a rooftop antenna.

NBN Co is tax payer funded, but mostly only to accelerate fibre installations. Aside from that upfront capital expenditure it is profitable and some of those profits are paying off the tax payer's uprfront investment.

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.

They’re the ones using their devices all day for work or similar.

I spend about 10 hours a day doing "real work" - writing software - on a desktop Mac with an M1 chip. It's way faster than I need. Having even more power than that in an iPad? Overkill is an understatement.

I get why they're using an M4 — supply chain / economy of scale works better if you have most of your hardware on the latest chipset and also the M1 is missing some important features. Also the M2 was basically an M1 and the M3 used a particularly expensive manufacturing process that was only really sensible for high margin products like the MacBook Pro... so that leaves M4 as the best choice. But for me the marketing is missing the mark by focusing so much on CPU performance. Just say "it's really fast" and move on to other things, leave the exact details for the spec sheet.

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.

Sure but I already charge my iPad about once a week and it's never flat - 13 hours for video playback if you watch one or two TV episodes a day goes a long way.

I guess they could add a smaller battery, but I don't think that would reduce the weight by much — it's pretty small.

What iPads really need is better software. Safari, for example, is vastly inferior to the Mac version. And don't even get me started with how window management works on an iPad. It's total garbage.

Maybe with better software, I'd use it for something more computationally demanding than watching TV.

OpenAI isn't doing that - they're just making it available to a small group of experts to kick the tyres and provide feedback before it goes public.

It's journalists who are hyping it up. Somehow making "someone is doing AI research" into a story.

Google doesn't own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.

So even if Google gives a project a "special deal" it's still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it's better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to the level of detail OSM has. Compare these two screenshots — the Google map has so much less detail it's not even recognisable as the same place. Roads and major features are missing or drawn in the wrong place.

It was great, in 2017

It hasn't stopped being great. In fact it's better than it ever was.

We need better safe guards and checks so that some person can’t just delete France.

The map is updated millions of times per day. There are checks in place, but minor edits don't get much review especially if it's something simple like "this street has a bus stop". Deleting France, yeah someone would notice that change and block it. Most software doesn't use the realtime map state - they use a slightly older version of the map in part to avoid using a version of the map that has been compromised.

You really only see the current map state if you are editing the map.

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.

When I think of “influencer” this is the image in my mind.

... OK. But that's not what the term "Influencer" actually means. The actual definition is basically just "anyone with a lot of followers".

And there are plenty of people with a lot of followers who produce great content. For example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU

How would that ruin it?