• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • So they progressively increase closing force if it keeps detecting something but the owner keeps trying to close it. I can vaguely see the reasoning only if they aren’t confident in the frunk sensor for some reason. I mean garage doors solved this problem forever ago without having to resort to something like that.

    I wonder if the “vision-based everything” mandate from Musk applies outside of autonomous driving features? Makes sense to not be confident in it if it’s just a camera…


  • To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube directly censoring the phrase. They aren’t known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.

    What is happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves…because YouTube’s policy around monetization. They’ll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.

    Indirectly, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which will ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that might be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.

    Genuinely the power TikTok and it’s advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear “unalive” instead of “suicide” these days. “Pdf” (or others) instead of “pedophile.” The list goes on.


  • Instead of pretending One Man With A Gun is going to do something

    I used to agree with this train of thought, why be armed when the government has tanks?

    But the realities of the past several years have shown us that an armed rebellion can be significantly more powerful. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at Myanmar today where the rebel groups are literally 3D printing carbines. A guerilla group with small arms can put serious pressure on a modern military. Will lots of them die? Probably. Will they “win”? Probably not, but they could easily wear down the enemy with attrition. When you need to move a couple dozen men with rifles it’s an entirely different game than coordinating 12 tanks and 500 men, you can employ completely different tactics. Especially on your home turf that you know inside and out.

    Is an armed rebellion happening anytime soon? I sure hope not. But the threat that an armed populace can at the least put some serious hurt on a military/government is a deterrent to tyranny. Just the possibility of it is a huge deterrent, compared to authoritarian countries where citizens aren’t armed and get run over by tanks.

    I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a huge problem, but saying armed citizenry is zero deterrent is just factually untrue.







  • This is a pretty big overstatement.

    DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

    This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

    What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

    This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

    If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

    Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.





  • You’d think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space

    Someone above posted an article saying they aren’t actually. But you’d be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They’re highly compressible since they’re just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that’s the idea)




  • I have not researched these specific cases, so may be wrong about them.

    You’re not obligated to do research on every individual bill the political parties push and what rider clauses they slip into unrelated bills. That’s fine.

    You, however, should have research and examples to back it up if you’re gonna “both sides” this. The Democratic party is far far far from perfect or what I would want, but at the very least most of them seem to be campaigning in good faith or at the least not inciting actual violence and treason.

    Saying “so may be wrong about them” isn’t a free pass. Know that people read what you say, and we have a huge problem of political apathy (circa 2016) due to the constant repetition of “but both sides are the same.” Let’s please not exacerbate it unless we’re bringing facts and evidence to the table.


  • 12V sealed lead-acid batteries are a standard size and chemistry… They are absolutely not comparable to a BEV battery. The lithium ion 12V batteries are built to the emissions standards and regulations of the 12V lead acid, that’s a known quantity and a hell of a lot less energy. BEV batteries contain kwH of energy, they are significantly larger, are a nonstandard size on every single vehicle. Even if Toyota made it the same size and shape, the energy density might be enough to fail EMC regulations (without having to change the size and shape)

    I don’t know what else to tell you man, I work on electric vehicles for my job. Literally an engineer. You can choose to not believe me but it just isn’t anywhere near as simple as you’re acting like it is. Just because you think it’s like swapping an alkaline AA for a NiZn AA doesn’t make it true.


  • Different battery chemistries do not behave identically in terms of failure modes, EMC emissions and interference response, and tons of other things. Just swapping one battery for another has a huge effect even before you consider auxiliary components like charging circuitry.

    My assumptions as to why you can just drop in an aftermarket battery and crate motor into an existing ICE vehicle (also, far from any vehicle, it is a relatively niche product) are that A. The batteries are way smaller and aren’t structural to the frame the way they are in BEV-first designs (but this is how we get good range out of them). B. The companies selling these probably aren’t held to the same emissions standards that an automaker is.

    Again, these are assumptions, I don’t work in conversions but in BEV designs primarily. I know there’s a ton of red tape for us to even think about changing battery chemistry, and we 100% would have to get all new certifications for it.


  • What certification does it need other than be certified by Toyota for use?

    Engineer in the automotive industry here. Vehicles need a ton of certification by tons of different governments and face very strict regulation.

    Just a battery alone is going to be subject to lots of EMC emissions and interference tests. Then you have the capability to survive crashes, fail operational requirements, how does the battery fail (does it explode or just disconnect itself?), etc. etc. These are all dependent on the chassis the battery is in, so they can’t just swap it into an existing chassis and say “Oh it worked with battery A, it’ll work with battery B.” Unfortunately the requirements are just way too strict for that.

    Additionally I can’t go into details but the sentiment others are echoing of “If it’s coming in 2028 they should have a functioning prototype” are true in my experience. It takes several years to design and release a car, and when you’re introducing a new battery tech or drive train or similar changes it takes even longer.