• 1 Post
  • 80 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • It seems like there’s a market for a company that will buy Teslas ultra cheap, modifies them heavily, then rebadges them like Alpine does for Renault, AMG does / did for Mercedes, Abarth for Fiat, etc.

    These days those are all subsidiaries of the main brand, and even before that they had a cooperative relationship with the main brand. But, I can imagine a setup where the main brand doesn’t support or approve of what the modifier company does.






  • They don’t support sending messages over a serial / USB / network connection to say “battery is almost dead, shut down cleanly while you can” right? As far as I can tell, that’s the one key feature that a UPS has that a portable battery doesn’t.

    I took a look the other day and was amazed at how little UPSes have improved in the last few decades vs. everything else battery-related.

    At this point, I’d expect a consumer-grade UPS to have something like a Raspberry PI attached, and run a web server. I’d expect it to not just have a serial port for signaling, but to be able to run custom BASH scripts to send messages out to any attached device warning it about being on battery and keeping it up to date on the battery status.



  • I don’t think it’s an “obsession with cars” or that people are “ignoring” electrified rail.

    The problem is that there are things that are in your direct control, like buying a car and using the roads which exist. Then, there are things outside your direct control, like trying to get your government to install electrified rail. Even if you have a really responsive government that isn’t captured by special interests, getting rail built and up and running can take a decade. And, if you need to get from A to B, you can’t wait for a decade. Even if you’re really pro-rail during that decade you still need to travel, so you’re likely to be forced into getting a car. Once you have a car, then rail might become less of a priority because you are now a car user. Maybe eventually you’ll still want to use the rail system, but for now you have a car, so your priorities are still going to include car priorities.

    This all changes if you live somewhere where there’s already great rail service. In that case, you might already have rail available when you move somewhere and all you need to do is encourage your local government to keep funding rail and not subsidizing cars. At that point, the car driver demographic is small and easy to ignore.

    The problem is in switching from one system to the other. You need a government that is going to weather the complaints from drivers for years while the rail infrastructure is being put in place until you get to a point where drivers can start selling their cars and switching to rail. That’s really hard to do though, because going from poor rail infrastructure to good rail infrastructure can take a decade, and politicians often have terms lasting only 4 years or so. That means that they have to take on the expense and pain of starting a rail project and then facing an election long before the system is up and running. It’s actually surprising how many politicians are willing to do that, given that it’s so hard on their political careers. It’s unsurprising that most of them don’t want to do it because it means getting re-elected is much more difficult than if they just stick with the status quo.

    Meanwhile, the special interests like car companies, car dealerships, gas stations, etc. are all going to be lobbying against any rail projects. In North America it’s even harder because car companies are local, whereas the companies that make trains are mostly European. So, the car-related lobby can talk all about the impact on local jobs, whereas the rail lobby has to deal with the jobs mostly being in Europe. Even without that, it’s hard to change things because of the issue of diffuse costs and concentrated interests. Hundreds of thousands of commuters might benefit from a rail system, but it’s probably not their #1 priority, it’s something they care about, but at best it’s #4 or #5. Meanwhile for car companies, etc. it’s a top priority. While you might not want to go to every city council meeting where this is being discussed. It’s almost certain that the auto lobby will ensure their voice is heard because it’s at the top of their list.

    In the end, it’s a lot more complex than just people being obsessed with cars, or ignoring light rail.


  • It will slightly improve the chances. But, is that enough?

    Imagine you had an intern working with you on a project. They didn’t know anything about SQL injection, cross site scripting, etc. You probably wouldn’t give them a task where that was a concern. If you did, you’d watch them like a hawk. Because they’re an intern, the amount of code they’d produce would probably be pretty low, and it would be pretty low-quality overall, so it would be easy to spot mistakes that would lead to these kinds of vulnerabilities.

    An LLM has the understanding of the problem space that an intern does, but produces vast amounts of code extremely quickly. That code is designed to “blend in”, i.e. it’s specifically trained to look like good code, whether it is or not. Because of “vibe coding”, people trust it to do all kinds of things, including implement bits where there’s a danger of XSS or SQL injection. And the way Claude Code ensures it doesn’t generate those vulnerabilities is… someone says “hey, don’t do that, ok?”

    Having that statement in there is better than not having it. But, it’s just a reminder that these things aren’t appropriate for writing production code. They don’t actually understand what XSS or SQL injection are, and they can’t learn. They don’t know why it’s important. They don’t have a technique for checking if their code actually has those vulnerabilities, other than passing it to themselves recursively and asking that other version of themselves to generate some text that might flag if those vulnerabilities were spotted. But, AIs are famously sycophantic so even recursively using itself, it will generate text to “please” itself and probably write something like “your code is great and I can’t spot any vulnerabilities at all! Congratulations! [Emoji] [Emoji] [Emoji]”


  • To me what’s wild about it is that it’s completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.

    You’d think that they’d say “Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let’s just make this a park”, or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.







  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlHow did your country vote?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    11 days ago

    Sadly, I would bet that it’s the jewish lobby that pushed a lot of countries to oppose this. They have this need to make the holocaust be the worst thing that has ever happened to any people in the history of time.

    The holocaust certainly bad, it’s among the worst mass killings of all time, and the fact that it happened in relatively modern times makes it worse because the world generally isn’t as brutal as it once was. Is it worse than the Mongol invasions, which may have killed more than 10% of the entire world’s population at the time? Worse than historical wars in China which killed tens of millions at a time when the entire world’s population was under 200 million? Where would you rank African slavery in that? Is it less bad because fewer people died, or worse because there are things worth than death? I don’t really think it should be something you rank at all. And, I’d also oppose any attempt to rank any of them as “the gravest crime against humanity”, because what’s the point of that?