The problem is the Big 3 aren't making vehicles the world wants. In their pursuit of profit, they built bigger and bigger vehicles tot he point where a pickup can have a 20 foot blindspot... in the front. Tall hoods let you hide a whole car and a half.

Sure, they're making profitable vehicles, but the imports are eating them in the areas they abandoned because they didn't make so much profit. And when they try to compete now, it's a hot mess.

If you like pickups and SUVs, sure, the Big 3 are making tons of money. if you want a sedan or other vehicle that maybe stretches your gas dollar a bit more, an import is what you want.

China heavily invested in EV production and batteries, and CATL is one of the leading manufacturers of batteries as well as investing heavily in sodium-ion technology to produce safer, cheaper and better for the environment batteries.

Probably not. "The knowledge" is far more than just a mental map of London's roads, it's knowledge of things like how those roads are at the present time of day and what the best routes are.

I think Tom Scott did a video where he competed with a London taxi driver on how to get between places - the taxi driver using his knowledge, Tom using a GPS. I think the taxi driver won by about half an hour simply because knowing where the traffic jams were and how to get around them.

Do people really use their laptops on battery that much? I tend to sit at desks and not 'Neath the oak tree at the top of the hill.

Yes, but do you bring an adapter with you?

Long battery life can easily mean you just take the laptop home to do work from home, rather than the laptop and adapter. (Sure, you could buy an adapter and keep it at home...). Or if you're someone who visits offices to do presentations at client sites, or you travel to various offices you don't have to bring an adapter with you.

Or it also means you could do Real Work(tm) and get 6-8 hours doing it - compiling your software, or video editing etc. 24 hours generally implies very light tasks - work precessing, web browsing, etc. Anything that might consume CPU cycles your battery can drain much more quickly. So 24 hours of light usage can easily mean 6-8 hours of heavy processing.

There are two groups of people angry about Tron Ares I find.

First are movie critics, but that's been the case for a lot of blockbuster movies. It's just a movie that gives you a couple of hours of escapism where you leave your world and get into the movie. Turn off your brain, veg out a bit and enjoy the ride.

The second group are Tron fans who are really into the lore and are basically angry that the movie that was supposed to follow Legacy was cancelled (because Tomorroworld failed badly). Ares is not really a sequel to Legacy - it draw s bit from Legacy, draws more from the original.

But it was a fun movie - and I suggest seeing it on the largest screen you can - real IMAX if you can. And if you can do it in 3D, even better - the IMAX 3D presentation is excellent. If you can't, I suggest going to a Dolby Cinema over a Liemax screen, again preferably in 3D and likely with all the bells and whistles you can get (e.g., D-BOX).

Of course, the sad bit is because the 3D is really good, we'd likely not see a 3D home release other than maybe what Turbine or Japan has.

If you're angry Jared Leto is the main guy and you'll never see it, I suggest opening your mind. Leto's performance is wonderful in the movie and honestly understated.

Honestly, I spent $25 for the IMAX 3D, and I felt it was worth the money. I have wasted $25 and more on worst things in my life, watching Tron Ares is not going to be one of them.

Once the update is downloaded the infotainment board waits for the car's main systems to be available and then updates those as well - it's the whole 'Over The Air Update' that marketing loves to push - and why many think it's doomed to cause failure or safety issues.

The problem is most people are driving their cars when the main system is powered... So now it does the update while in motion? That's a very bad design. And now you see why.

The problem is several.

First, OTA updates allow many recalls to take place with zero action on the customer part - Teslas are famous for this and they fought with the NHTSA because NHTSA requires recall notifications even for recalls fixed via OTA updates. (They also track which cars have had recall fixes applied - so you can enter a VIN and tell if there are any outstanding recalls that have not been fixed). This bookkeeping is needed because maybe your car is somewhere where the OTA update was not applied and thus is missing a patch.

Not having to involve the customer is good for the customer - they don't have to schedule time with a dealer and wait several hours for the fixes to be applied - it happens while they're not using the car while it's parked at home. No driving to a dealer or taking half a day because that's the only time they have.

It's also good on dealers who don't have to schedule a "free" service appointment - sure they recall is paid work for them, but it's at 50% of the normal billing price. So the dealership doesn't have to deal with required service that barely pays the bills.

Updates are never done while the car is active unless the user confirms it. Normally the user confirms it and it takes place when the car is turned off. Given the various modules will need to reboot to run the new software, this has to take place while the car is off. Basically the "key" doesn't actually control power - it's just a signal. You turn off the car, the systems are still powered up - just in a lower power state. After an hour, they turn off. This is why many things are often "ready to go" really quickly if you recently turned off the car, while it takes a little while longer if you left the car off overnight.

Have you ever wondered why have cars got so big? Why do we have more SUVs? It's because emission norms take into account the class (size) of the vehicle. All the powerful engines couldn't get away with getting into the right brackets so many manufectures instead decided to keep the same engine/power/emissions but make the car bigger so that it can squeeze under the right limit.

That's in the US due to EPA regulations or CAFE.

But the real reason is profits - because the big car trend started with the American automakers in the 90s where CAFE was much less of a deal. It's just that big trucks and SUVs made a lot more money than sedans and small cars. After all, you can tell people complain about EVs costing $50,000 when a new econobox costs $20K. Ford/GM/Chrysler of course would rather you buy that luxury SUV for $50K where they make far more money than that $20K econobox. It only costs just a tiny bit more to build it, but the margins are way better.

It's why the Big 3 don't really do small cars or sedans, and the ones they do generally suck outside of a few specialized ones like muscle cars.

If you're American, then Buy Ford/GM/Chrysler is basically in your DNA (despite the last two being foreign owned), so you've been forced to go along with buying the more expensive vehicles because the cheap ones are crap and the dealer would also want you to buy the bigger vehicle.

Meanwhile the rest of the world are making smaller vehicles that run great and are fuel efficient and making a profit.

The Japanese don't want to buy an F-150 that is larger than their famous Klei trucks and is far less nimble or practical on Tokyo streets. Meanwhile, Toyota makes nice sedans that get good mileage with great quality that satisfy the portion of the American population who either cannot afford a big vehicle, don't want to drive a big vehicle, or need a car to go down congested city streets easier than a literal tank.

It's not hard to see why - a GPS satellite isn't a really powerful thing - think of it as just a lightbulb transmitting signals and you're basically seeing how strong the signal is. It's basically in the noise by the time it reaches earth.

The other problem is the signal geometric dictates how accurate it is - a city with tall buildings means you only have a very narrow view of the sky, and that narrow view leads to large GPS errors. It's why everyone uses wifi and tower trilateration to get a better position.It works pretty well especially with wifi since it's relatively short range and a simple scan of what you can see can often locate you quite precisely especially since a dense urban area will generally have lots of it around.

In a city with skyscrapers, your narrow view of the sky is a huge problem, regardless of what GNSS system you use - you just don't have a good view of the sky.

Even XM satellite radio, who use some of the highest power radio transmitters available dpesn't work well in urban areas because of the narrow view of the sky blocks access to a lot of satellites. It's why they have to use terrestrial repeaters in cities

Satellite services need sky to work.

Toxic workplaces aren't new. In fact, they're probably as old as work itself.

The rise in toxic workplaces is like the rise in autism - it's always been there, we're just way more aware of it now and things you could get away with 30 years ago is no longer acceptable in any workplace today.

RTO has nothing to do with it, it just amplifies it.

Toxic workplaces are what gave rise to "work to rule" or its more contemporary name, "quiet quitting". As in there's no longer any reason to go above and beyond at the workplace - you won't get that promotion, your raise will be minimal, so why bother putting in excess effort? And if your workplace is toxic, you put in even less.

As in you don't even give it 100%. You put in just enough to not get fired while using the rest of your capacity to look for another job.

China has started to go through such a reckoning, because the business culture is very capitalistic and you have people rejecting work altogether (something helped by the low cost of living so survival is fairly easy on a small budget).

The US, which has traditionally more worker protections (few as they may be) might be undergoing something similar where toxic workplaces are just simply called out, and like places forcing RTO, they will likely have to pay more for their employees to recruit and retain them.

It's also not innovative because solar powered EVs have been around since the Tesla Roadster.

You know, solar panels on roofs have been a thing for a long time, and it's not a huge stretch to take the power they make, and shove it in an EV. Viola, solar powered EV.

Sure it's not a car with built in solar panels, but the average area of a car does not provide enough power to go anywhere - given practical shading and other aspects, you might get a kilowatt or two out of the solar panels. A car with a 50kWh battery would take several days of full sunshine to charge. It's L1 charger speeds, at best. Except instead of being able to use your car during the day you have to charge it during the day in the sun and then use it at night, versus plugging it in to an L1 charger at night letting it charge while you sleep.

You're far better off with fixed solar panels on the roof and channelling that energy into the battery of your EV.

My brother built an electric bike using cheap lithium batteries he bought online. The guide he followed said the system was smart and safe, with no need to worry or really understand how it worked. One night, the bike caught fire in our garage. Lithium fires burn fast and hot, and you cannot put them out with water. By the time firefighters arrived, the garage was destroyed and part of the house was burning. My brother got third-degree burns trying to pull the bike outside.

Lithium ion batteries do not cause lithium fires. If that was the case you should be concerned about the several pounds of sodium that's sitting in your kitchen right now.

Lithium ion batteries have several weaknesses - and they catch fire not from lithium ions, but the stored energy which creates an internal short circuit that rapidly generates a lot of heat. Couple that with flammable electrolyte and cell materials that contains oxidizers and you get the recipe for a fire. The lithium itself is fairly stable in its ionic form and it's very reluctant to replace the lost electron.

It's not the lithium - because if you take a discharged battery and a charged battery and puncture them, the discharged battery (or really, anything below 50% charge) will at best spew a little contents out. meanwhile the charged battery produces exciting fireworks.

Lithium primary cells though do contain actual metallic lithium and are exciting, but their expense and non-rechargeable nature mean they are not very prevalent.

As for your kitchen - sodium in the form of table salt. Sodium chloride, which has both the reactive sodium metal plus the poisonous gas chlorine, but together is rather innocuous other than giving you high blood pressure.

If you have dodgy cells, if you're willing to give up half their capacity, they will not cause a fire even when damaged as at 50% they do not have enough energy stored to discharge with flame.

Nevermind. The problem was my /tmp ramdisk was full. I guess Fedora uses tmpfs by default and it's a fixed size. This has bit me before. Wonder if I can change it back to a normal directory on the disk.

No, tmpfs is not ramfs. It's called tmpfs because it's a self-resizing RAM disk - it takes more RAM the more stuff you put in there, and shrinks when you delete stuff, which is great for /tmp and other temporary file storage. It does have a limit of up to half the physical RAM installed, but that shouldn't be a huge issue on a modern system.

tmpfs might fail if there's no more RAM available which can happen if there's a lot of stuff going on, which likely might have lots of stuff in /tmp so it's a double whammy of low RAM and lots of temp files clogging things up.

While true, it's also potentially risky especially in a high profile case where pretrial coverage can reach a lot of people.

As example, if for some reason part of the evidence publicly disclosed will be ruled inadmissible for trial, jury selection would be significantly impacted as it might become very problematic to find an unbiased jury.

Or it's likely that it's evidence they aren't going to use because it's so circumstantial it's worthless. "We found our suspect, he had ChatGPT and location history putting him in the area".

They likely have far more convincing evidence than that and hearsay from the passengers.

All that's basically been revealed is "We found a suspect, and evidence points to him being in the area where the fire started". It's not criminal level airtight evidence, and any good lawyer can poke holes at that (well, so were dozens of other people that were in the area), so it's general enough to not taint the pool.

Presumably he was in the area. But likely so were many more people - he didn't happen to be the only person there at that time.

The prosecutor's job is to convince the jury that it could only be this person, and likely the evidence they release isn't even close to it.

Contrast that with Luigi Mangione who has had the President and his DoJ secretary all call him a murderer, which is tainting the jury pool because they're associating him with murder from the get go.

All the police have done here is say he's a suspect who had this amount of circumstantial evidence tying him to the fires. If you can concoct a plausible story to cast doubt, the jury's not tainted.

He's only a suspect. Whereas Luigi Mangione has been called repeated a murderer to the point it's tainted the jury pool. It's why Trump repeats his words a lot - repetition drills it until it becomes "truth", and having the top people say it basically makes it true. He might walk simply because the administration simply couldn't shut up. (He could also walk simply by jury nullification - especially with health insurance premiums doubling or tripling in 2026)

I were at a job interview with company make these Internet of Trash things. Of course, a lot was cloud, but they actually were also looking for embedded skils as they also want to move as much as possible into the devices such they could work without internet. But then: without a local websiervr, the configuration probably couldn't be changed without a cloud backend.

You don't need a webserver for configuration. Presumably the devices were getting configuration information from somewhere, and if that part is documented, you're all set.

Because when the cloud shuts down, you release those docs, and then let people figure out how to redirect the configuration requests then go on from there. Within a month someone will have a internet DNS service that redirects to their web configuration thing.

Just tell people how to do it and let the hackers figure it out.

I'm reading a lot of "it's simple, just get a...". If you read the article, it says they're "associated with an early Mac computer". That almost certainly means these a GCR formatted disks, and need a drive that can do variable speed rotation.

It's not impossible obviously, but it's likely the best way to do this is with a vintage Mac itself. Which then implies hooking up a mass storage device of some kind to that Mac so that it can be transferred to something more modern. So not super rare and impossible, but definitely fiddly.

You don't need a variable speed drive. You can read the flux transitions and timing information using a standard 300RPM drive.

The only reason you have a variable speed drive is because the chips of the day couldn't decode fast enough - they relied on PLLs to achieve the bit timing and the raw bitrate at the outer edges was too fast for the PLLs to lock so it requires the drive motor to spin slower.

Amigas did that for high density floppies - they spun at 150RPM to keep the bit time within Paula's limits, making it a neat hack (HD floppies have a bit time that's half that of DD - 1us/bit vs 2us/bit)

Modern hardware and software can decode this quite easily so a flux image of a floppy is trivial to recover from.

You only need a 2x2 to solve a 3x3 because the center cubes don't move. You only have top CW/CCW, bottom CW/CCW, left CW/CCW and righ CW/CCW which are all the moves a 2x2 can do as well. You don't move the middle. (i.e., twisting the top two CW is the same as bottom CCW)

It has accelerometers and gyros so it can detect which is twisting and which is staying still and assuming that's the one you plan on turning

If you're learning basic technique, aka "the algorithms", it'll suffice. Once you get those down to more advance cube manipulation you will want to do it on a proper cube because once you do it for speed, a digital simulation won't suffice.

The other issue with a 3x3 cube is the magnifude of difficulty increase - a 2x2 has 24 displays. A 3x3 has 54, this is 125% more displays that need to be updated and managed and getting the engineering challenge of pieces that rotate and move is much more complex. It would be easier to give each cube its own independence (2 or 3 displays each plus processor and battery) so you only have to route power to all of them (a not hard problem) and have really short range wireless to communicate with them all.