Happy Valentine’s Day!
Got any fun plans? Or is it not your jam?
If at first you don’t succeed…
House Republicans impeach Mayorkas by a single vote
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/13/mayorkas-impeachment-seccond-house-vote/
Gift article because this is wild.
Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first ‘Full Self-Driving’ fatality
https://wapo.st/3UD1Iu2
Oh FFS
CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/02/13/covid-isolation-guidelines-cdc-change/
Sprots!
Arrest made in theft of Jackie Robinson statue in Wichita, police say
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/13/jackie-robinson-statue-stolen-wichita-park
Aww sad traders
Dow tumbles more than 500 points, on pace for worst sell-off since March: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/12/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
IDK but I can’t stop laughing
Have a great day!
That Dunkin’ piece was priceless. Did you know that there’s a Dunkin’ University?
My heart burns for you. Be mine.
Also, your lead image of the candy hearts. How romantic. “Stay safe.” “Speak soon.” “Very best.” Like something you’d tell a client you don’t know very well.
As for the Tesla Story.
“No hands? You think I’m fucking stupid, Hans?”
Drunk and trusting your life on beta software? Yikes!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m not surprised by the company’s response either.
He was drunk at the time. That’s a complication I haven’t heard before — drunks using a Tesla as their designated driver.
The video is horrifying — it’s a Tesla, it’s going to be burning for hours.
We’ve got driver assist in my wife’s car. We finally turned it off because it kept trying to correct us when we changed lanes. Basically, we got nervous that we’d need to swerve abruptly to avoid another car or something in the road, and the car would fight us. And that’s mild compared to what Teslas do.
I think I mentioned once I ran into a guy who was suing Tesla because he was hit while walking in a crosswalk. It was on autopilot and the woman in the drivers seat registered over the level for a DUI.
I hate driver’s assist. I had one in a car I rented and I turned the fucking thing off after a similar incident.
Sure I might be aggressive, but I know what the fuck I’m doing. I trust me (even if no one else does.)
…in more than one case I can think of among people I know personally features that one would find useful…or even a godsend…are an invitation to another to be an absolute liability on the road
…arguably I could have said the same thing about cruise control, I suppose…but where that was just a simple version of the inattentive driver problem the permutations of settings these days suggests to me that if people were able to cherry-pick the ones that suit them a lot of people might be quite happy with them…but a lot of the people I know that I think that would be true of are also among the least likely to have developed the necessary familiarity with how to go about it…or really understand what the systems would do or how to know if they’re okay to assume they’ll kick in
…it’s a lot to really get a feel for & most people I know get in a car when they have places to be & aren’t going to drive a few hundred miles just to have a shakedown & test out the features & the difference between switching them on & off in different combinations under different scenarios…some of which you can “road test” & some you kind of have to triangulate based on how stuff works when you aren’t threatening to cause an accident
…& even then…big difference between being able to see how it might work & having confidence that you’re on top of how to operate the interface…it’s not like fog lights or high beams…which is ironic since one of the features that would help other people out if someone I know used it are clever headlights that don’t dazzle other drivers?
This is exactly why I will avoid buying a car with those “features” for a long as possible. I don’t need to be fighting my own car when I’m the one who is fucking driving.
…I sort of don’t really think about this all that often because after a certain number of times the claim that they’ll have it cracked within the year as a means of trying to boost interest &/or his stock price has become the equivalent of saying “we’re never going to figure this out”…but…I only recall seeing tesla-induced fatalities in the news
…which I guess might be because other cars come from companies with better lawyers & less dumbass CEOs so they aren’t vulnerable to the same charges of liability…or…I guess…because maybe the pool of tesla owners is self-selecting for relevant characteristics…who can say?
…but…a year or so one side or the other of the first time I remember him talking about self-driving teslas someone I know got a car with “driving assist” or some other name for a bunch of automated things you’d expect the driver to need to do…the fine print was very clear about how it in no way implied the driver got to pay any less attention than they should without it & ought to be ready to be doing all the driving at a split-second’s notice to a degree that suggested if you managed to fully comply you’d be a nervous wreck by the time it drove you to your destination…but presumably would hold up pretty well in front of lawyers &/or loss adjusters…& it was pretty clear that it could handle some circumstances & very much not others
…but…in slow moving traffic in town…or highway driving…it could steer, brake & accelerate (in an appropriate gear)…stay in lane…& maintain an even distance from the car in front…provided you had at least one finger in contact with the steering wheel & your full weight on the driver’s seat…so…tesla presumably has at least that level of thing down as well as all the other manufacturers
…the jump from there to “full self-drive”…absent a complete overhaul of every road surface to build in some sort of infrastructure so the car doesn’t need to figure it all out onboard…is almost entirely what people who develop AI talk about as “non-trivial” problems
…his grok AI on its diet of infinite shit-gibbons with infinite keyboards still seems wildly less likely to produce that equivalent to the complete works of shakespeare than just about any other AI model getting truckloads of investment & few curbs to the latest hardware
…so
…at what point does the liability come down squarely on the difference between over-promising sincerely & serially failing to deliver…& misrepresentation combined with mis-selling since the name of the product & the bulk of the way it’s presented makes it out to be something it isn’t…& encourages users/customers to use it in ways that are inappropriate to what they actually have in hand…because if that’s done knowingly…& It’s hard to see at this point how it could be otherwise…& the reason it continues to be done is because it’s financially advantageous when you come down to the bottom line
…that sounds like a class action law suit case study that could become a feature of law school curricula?
Ford dropped its full self-drive program a year and a half ago, and at the time took a $2.5 billion hit in their value.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/tech/ford-self-driving-argo-shutdown/index.html
I’m sure they understood the drop but did it anyway, which says something about where traditional analysis is leading.
I’m sure there’s a lot of “But Tesla!” thinking that keeps some people throwing money at them. What’s interesting to me is that over that same period Tesla’s overall value has flatlined even as the market overall has grown a lot. I would guess this is increasing the pressure for more PR to keep the bubble inflated, while traditional analysts are seriously hedging their bets.
…I’m basing this on a combination of things I’m told by people who know considerably more than I about machine learning & neural networks on the one hand & cars on the other…but those are different people so the potential for me to make a hash of it & not a viable alloy is pretty broad
…in any case…if you break it down as an engineering problem…the drive by wire tech & the amount of onboard “compute” is (& has been for a while) basically “there”…indeed in the senses that it’s a sort of logical extension of how things like fuel injection & ABS work leaving the driver out of the loop in some cases isn’t even really controversial & the benefits generally viewed as settled
…but feeding it the relevant real-time data…& what that is…& how to capture it & quantify it & process it with enough of a headstart to overcome the processing lag & intervene at the level of the usual control surfaces…that’s several sets of problems either nested or scrambled together in ways you may or may not be able to tease apart into individual problems you can code a solution to…I vaguely recall at one point tesla diverging from the consensus approach in terms of…I want to say a radar/lidar vs camera based approach…but even then it seems like for some stuff…like the corresponding information about other vehicles in the vicinity…the former has advantages…but for pulling out context like road layout or posted signs for things like speed limits or one-way systems…or obstacles…or pedestrians not necessarily interacting with the traffic-bearing portion of the route…the camera approach might have better odds…but even if you try both…which over-rides which when the same set of what the system considers equally weighted variables could go either way based on the inputs of the moment…that one problem doesn’t necessarily have a one-size fits all solution, either…so how many different ways to play it does the system need to have in its toolbox to be able to hit on the right match every time
…& every so often even if you’re winning you start to hit the limits of the hardware you’re building into the vehicle…so…whatever you do…like throw in a different sensor suite…or a bigger “brain” that runs faster…ceases to be backwards compatible the way that musk’s much touted “over the air” updates “fix” or upgrade features at the software (or possibly firmware) level
…if money were no object & you didn’t mind being driven about in a thing that bore little resemblance to a car…would only go some places & not others…& mostly slower than most people drive…you could probably cobble together an autonomous vehicle that wouldn’t get you or anyone else hurt…but you couldn’t sell enough of them to make them affordable to build in significant numbers, would be my guess
…meanwhile…china is coming for his lunch money
How China Built BYD, Its Tesla Killer [NYT]
…can’t say as it looks like there’s consensus on how the times bills BYD…but…it would track with how china has approached a lot of mass manufacturing processes?
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/s/0mexKOtGSi
[…it’s a reddit thread on the NYT thing…not exactly authoritative but one of the early comments when I skimmed it had a link to a site that tracks subsidies that pinned around $3billion to tesla in federal money…so there’s that?]
The obvious example would be completely replacing cars with an auto driver streetcar/bus system, which is very much possible, and has been implemented in a few places. If autonomous vehicles are on a separate path with limited, defined crossing points for pedestrians and bikes, the engineering and programming is vastly simpler.
But you’re right that you wouldn’t sell 100 million units with a $10,000 profit per unit in that model.
What I always find interesting is that there is relatively modest but still big market for autonomous vehicles in dedicated pathways. Places like airports, colleges, and amusement parks run a lot of shuttles, and you could easily see mass transit applications too. But the expectations in the finance sector for overwhelming profits, instead of more modest ones, puts a huge damper on smaller but smarter options.
…at the extreme end of the spectrum…if you had a circular thing with a 360° sensor cluster in a blister on the top…& another protruding all the way around the bottom like a running board…with maybe luggage space behind the seats & or in a central or ceiling-hung cargo net arrangement…with a waist/chest high buffer like a hovercraft skirt that stows its deflated self when the thing isn’t moving…& only moves the way it wants to absent being shoved out of the way by a pedestrian
…I figure nobody dies as a result
…but nobody buys one & the start-up that tries to introduce them to the e-scooter using market goes bust inside a year?
Also, if I may, I hate these stories because these are **NOT** the first Tesla auto-driving fatalities. It’s already killed a whole bunch of pedestrians, but apparently they don’t count or whatever.
Oh, look. Republicans lost again. OVERWHELMINGLY. And what was their platform? Oh, yeah, scary immigrants. While the new Democratic representative pushed the right to an abortion.
Democrat wins N.Y. special election, flipping House seat once held by Santos
It’s not an unalloyed victory. Suozzi represented that area for years, so he was very well known, and left the seat to run to Kathy Hokum’s right in the gubernatorial primary. His opponent…no one had ever heard of her. Oh well. Since everything in Congress is now done party-line, that’s one less vote that the loon from Louisiana can count on.
I mean, good for Suozzi, but this is the district that elected George Santos, you can’t really take too much from a lunatic group of voters.
Before polls closed, NY Times Pitchbot joked “If Democrats win today’s special election in NY-3, it’s further proof that special elections don’t mean anything. But if they lose, it’s very bad news for Biden in November.”
Right before the election, the Times ran a crazily one-sided article promoting the power of the local GOP “In the Land of George Santos, Machine Politics Fuels a G.O.P. Revival” so of course now their take is represented by Nate Cohn trying to explain why this is meaningless, not how their earlier take on the local GOP might have been seriously faulty.
The Times got embarassed when Santos won when it turned out they had ignored the race and hadn’t bothered to consider scoops by the local Long Island paper on Santos, and then they pointed the finger at their readers for not supporting the local press, which of course ignored the fact that the Times is the local paper for a district that represents NYC. But I’m sure their reasoning was “A district that includes Queens? You expect us to cover something in Queens?”
Onward!
…I…might have managed to skip on by…probably thanks to @bryanlsplinter‘s admonishments about polling…but I’m pretty sure the NYT ran a column the other day by nate silver of five thirty eight “fame”…technically I think it it was opining on the split between the data & “consumer confidence” rather than voter stuff directly…but I’m guessing you don’t have him on the call sheet if you’re planning to pivot away from your comfort zone on the approach to forecasting?
Krugman posted a great graph about his on Bluesky noting that 86% of Republicans think the economy is bad … which is to say, pretending that polling on consumer confidence is a pure, nonpartisan measure of anything is pretty dumb. But we are talking about Nate Silver.
My theory about that district is much of it is so wealthy (it’s the Five Towns/Great Gatsby area) that is doesn’t matter much to them who represents them. One phone call and the rep will hop to it, and if they don’t they’ll be hopped over and one of our Senators or some lobbyist will do their bidding. Chuck Schumer is certainly not unfriendly to the concerns of people with money. And the other one, Gyllenhaal or whatever her name is, doesn’t seem to do much of anything, so she must be working behind the scenes to pull some levers and trade some favors.
Oh, and plus also, that’s where we got the Faithful Hound from, the North Shore Animal League shelter in Port Washington, and his political leanings are unknown to me. He’s a very happy and sociable hound so I bet he would be a good Democratic Socialist. Not like this cranky elderly grump.
I have a cousin who lives in that district, and that picture is something out of the fever dreams of a NY Times opinion page writer. They think of it as either Archie Bunker or what followed after Gatsby was found floating in the pool, and that’s becase they think it’s beneath them to ever go there. The Post has its huge blind spots too.
I think you might be right. I’ve actually been to a few parties where NYT folks, including the top-line talent, were in attendance. I knew a lot of the copy editors. They all lived in either Manhattan or Brooklyn or Westchester. There are a couple of towns in New Jersey that are considered acceptable, like Summit, and Long Island is fine as long as it’s summer and you’re in the Hamptons, but otherwise, oh no no no no.
I love how Silver in his column said some liberals point to GOP partisanship as a factor in consumer confidence polling with a link to a very detailed study…. and then just handwaved it away!
Aggregating intentionally antirealistic opinion responses into an overall measure will absolutely skew results. He didn’t even bother to address the issue.
He weirdly also briefly mentioned future expectations as a drag, but nothing about how politics might affect that. Which leaves out an absolutely critical issue. Fear of Trump is a very realistic reason for pessimism about the economy in 2025 and beyond. The guy is promising to send the military into blue states to capture immigrants. His chaos would be a disaster.
Measures which incorporate future concerns are going to be massively affected by the press, no matter that Silver also handwaved away suggestions that consumer confidence were influenced by media bias toward negative reporting. The worse they cover Trump, the more likely future expectations among rational voters will grow.
This is why I read the New York Post. If I only read the Times I’d get a very slanted picture of what’s going on in the Knesset or at EU HQ in Brussels, but you wouldn’t know that the New York City Council exists. That’s also why I read Gothamist, which is the anti-New York Post.
So…instead of a very slanted view of what’s going on in the Knesset or EU HQ, you get a very slanted view of what’s going on here.
I do not actually read the Post that closely. I avoid the Opinion section at all costs. And they’re very tabloid-y “if it bleeds it leads,” which can be kind of thrilling. “Woman, 27, Strangled and Thrown off Balcony of Bronx Housing Development” but not particularly enlightening.
But when they delve into municipal malfeasance no one else comes close. They’re reportedly the most feared media outlet at City Hall. Mayor Patch Adams will sometimes bar their reporters from his infrequent press conferences, and when the pressure gets too intense and he has to let them in he’ll never take their questions. That, I think, is what a functioning, adversarial press should be. I don’t think the Times even bothers sending anyone to them anymore, and maybe if they have some space to fill they just reprint propaganda from the City Hall press office.
HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR
… still undefeated.
The person who wrote that headline died somewhat recently, I think. Hall of Fame. I would love to visit his grave.
I would obviously say “never read the Post” — OK, mayyyybe the sports pages if you’re into that sort of thing — but you’re 100% dead-on that the Times pretends it isn’t a city paper. I’ve never totally understood it!
One of the things toxic friends do is try to establish a framework of false dichotomies. “If you’re not with me, you have to go back to him, and he’s a jerk.”
It’s a dynamic that the Murdoch press pushes every single day – “It’s either us or the NY Times, and you know who they are.”
And like all toxic relationships, it relies on a doom spiral of making people feel worse and worse about themselves to increase the dependence on their side of the false dichotomy. It’s all part of the horrible refrain “without me, you’re nothing.”
The way out is to walk away from the toxic friend first and choose nobody. There is zero reason to read the NY Times as an alternative to Murdoch, and there’s really no reason for someone who wants to get out of that spiral to get hung up on the news at all. Once the cycle has been broken, it’s time to reevaluate, but the first thing is to stop accepting the bad framework.
But the Post is incredibly entertaining, and free, and how else would I know what Kyle Richards is up to or how Taylor Swift’s relationship with what’s-his-name is going. Drunk driving arrests of public figures, real estate goss, restaurant openings and closings…
This reminds me that there was a very grim feature on another website, maybe Eater.com, that did a monthly tracking of all the restaurant closures during Handsy Andy’s Reign of Terror during the pandemic. Almost every restaurant I used to haunt closed their doors. And that asshole wants to return to politics? They could run the reanimated corpse of Mussolini against you and I’d vote for him. Asshole.
Seriously, that world is engineered to make you hate yourself and the world you live in. That restaurant closure list is just one more example. Meanwhile the irony is that both the Times and the Post worked overtime behind the scenes with Cuomo’s PR flacks to manage his image.
It was a completely different outlet which finally broke the news about Cuomo’s assaults, and the Albany Times Union did it by rejecting the access model that both the Times and the Post pursued, just from slightly different perspectives. The Albany Times Union refused to play ball, got cut out of the loop for the little leaks that Cuomo and his hacks doled out to hide the bigger scandal, but in the end they nailed him, not the access journalists.
It’s not a choice between the Post and the Times, and in the end the more you seek them out, the duller and dumber the stories you get. And the worse they make you feel. It’s a dismal cycle, and the good stuff is out there if you break it.
I’ve sung the praises of the Albany Times and their reporting many times, especially when Handsy Andy was heading for his disgraceful downfall. And we taxpayers are on the hook for for his multimillion-dollar legal bills. Asshole. Out on his boat fishing. That horrible Fredo brother of his. The thousands of nursing home deaths during the pandemic, because he was in the pocket of the hospital industry. And his stooge, Kathy Hokum, dragging her heels on any kind of investigation into any of this, which implies complicity. Grumble grumble grumble.
@bryansplinter I hadn’t been following this at all because I fully expected the people who elected Santos would still vote Republican. However I found it interesting that ABC news pitched the story as the Democrat running on a basic republican platform including howling about immigrants and border security. They didn’t breathe a single word about abortion when reporting this.
Dammit. Spelled your handle wrong @bryanlsplinter
Ah, pretty soon AI will not only self drive our Teslas to our death, it will run us over with a forklift…
https://electrek.co/2024/02/13/arcbest-launches-full-line-of-electric-autonomous-forklifts/
and take those annoying drivers out of the picture for auto racing…
https://theconversation.com/bringing-ai-up-to-speed-autonomous-auto-racing-promises-safer-driverless-cars-on-the-road-214208
and most importantly on this Valentine’s Day, it will tell us who is ugly and who is gorgeous!
Even worse AI chat bots hoovering down all your dirty details.
…I don’t know if that grid-of-grids is generated images or scraped from somewhere…but it reminded me of something that came up in a conversation about the reception the marvel movies got when someone asked “what is it about brie larson that makes these”fans” so hostile?”…& they were told “oh, that’s easy – those are all people who are mad that nobody who looks like brie larson would date them if they were the last man on earth”
…because to that same audience…that grid looks like it breaks down to approximately
…which seems like a safe set of assumptions if they’re AI headshots…but if they’re actual passport pictures or something…statistically some people who look that way would in fact be dumb enough to date the sort of marvel fanboi who has a massive problem with brie larson?
I read the image as “SPEAK SPOON” and I was like yes I do enjoy using spoons, what is this new language the kids these days are using??