Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

I do hope it's shielded

My cars have always been prone to glitching when driving Hwy 280 over the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

plastic?

I thought chiplets were on fiberglass. The rigidity should be adjustable.

A glass substrate sounds difficult when it comes to routing a thousand little wires. I'd need a manufacturing-for-dummies video to visualize this.

Dysfunctionally conservative

It's much too heavy and has too little storage to be a suitcase, so why is it a suitcase? Colorless renderings of it being a perfect fit for an Accord trunk makes it look even more boring and pointless. You're going to drive almost somewhere, rip the trunk gaskets off your tall-assed Accord dragging this beast out, and finish the trip on this?

Not sold in Japan because they've figured out transportation already.

W/kg

Ghost of Steve Jobs: You're not eating enough.

Skeptical me

It's not Star Trek time yet. Training and maintaining AI datasets is incredibly expensive. Even when technology improves to make that easier, the same funding levels will be maintained to improve the quality. In other words, there are lots of bills to pay. AI products will be tainted to serve the large corporations that built them.

It could be another 15 years before we have AI that serves only the user and can be trusted with personal data. Even so, we're doomed if AI data ingestion is tricked as easily as real humans.

Thanksgiving test

My vote for the electric grid test in the US is Thanksgiving. It's a single day of nearly mandatory family gathering, electric cooking ranges will be running, everyone needs to recharge so they're ready for Black Friday sales, and it's not a good time for personal solar power.

I've experienced a couple of blackouts on Thanksgiving recently. Oddly, they were caused by neglected maintenance rather than high loads.

Android trick too

A lot of phone makers restrict the maximum CPU speed when there's no user interaction. It's essentially a workaround for the bundled Chrome browser sucking so much. Rubbing your finger around in the screen makes everything run faster on these phones.

Chrome?

My new ROG Phone 7 has these Googley privacy menus in the system settings. That means it may be far, far worse than Chrome. It implies Android System WebView and built-in advertising APIs.

Android has really needed a non-Google maintained fork since version 10.

Obsolete

Luckily, my 2018 VW uses 3G for telemetry. Good luck finding a signal. I haven't seen the connection LED on in a long time.

Migrate from a hostile company that won't leave you alone to a hostile company that could turn off the product at any moment? I hadn't considered that Oracle might not be the worst option.

Subscriptionville

There's a reason not many people live in that area - it's a hellish commute to any major city. You'd essentially have to move if you lost your local job. That narrows down potential inhabitants to renters rather than buyers. H1B visas, recent graduates, seasonal workers, and others not in a position to demand a salary raise.

So, this really is an evil genius plan. You get cheap labor and they all pay a subscription to live there. If someone isn't working enough weekend hours you can remind how high the bridge tolls are to work elsewhere. Maybe you even change local entertainment business hours to make sure nobody is out having fun when they should be working.

What units?

PCS Block G? 1910-1914/1990-1995 MHz? The Sprint cellular acquisition? Existing Band 25? These press releases are impossible to correlate. The last time T-Mobile got a new band, people were talking about it in NTSC television channel numbers too.

We need a standardized Register unit for radio bands.

CPUC vs DMV

The California Public Utilities Commission started warning cities that they may be next for robotaxi testing and those cities can do nothing to stop it, even as SF is having a bad time with them. One problem is that cities have no way yet to ticket robotaxis because tickets are for drivers. I'm glad the DMV is stepping in to pause this for a while.

If Comcast sold used cars, you'd have the feel of the CPUC.

Is it left or right?

Everything in the US gets forced into a childish binary form. Man or woman. Left or right. Rich or poor. Good or bad.

Winner or loser. Black or white. For abortion or against it. With us or against us.

This simplification breaks everything down into a decision between two wrong and stupid choices.

LG ads

Never give LG an Internet connection unless you have a very high tolerance for advertisements.

A lot of small monitors run off 20-something volts from a wall wart or brick. It's not rocket science to build them a battery pack.

Pessimist me

This sounds like a half-baked loophole for mass layoffs without having to give 60 days notice or pay into California's unemployment funds. Make a list of people who aren't in the office enough, give them repeated warnings, and now you have a huge list of employees ready to be 'fired' if there's a recession. I doubt California is going to fall for the trick. Employment is already 'at will' and I don't see mass firings as an exemption to the rules.

The last few years feel a lot like just before the 2001 bubble. There's a lot of effort put into maintaining stock prices and cutting costs but little thought about the maintaining business or keeping customers.

Brilliant

Broadcast a Tesla FSD failure to get out of fighting. Throw Tesla under the bus (or fire truck) to benefit Musk's ego and ego corporation X.

Demanding money from a US school?

It's clearly a foreign attack if the crims think they're getting more than 2 hours of bake sale profits.