Riskable

It’s because car manufacturers are loath to change microcontrollers in their vehicles because they’ve got decades of processes, tooling, and debugging with the (Atmel) chips they’ve been using since forever. When they decide to make a new car they basically just look at the latest Atmega(whatever) “automotive” chip (using really old chip tech) and choose that.

Atmel has “automotive” chips for everything! From regular MCUs to beefy ones with boatloads of pins and (slow ass) LCD controllers. They’ve made it so that car manufacturers don’t even have to think! The engineers probably get an automatic OK to use whatever Atmel “automotive” chip they want but anything else requires a lengthy and expensive certification process.

Some cars are using STM32 chips made for automotive but they’re not as common as you’d think!

Basically, the car manufacturers are extremely risk-averse because of low margins and something like an ECU recall can totally ruin the profitability of a new car. They’re also lazy and don’t want to try new things! There, I said it 😁

It’s because they cheaped out and used (cheap) electromechanical switches for the buttons and electromechanical rotary encoders for the knobs.

If they used magnetic hall effect switches they’d never glitch (unless the microcontroller itself is glitching). Hall effect switches are forever.

(And no: Even cars in Arizona don’t get hot enough to wreck rare earth magnets… They’ll lose strength slightly above 80°C but not enough to matter since the car knows its internal temp and can compensate if they didn’t get the better sensors that auto-compensate).

For reference, hall effect switches and encoders aren’t really that much more expensive for something like a car where you’re going to be using/making millions of them. It probably saves pennies per car to use the cheap switches.

Not with that attitude!

Gently rotates monitor and increases zoom level to 400%

‘Face’ concept? I could’ve sworn people in Asia had faces. TIL!

You’re overestimating the intelligence and ability of his listeners if you think they’d notice the difference.

They’re investing heavily in podcasts because podcasts are far, far more profitable than music. If they can get people used to (and hooked) on listening to podcasts (any podcasts) through Spotify then all that money spent on popular podcasters will be worth it (in the end).

I’m sure Spotify would love it if they could stop streaming music entirely and just focus on podcasts. Streaming music costs them a ton of money and overhead (bureaucracy associated with keeping track of and paying artists globally with bazillions of laws and regulations and fees to navigate) whereas podcasts just cost bandwidth.

Prediction: Murdoch will be dead by then. He’s 92.

Edit: I think we’ll see news that he’s dead by next Saturday. Why? Trying to cash in my hopium 👍

This article is misleading: The cards are already “AI accelerators” they just come in monstrous sizes and coolers that aren’t suitable for cramming more than one into a computer (server) case.

What the Chinese chop shops are doing is removing the components and resoldering them on to smaller PCBs and putting on smaller (but more powerful and jet-engine loud) exhaust-style coolers.

Basically it’s just old fashioned harvesting and re-using of PCB components. A common thing during the shortages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some banks? No. All banks.

Even credit unions do this. They may not have as many or as expensive fees as regular commercial banks but they still have fees and certain features aren’t free. If you deposit $100,000 (or more) you’ll find that a lot of those fees get waived, your interest rates will be better, and they will generally treat you better than the peasants with like $5,000 in their savings.

It’s just another advantage that the rich have over every day people. Most of them take these things for granted or don’t think they matter in the slightest. It never occurs to them that regular $3 fees or occasional $25 fees can have a huge impact on the poor and the middle class.

Full Disclosure: I work for a bank.

AI is an enabler. I have not patience for sitting and drawing for hours on end to make extremely detailed art but I’m a creative individual and would love to have the power to bring my ideas into reality. That’s what AI art does.

The problem with that, of course is it means that if I’m really serious about an idea I won’t be paying some artist(s) to make it happen. I’ll just whip open an AI art prompt (e.g.Stable Diffusion or any online AI art generators) and go to town.

It often takes a lot of iteration and messing with the prompt but eventually you’ll get what you want (90% of the time). Right now your need a decent PC to run Stable Diffusion (got 8GB of VRAM? You too can generate all the AI images you want 👍) but eventually people’s cell phones in their pockets will be even better at it.

Civitai is having a contest to make a new 404 error page graphic using AI. Go have a look at some of the entries:

https://civitai.com/collections/104601

I made one that’s supposed to be like the Scroll of Truth meme:

I made that on my own PC with my limited art skills using nothing but automatic1111 stable diffusion web UI and Krita. It took me like an hour of trying out various prompts and models before I had all the images I wanted then just a few minutes in Krita to put them into a 4-panel comic format.

If I wanted to make something like that without AI it just would never have happened.

It’s the real skynet. Hollywood’s idea of an evil AI is one that kills all humans. We all know the truth: The most evil AI in reality is the one that maximizes profits.