• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle

  • This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

    His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.






  • My first reaction was how stupid this is. Dirt, debris and other things will get on the panels and cause lots of problems, but after a few minutes I realized it’s actually quite brilliant.

    There are three major costs of solar, the panels, the location, and the wiring + inverters. If the tracks are used as the wires (extremely low resistance paths back to an inverter), the location is wasted space so basically free, and the inverter can be placed anywhere along the path to remove the power from the tracks, the cost of this comes down to mainly the cost of the panel, which is actually pretty cheep these days.

    The real challenges will be in cleaning & maintenance, vandalism, and modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).


  • This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

    Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

    The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

    There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.


  • Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

    When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.








  • Mainly 100% removal from Ukraine (not unreasonable, but also not going happen without Ukraine doing much better on offense) and a shit ton of reparations for all the damage done and people killed (this is never going to happen).

    IMHO The most likely scenario is Russia keeps 50 to 80% on land they’ve already captured and Ukraine agrees not to join NATO and the war stops. Keep in mind much of the land that they’re currently fighting over will be useless for a generation due to all the mines and shells shot into it. (Maybe “useless” is too strong, but it will take a lot of work to make it safe for living and farming.)


  • The reality is that both sides are laying out unrealistic terms for surrender right now… and that’s fine. The start of a negotiation is always to start with a stated position and go from there. This war will end at the negotiation table… at least we hope it does becuase unconditional surrender won’t come from Russia, but it could come from Ukraine.

    The real question is have both sides suffered enough for a negotiated end to this war? Look, it sucks, but that’s the truth of it. It would be good to see an end to the fighting and dying in Ukraine. Wars suck. The only side winning in this war is the US. They/we spend a pittance of money and watch Russia burn their future generation, military reputation, and global standing to the ground. That’s the #2 political opponent the US has in the world, and it’s acting as a great example for to show China (the #1) why it should behave itself over Taiwan. Win win!

    But wars suck. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines, but there a lots of people fighting and dying over there who have nothing to do with make the decisions for war. Yes Putin’s demands are ridiculous, but so are Ukraine’s. That’s fine. Put them in a room and hopefully they can figure out way to end the killing that’s in between the two.


  • But the reality is managers want to pick who gets laid off. It’s not that they want to just cut heads and reduce costs… upper management. may want that… but the actual managers want to keep their best and brightest. They know who the people are who get shit done, and they want to keep those people. Rto tends to have the opposite effect.

    The reality is it is often the best employees, the most experienced employees, and some very high level employees who have the most confidence and are most willing to say " screw you, I know I can find a job somewhere else" And give the middle finger to the employer who’s trying to do an RTO plan.

    Don’t be fooled by the headlines. Real businesses want to control who they let go. They want to have all the power in the relationship. They want to cut their lower performers and keep their superstars. RTO is about the worst head cutting program you could dream up.