The difference is that the jaws of life only come into play if the door is mechanically blocked, because the car is so bent that the door is binding or because it rolled.

The Tesla door design stops working if battery power is lost.

Then you have to ask “ok, but what does the car get from that change”. The answer is absolutely nothing. Some will claim improved aerodynamics, but the Model 3 exterior handle is fundamentally mechanical and is flush, but still interacts with an electrically actuated door latch. The electronics could have been replaced with a mechanical system with the same aerodynamic profile.

But fine, they have a mechanical backup. But it’s not the same place as you would operate normally. This means during an emergency, whomever is trying to operate the door needs to know that not only does the outside handle not work (common enough with locks) but the normal/obvious interior door release control also won’t work and you need to know about the hidden backup mechanical release. Other cars have done the electronic door with backup mechanical and the backup operation is simply “pull the handle a little harder” or somewhat worse but still “pull twice”, which is intuitive, but Tesla made the backup mechanical different than normal opening. Normal opening is a button, and you don’t really learn intuitively to use the mechanical latch that is in the front. To be generous, at least the front handle is vaguely guessable. The rear they hide the mechanical release on a cable under a plastic cover under the rubber mat in the door storage.

The point is this can and has contributed to people trapped in cars in panic situations, and there’s zero upside to it.

Note that Tesla isn’t quite alone, I saw a Corvette similarly obsessed with ‘button to open door’, but it’s a stupid thing to do regardless of manufacturer.

I think you are on to something, but I’d say it actually largely deflates the ‘people didn’t vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different’ narrative.

“Did not vote” rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you’d probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you’d also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse… etc… I’m not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario…

I think the missing part in that is the “Miata”-ness. A fun little car with a bit of oomph to it and being ok with short range for the sake of a more fun/light drive. That has the light and affordable down, but doesn’t really approach the ‘fun’ part of the miata appeal.

Another facet I hope the H shaped battery would mitigate is the weight. Might have to further wait for viable solid state batteries to match the ICE for cornering. Yes the reving and shifting fun is lost, unless you go like the Ioniq N and just give the driver the toys to feel like they have revving and shifting…

I too would probably be fine with 100 miles for a ‘fun’ car or even commuter car. Though that’s a luxury many households can not afford, a designated car for ‘road tripping’, so I’m not going to expect too much attention to this scenario…

The thing is they do make the parts, but it’s a custom job and generally changing from a mass-manufactured EV to a hand-crafted car. The savings in reusing the reusable portions of the car are more than offset by the labor associated with putting them in. So it’s only really reserved for ‘classics’ with some iconic design, and even then the person risks enraging fans of the car who find it heretical to rip out their engines.

You could have been arguing the sky is blue and still this writeup would be seen as chatbot madness.

Don’t know if this is an OpenClaw instance run amok or a heavy LLM user using LLM to generate content, or an LLM user that has gone down the deep end and wrote this article but used a lot of LLM output to feed their thought process…

If it’s the latter, suggest you step back from electronics a bit and get grounded, because the style has a psychosis smell to it.

No, Grok is not some all-knowing Oracle that proved your concept is bulletproof. You can get Grok to affirm any input because it really wants to please the user. Just like all the other LLMs, do not assume their assertions are based in facts and do not mistake their bias to please the prompter as validation.

Problem with the theory is that people believe in LLM strongly enough that whatever pressure there is within a market to be vaguely similar evaporates. SQL certainly has dialects, but at least the basics are vaguely similar, as an example.

Working with a vendor that is oddly different from every other vendor in the space and we applied pressure to implement more typical interfaces. Their answer was “just have an LLM translate for you and use our different and frankly much weirder interface”. When we did cave and use it and demonstrated the biggest LLMs failed, they said at least they give you the idea. Zero interest in consistent API with LLM as an excuse.

On the write your code for you, it has to be kept on a short leash and can be a nightmare if not overseen, though it can accelerate some chore work. But I just spent a lot of time last week trying to fix up someone’s vibe coded migration, because it looked right and it passed the test cases, but it was actually a gigantic failure. Another vibe coded thing took 3 minutes to run and it was supposed to be an interactive process. The vibe coded said that’s just how long it takes, if it could be faster, the AI would have done it and none of the AI suggestions are viable in the use case. So I spent a day reworking their code to do exactly the same thing, but do it in under a second.

For the jira ticket scenario, I had already written a command line utility to take care of that for me. Same ease of use instead of using jira GUI and my works torturous workflows, but with a very predictable result.

So LLM codegen a few lines at a time with competent human oversight, ok and useful, depending on context. But we have the similar downside as AI video/image/text creative content: People without something substantial to contribute flood the field with low quality slop, bugs and slow performance and the most painful stuff to try to fix since not even the person that had it generated understood it.

Just a small correction, 120v.

But charging at home is a game changer compared to gas, cost and convenience both. If you can’t charge at home though, it’s rough as the commercial charging stations are pretty pricey, before Iran or was generally more expensive to fast charge than gas per mile. Home charging for me is like getting 1.25 a gallon gas. Except without the oil changes, the belts…

Yeah, my personal experience and watching mechanics online… The turbo engine with a cvt is going to be as big a nightmare down the road as an EV battery. EV motors with a single gear is so much easier to make reliable except the trickiness of battery chemistry… AWD by having independent motors front and back…

Don’t forget the obsession with having any way to open a door except a boring normal way.

I’m really really hoping EVs get over the Tesla envy and just make sensible cars with EV drivetrains.

It’s probably a wildly unpopular idea, but I personally would love a Miata with an H shaped battery pack to let the passengers ride low in the car at the expense of some range, with the traditional driveshaft tunnel becoming battery.

But failing that, straightforward door opening, actual buttons and knobs for HVAC and volume, and a reasonable expectation of serviceable battery pack over time and I’m totally there for it.

“I’ve delayed the deadline to let the very promising peace talks that are definitely real and not at all made up proceed”

Add in a “per container” for things that are realistically seen as a single serving, like your drink example.

That way I don’t have to do the ‘per 100g’ figuring and I have a realistic assessment of that small can of soup that’s somehow supposed to be 2 to 3 servings.

I find the conundrum of the ‘Claw Code’ scenario amusing.

LLM companies have argued they should get to ignore all copyright, and now that one of their code leaked, suddenly they care greatly about copyright.

But fine, their argument is that LLM digest of copyright infringements are ‘fair use’, so now that’s been turned against them, using an LLM to launder their copyrighted material in precisely the way they declared doesn’t count. So either they let it ride or undermine their own argument…

I wonder how common this is for evs in general. My vehicle has only gone in once for a recall on the windshield wiper motors, nothing else gone wrong.

The last car I had got off that brand needed quite a few repairs, so it’s remarkably refreshing to have a car that is just working along.

EVs just seen to be an easier thing to make reliable. Temperatures run much lower, fewer fluids in play, not having to deal with thousands of little explosions every minute…

The battery seems to draw all the headache, but even then reports suggest that conservative battery management systems have made those more reliable than people thought they would be. Probably thanks to the mandatory 100k warranty on batteries, the vendors took it seriously.

Fun fact, while shopping for a car in 2022, we looked at a used 2021 bmw x5. I wondered what they replaced it with and the salesman said “oh, he traded it in for a 2022 x5 of the exact same trim”. They know him well because every year he comes in and trades in to make sure he is never driving “last year’s model”.

Particularly stupid because that was the year of shortages where they actually made the new model worse by removing features they couldn’t get supply for, other than removing features, the new car was unchanged from prior year.

You know it’s bad when the last message is essentially “we are just going to stop talking publicly about it”

Allowing Xbox Division to fall so far from grace that it’s barely a blip in the Gaming Scene

This surprised me, as the xBox One launch showed they knew that gamers didn’t actually want games, they wanted to use it to watch TV!

It’s wild that they thought the xbox one launch should have included:

Problem is they barely have reason to care at all about Windows, it’s only 4.2% of their revenue even with their formidable presence in the market. That might even include their microsoft store cut, making the OS itself even less of a significant money driver.

So they feel it becomes more valuable to try to use that to promote their more profitable cloud services, make the users rent everything.

However, a huge warning sign for them should be the relative pittance of “consumer” cloud revenue. Suggests that all the efforts to try to milk the consumer market is for naught, as consumers just don’t want to spend that money on renting office software or storage. So moves that make their consumer desktop user hostile have negligible upside but may ultimately threaten their position in the 70% of their revenue that is business customers. They got those business customers in a consumer-first play where home computers set specific expectations the businesses embrassed, and they could lose that the same way.

Especially in a world where the only software most users use is a web browser, and games are the biggest non-browser software that remains, but Valve is having a decent success pushing non-Windows story.

Some games DRM or anti-cheat makes Windows the only option, but the gamers grow weary of all that BS too.

Sure, but this comic is in English…

I agree, but this isn’t that shoe falling yet.

This is a bunch of people that don’t have experience assuming everything will work and lots of little things not coming together derailing all this stuff. No water, inadequate power, a lack of some local contractors, a disgruntled community, some permitting problem. Any one of these problems surprising them and many many millions of dollars of stuff suddenly in limbo…