Another perspective.

Once upon a time, it was pretty normal to watch something and not be able to pause or rewind. It was perfectly expected that you might not get every single word and you didn’t really think twice about it, just like you don’t think about how you miss some words in real life.

But now, we can pause, we can rewind. We can get exactly what was said and we get preoccupied with making sure we understand every single word. So captioning becomes even more critical.

Looks like it is genuinely rotary dial design. Those aren’t buttons, they are holes. The text is on the black background, the clear plastic above it has holes cut out. There’s quite a bit of thickness to that plastic and it’s some distance from the black backing. Looks very much like a rotary phone looked, though understandable that most folks haven’t seen one up close.

His story was a bit less flattering. The narrative the advocates want is that Torvalds is all in on vibe coding the kernel.

The actual story is that he found it somewhat useful, even as it gave him wrong information and directed him to get help from a developer. A useful, but limited augmentation.

If Torvald’s account were the accepted reality, they wouldn’t be steamrolling rural locals to make so many datacenters and wouldn’t be demanding we need more natural gas power, and wouldn’t represent the majority of our economy. They would have utility and be available, but not so obnoxious. Well, maybe, they might not have bothered with so much expense in training for this level of capability, but the cost is sunk now.

Of course most development isn’t Torvald’s level, it is human slop. So there’s more to things than the actually complicated work that AI is limited for.

But it’s not only critics that oversimplify. Advocates are obnoxiously bad at declaring everything is all good with AI

I’ll second the volunteering, though I never really feel comfortable socializing among the volunteers, it still feels good actually doing something I think matters, but at the same time know I’m utterly replacable and no one would specifically need me to do any of it.

Have a colleague who went from over $300k/year to like a $50k/year job. Basically something to vaguely keep the lights on while his savings took care of itself. Way too young to retire, but he figures he can be ok with his savings and bonuses he had over his high paying career.

Never wanted to climb the ladder, but it was the only way I could really get better pay.

The higher I go, the more I can’t stand the conversations. Being straightforward is a career killer. Competing with folks that talk big without knowledge, knowing I need to carefully balance working with them while making sure my ass is documented and covered for any blame when they screw up and want to throw someone under the bus.

I have generally still loved talking to the “grunts” and customers. People who have real problems and doing real stuff without so much office politic crap going on. Not people trying to write blog posts to try to sound smart without actually doing anything or actually knowing the material.

Ironically, Microsoft platform as of yet still is pretty much a given that Linux may also run, with the exception of some of the Surface systems, but the ones no one wanted anyway. Apart from SecureBoot, Microsoft is picky enough about firmware specifications that are open, Linux can more easily be customized than random embedded things. Some things were rough, like ACPI implementations that didn’t comply strictly with the spec but microsoft happened to tolerate it, but fundamentally the Microsoft approach of outsourced everything makes for better chance for third party OSes.

Motorola has been under Lenovo for over a decade now, and still is, as a clarification.

The new thing is that for whatever reason, Motorola themselves has explicitly declared that some as-yet specified 2027 flagship model will officially support Graphene (though you have to load it yourself). This goes beyond just letting the community figure it out if it happens to be workable.

Now as to whether they follow through on that, hard to say. Lenovo broadly sometimes makes announcements and then backs out without explanation.

They are compatible with some existing and future phones. Google’s in-house processor decided to skip on an extension that the broader ARM ecosystem seems to continue to value. Graphene didn’t invent this extension. I presume that their compatibility with upcoming motorola devices indicates other mobile device processor designs implement the extension just fine.

Actually, Motorola has more market share than Pixel.

Though Google mainly cares about the software ecosystem, so they explicitly don’t care about Graphene since it’s not an outcome they want in the industry anyway.

One near me does it. They just happened to have a special where a month cost less than a single wash and my spouse went for it.

Nightmare to cancel the damn thing.

Note that Debian has had a purist approach to intellectual property, and the common sense practical view that ‘obviously’ it has to be ok or else the entire industry would be hopelessly screwed by now, I could see them trying to stick to their guns.

There are still court cases flying about and so far the focus has been by rights holders versus the AI platforms. Those have thus far been pretty favorable for the platform holders, but there’s a catch.

The platform defense has been that “sure, we trained on copyrighted works and sure, the model can produce copyright violations, but when a violation happens, it is the fault of the operator and they should be on the hook for violations”. So it remains possible that someone comes after an AI user for making a knockoff, and given the context, the AI user might be making a violation without even knowing they are.

So accepting a contribution under GPL might get them in hot water because some company decides that the submission looks too much like their proprietary code, and they can draw a line from their codebase being open to AI ingest to it landing in a codebase.

Sadly, this is a bigger risk for open source than closed source, as the closed source is harder to detect such things.

Not him, but I almost never boot windows, but the other day I had to change a part of a a stupid powerpoint presentation that only could be done using Powerpoint desktop app. Wine has not done so well with it, Libreoffice wouldn’t do the thing right, and browser based office can’t touch ‘master slide’ content.

While true, this same infrastructure is used by corporations that either feel they need the privacy of on premise model, or decided paying by the token is too expensive/unpredictable.

NVidia would love every business to decide they need to have dedicated private gpu heavy infrastructure.

Well, the guy was leading the police on a chase, so it’s probably true for that.

And she was intoxicated and they only investigated after the crash, so probably true there too.

It’s not that it won’t improve, but it isn’t going to cause a runaway “singularity” event.

Like the drama around the models “escaping” and “amazing hacks” have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.

A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.

It seems to be just that consumer tech doesn’t evolve like it used to. It was insane how things went from the late nineteenth century to modern era, but lots of signs of slowing down.

While computer tech is going, it’s now only doing so by scaling behind home electrical capacity. The high end server chips are just cranking the wattage because they can’t improve within a more reasonable power envelope anymore. A 2026 laptop that replaced a 2020 laptop that was broken wasn’t really significantly faster. In 2000, a new PC would have been more than 10 fold faster than a 6 year old PC.

Tech progresses, (e.g. just got a phone with a solid state battery that’s crazy better than battery behavior before), it’s just some of the biggest consumer electronics things are hitting physics and things we are used to advancing are just flattening out.

Based on what I saw and what I read, it only took over of it detected you trying to swerve and an obstacle that would hit and change it into an aggressive lane change. The steering into was at least roughly the maneuver desired, but it just corrected it.

Though it may sound scary, it absolutely worked in my scenario. I’ve never ever seen it activate accidentally.

I can’t even be sure whether it activated or not that time, I wasn’t driving. It just seemed like a scenario and maneuver unlikely for a barely driving 15 year old to pull off so perfectly. I’m not so sure even I would have avoided an accident, but even if I did, I doubt I would have hit the maneuver so spot on.

25.9 percent of owners whose cars have adaptive cruise control never switch it on

I know someone with adaptive cruise control who technically turns it on, but only when there’s no car in front of them…

Nearly 18 percent steer clear of lane-keeping assist

I suspect these are also people who don’t like to use turn signals. They don’t like the car fighting their ill-advised lane change.

21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking

I’ve never experienced actual automatic braking, though I did have a car that had a fairly high false positive rate on the collision alert that could have inspired someone to turn it off, and could easily imagine it if the car actually did brake. There’s also people that are afraid it might have a false positive and turn it off pre-emptively.

Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.

I’m shocked that number is so low. I have so little interest in what my car’s voice assistant can do for me. In a family car I gave it a spin because it purported to be “fancier” but I didn’t like it and it was also pretty useless. I don’t see this as a big “meant to save their lives” thing, it’s just a gimmick.

Augmented reality head-up displays fare no better: 17.1 percent of drivers who have one refuse to turn it on

I know someone in this boat, they don’t like their view being obstructed, and the car model they wanted had this as base equipment. I would also say this is more gimmick than life saving. A glance to a speedometer or nav screen isn’t going to be a super risk thing so long as those displays are appropriately located, they don’t need to be right on the windshield.

massaging seats, just 22 percent say they use them regularly

Ok, really off the topic of the headline now. I have sat in a “massaging seat” in a car and am not surprised. It vaguely vibrates a bit, hardly worth anything.

only 22.4 percent use AR head-up displays when fitted

But they said AR HUD was rejected only by 17.1 percent of drivers? Guess the question would be what the definition of ‘used’ is if they have it on but somehow don’t “use” it?

24.5 percent use remote start functions

In many cases, this is of pretty limited utility. If it’s a keyfob-only capability, you have to be close enough to the car that, by that point, well you might as well get in and start it instead of digging out your keyfob. If it’s got a gas engine, then it’s not something you probably want to do out of sight. I will say for an electric car with internet controllable remote ‘start’, it’s nice to get it going while you are getting ready to leave at the end of a workday or when you are paying the check at a restaurant.

45.7 percent of respondents say they regularly use reversing cameras

I actually saw someone this week who spent years ignoring his backup camera finally decide that his back up camera was handy. He’s also the worst at parking I know, so here’s hoping he starts backing up with his camera and gets better…

41 percent use heated windshields.

So what do the rest do when their window fogs up otherwise? This seems… hard to believe.

My 2015 would have the ‘collision alert’ because a car was in an adjacent turn lane, but the road curved and it didn’t know that.

It also would go off most days on a stretch of road because it was certain I was going to slam into the guardrail of the curve. Again, the system had no cameras, no map awareness, so it just had radar saying ‘something metal ahead’.

It was slightly annoying but left it on, just in case.

Now my 2023 on the other hand hasn’t had a false positive that I can recall, in fact if not for one incident, I wouldn’t even know it was doing anything. Someone pulled right out in front of my kid learning to drive. I had just enough time to think “oh, we are going to hit or my kid is going to yank this thing off the road”. Instead, my kid executed a shockingly perfect evasive swerve that landed perfectly into the free lane. Then I find out that it also would take over steering and as a result, I’m pretty certain it saved me a pretty significant wreck.