Hackaday Links: September 4, 2022
Say what you will about Tesla, but there is little doubt that the electric powered auto maker inspires a sure diploma of fanaticism in homeowners. We’re utilized to the types who just can’t stop likely on about neck-snapping acceleration and a sci-fi interior. But the ones we didn’t see coming are people who really feel their cars and trucks are so bad that they have to have to stage a hunger strike to get the consideration of Tesla. The strike is remaining structured by a group of Tesla house owners in Norway, who on their web site enumerate a lengthy record of grievances, like style defects, producing difficulties, quality handle difficulties, and client support problems. It’s not clear how numerous people today are in the team, while we assume at minimum 18, as which is the range of Tesla vehicles they utilised to spell out “HELP” in a parking whole lot. It is also not apparent how or even if the team is actually off their feed, or if this is just a stunt to get the focus of Tesla honcho and notorious social media gadfly Elon Musk.
No subject where by you live, the taxman generally cometh. And technology is building the job of squeezing out every little bit of income achievable less difficult, as we discovered with the story this 7 days that France is employing AI application to uncover undeclared swimming swimming pools. A ton of swimming pools had been crafted all through pandemic lockdowns, and seemingly a honest variety of assets proprietors forgot to point out that simple fact to their neighborhood tax authorities. A person these kinds of company teamed up with Google, simply because of system it’s Google, to use equipment vision to appear for pools in aerial imagery. At the time a pool is geolocated, it is cross-checked towards tax information to make guaranteed the owner is paying out their reasonable share. Honestly though, is this seriously a thing that involves AI? Any one who has ever creeped on the neighbors by means of Google Maps is familiar with that the unearthly turquoise glow of a pool definitely jumps out at you it looks like this would have been far more affordable and considerably less dystopic to just dump this position off on a summer months intern.
Let us see, so much we’ve dumped on Tesla and Google, so who’s up coming? Amazon? Nah, let us go for Apple! We’ve mentioned their self-restore kits a couple of times these days, and the bulky kits and sophisticated procedures never actually do significantly but shell out lip services to the ideal-to-mend movement. Actually, for our neighborhood, a major outdated kit of specialty instruments and a pair hundred web pages of documentation are extra like Christmas morning than something to complain about, but we can see where something like that would be off-placing to the normies. But genuinely, the most interesting factor about this full issue is mastering about the Apple pentalobe drive screw. Not remaining in the Apple ecosystem a lot, we hadn’t operate across that particularly hellish bit of hardware, but it was fascinating studying a tiny about it — and imagining up ways to defeat it devoid of buying a special tool.
And ultimately, [Kyle Hill] continues his fantastic “Half-Lifestyle Histories” sequence of small documentaries with a search at the Therac-25 disaster. We’d heard of it right before, but what we hadn’t realized is that the infamous “single programmer” who wrote the buggy code was a hobbyist who seemingly wrote the code to command the potent health-related linear accelerator as a type of aspect challenge. The video does a very good task breaking down the edge situations that triggered the accidents, which resulted in 6 significant radiation overdoses and the death of 4 people.
