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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’m one-and-done with my Model Y. I got it shortly after the Y was released in part because I felt it was a decent EV for the price at the time, and in part because their Supercharger network is a nice option to have (and I’ve used it a fair amount).

    Even if Musk wasn’t such a public buffoon and acted more like other auto industry CEO’s I wouldn’t buy another Tesla either. The vision-only system sucks not only in inclement weather, but bright sunny conditions as well. It’s also terrible at detecting rain for auto-wipers, oncoming cars for auto high beams, etc. The build quality of the cyber trucks is sketchy. They haven’t made any significant design changes in years, other than maybe replacing the steering wheel with a yoke (and I refuse to even ride in a car with one). They seem too proud of creating things like “fart mode” and holiday light/music shows instead of something actually useful like improved speech recognition & more robust voice commands (“tune radio to wxyz”???) and on and on…

    The way I see it, when it’s time to replace my Model Y there will be plenty of other competitive EV choices from big automakers like Honda, Toyota, etc. as well as newer ones like Rivian. And now that the Tesla charger has become an SAE standard and non-Teslas can charge at Superchargers there’s even less incentive to stick with a Tesla EV.


  • Ukraine will likely get assistance from more than just EU countries. And once things are safe again I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ukrainians around the world returning home to help rebuild etc. You can’t say the same of Russia I don’t think.

    Ukraine had a very robust economy before the war, exporting everything from food to military hardware. Given what they have learned about UAV’s, etc. in the past 3 years they likely stand to regain a strong military industry once again after this is all settled. They’re already manufacturing some of their own military gear for the war, and once the war is over it should be fairly easy for them to turn all that into an export industry.











  • GPS does not track anything. There is no possible way it can.

    GPS satellites transmit time coded signals. That’s all they do. They don’t receive any signals from the devices that use them.

    GPS receivers (which include everything from car navigation systems to smartphones to dedicated GPS receivers, etc) only listen for those time coded signals, decode them, and use that information to triangulate your location. That’s all that GPS itself can do.

    Smartphones, tablets, etc. can determine their location by GPS if they have GPS receivers built into them. They can then take that location data and forward it on to companies like Google, Apple, etc. But that is done over either a cellular or WiFi connection.

    Any claim of GPS based counting of crowd sizes should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The only way counts based on mobile phones could really be done is by asking companies like Google or Apple how many of their devices are being tracked in the area, or by asking mobile providers like Verizon or AT&T how many mobile phones are connecting to their cell towers in the area.

    The total number of people/ devices identified by GPS in a given area is exactly 0. Because GPS by itself is simply incapable of doing anything like that on it’s own.