I had a Volvo XC90 that “jumped” off the interstate and onto a parallel mountain road east of Knoxville. It did its best to track along those roads and somehow made its way into North Carolina. But even when I was back in Chicago, it was still stuck in NC trying to find a way off those mountain roads. Dozens of on/off cycles did nothing. I disconnected the battery overnight and that didn’t work. At the next service appointment, the dealer had to do a full firmware reset to wipe the memory and get it working again.
It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it could ever actually leave a road.
Last summer traveling down a rural road in southwestern Ontario, Apple maps told me to return to the route. We hadn't turned in 10 kilometers, but it was showing that we were 200 meters into a cornfield.
I don't think I could have ended up there if I tried in the Golf we were in. Nice try.
My kids thought it was the funniest thing, but it's a good technology lesson.
In Boston it's a very frequent occurrence to be driving in the Central Artery Tunnel and have your map software think you're on the surface, or vice versa, or to be on a highway overpass and again have it think you're on a surface road that is inaccessible from your location. You get used to it.
This seems like an entirely different level of craziness, though.
Yeah I remember back in the early 2000s before phones had turn-by-turn navigation, there were PDAs to do it and it was common for the software to just ask whether you were driving on the surface road or an elevated viaduct.
My dad used to have a crappy aftermarket GPS in his car that did the same thing. It would get lost dozens of miles away, and then hundreds of miles away.
The explanation I found online at the time was that a GPS receiver needs to download data about the exact orbits of all GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose altitude and change their orbits. Up-to-date information is constantly broadcasted by every satellite, but it takes about 15 minutes for a device on the ground to download this dataset.
Most GPS devices do this automatically whenever they get the chance. But if your GPS is somehow unable to stay online for 15 consecutive minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels, underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual location.
There's no way a modern smart phone or car relies on those ephemeris transmissions. They all just get it from the internet, which takes less than a second. That's one of the reasons why a smart phone has a reliable GPS fix basically instantly after being booted up, while old-school offline GPS units needed minutes to get a fix.
That's only the case for non-internet connected GPS units. Throwback to the early 2000s when my family car had such a unit, which, after having been turned on, would require ~15 minutes of waiting before it became functional. Funnily, I remember the mapping app would refuse to use the device clock and only use the time from GPS satellites. So at least you would know you need to wait if it didn't know the current time.
Well, that's certainly not the case. Each satellite transmits a low-precision almanac to the receiver that helps it lock onto the others, as well as a higher-resolution ephemeris that provides the necessary pseudorange accuracy for that particular SV.
But it's true that neither of those factors accounts for miles of error. That has to come down to either poor sky coverage/signal strength, poor software, or (more likely) both.
That's no excuse for disbelieving GPS for extended periods of time.
Google Maps gets it right: it tried to keep you on road, but only for a few tens of seconds. After that, if you are in the middle of uncharted territory, it'll show the marker there.
(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
Well, when I’m driving in Kyiv, and there is an air raid alert, usually my car navigation starts to derp, and after a few minutes it thinks that it’s suddenly in Lima, Peru.
Not that I mind too much, I know how to get around without navigation.
It does teleport to Peru but it also fast-forwards time to about a year into the future, which caused my car to think its overdue for that oil change. It even synced that back to the headquarters and I got an email asking me to take it to service.. (and arriving there on the wrong side of the Dnieper, I just decided to wait it out)
Wish we could put it into a manual mode where you just reset it's position once and then it updates based on wheel encoders & snapping to roads.
The technology should be resilient against GPS spoofing. If it “knows” it never left the mountain road, it’s not crazy to design it to reject an anomalous GPS signal, which might be wrong or tampered with.
I think the likelihood of that happening is significantly less than the likelihood that a car took a new road or other path not show in the cars mapping data.
>(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
Please don't do that. The map is simply not good enough and does not have enough context (road quality, terrain, trail difficulty) for anything but very causal activity. Even then I highly recommend to use a proper map, electronic or paper.
It has a lot more map data accessible and you can even overlay National Park Service maps, land ownership, accurate cell service grids, mountain biking trails, weather conditions and things like that.
Disclaimer: Just because you see a route on a map, digital or paper, does not mean it is passable today. Or it may be passable but at an extremely arduous pace.
We used the walking directions for dual sport motorcycles once. It was pretty nice. We did have a few places where it became sketchy. Those and maybe more places would be sketchy for walking too. Not that google maps could do much about it. Terrain is a living thing. These were mostly huge cracks in the earth due to rain water.
Trail? Terrain? I use it for walking for 10-20mins around a (mostly flat) city and I expect that’s what 90% of people use it for, the comment didn’t mention hiking
It depends what you are doing but for hill walking in Italy I found the footpathapp.com app good. There are no decent paper maps in the area I go and Google maps are also rubbish for local paths but the app kind of draws in paths based on satellite images I think and you can draw on it to mark the ones you've been on.
Yeah, that is my guess, there must have been bug, issues where GPS suddenly teleports you. One way to remedy that is to give the roads virtual walls so what ever GPS weirdness comes in, the location service will at least put the car close to its "previous" location for some time.
X could do just about anything. It’s actually hard to know what the current state of liability is these days, now that platforms have integrated algorithmic decision-making regarding what to show you.
In Anderson v TikTok, the appeals court decided that since the little girl did not specifically search for the videos she watched, TikTok’s algorithm made what amounted to an editorial decision to show her the videos she watched and thus Section 230 did not give them any protection. TikTok ultimately chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court and thus this is the current state of the law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Other courts may decide differently.
The general idea is that whenever algorithms are deciding what you see Section 230 is not in play - but the First Amendment might be. The Supreme Court hinted that this is how they view things, BTW. If this is how it is, then Section 230 is essentially a dead law already and losing it only affects old fashioned blogs and forums.
Curating HN to only be tech-specific topics is protected by 230. Literally the history of 230 is there were 2 lawsuits [1].
1. Website was sued over having "defamatory" content posted by a user and website won because they had no moderation (minus illegal stuff).
2. Website was sued over having "defamatory" content posted by a user and website lost because they had moderation (curated to be "family friendly").
Politicians (and less importantly, the general public) like the idea of websites being able to be "family friendly".
So forums and blogs can still exist but if you do any sort of not strictly legally required moderation you have legal liability for all content without 230.
> So forums and blogs can still exist but if you do any sort of not strictly legally required moderation you have legal liability for all content without 230.
Which means the consequence for any mistake on sticking exactly to the bounds of legally mandatory moderation is enormous liability (either massive civil liability if you go slightly beyond the bounds of the minimum, or given the source of most minimums catastrophic criminal liability if you fall below it); the only realistic approach at non-trivial scale is just not to allow UGC except at the level you are willing to edit as if it were first party content you were going to be fully responsible for.
It's going to be fun watching HN, which is full of people who support this sort of thing (and even more extreme regulations to boot,) deal with the ramifications of this forum's guidelines and moderation policies being de facto illegal.
It won't even be "turning into Reddit" it's all going to turn into 4chan.
> The general idea is that whenever algorithms are deciding what you see Section 230 is not in play
This isn't correct. The ruling was very narrow, with a key component being that a death was directly attributed to a trend recommend by the algorithm that TikTok was aware of, and knew was dangerous. That part is key - from a section 230 enforcement perspective it's basically the equivalent of not acting to remove illegal content. Basically everything we've understood about how algorithms are liable since section 230 was enacted remain intact.
I don’t agree. The ruling used logical reasoning based on the 2023 Netchoice decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that the actions of the moderating algorithms enjoyed first amendment protection. The first amendment protects you from liability from your own speech, while section 230 protects you from liability from somebody else’s speech. Ergo, if the platform was protected by the first amendment then the algorithm output was the speech of the platform.
Netchoice had a bunch of concurring opinions, including from ACB that essentially says they really aren’t sure how they’d rule in a case directly challenging algorithmic recommendations. That’s why I say it’s not clear how the liability situation is, and it really is baffling why TikTok chose not to appeal.
I think they are selling off old stock and exiting the TV business. Searching various sites in the US shows only a basic 50” 4K TV. A few years ago, they had a very wide variety of offerings - I bought a 65” 4K dumb TV from them. Amazon (US) shows a wide variety of available-to-buy computer monitors, so that is probably their focus at the moment. It’s probably a lot more lucrative.
They absolutely will and they will absolutely get away with it. It just won’t be anywhere close to 27%.
There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.
In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.
Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
Yep, there's no reason to believe the fees will only be a few hundred dollars as Sweeney is saying, Apple will absolutely try to extract as much as possible without being sued again. The zero commissions for external links was the right approach.
I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.
And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
I had a Brother laser printer for a very long time and printed a TON of paper with it. But it finally gave up the ghost during the COVID supply-chain meltdown and when looking at new Brother laser printers I discovered that they now have a much wider range of offerings and some are clearly not friendly. So the generic advice no longer applies - you have to be careful which one you buy.
Now, because of those supply chain issues they were all marked up to exorbitant prices; I ended up getting an Epson EcoTank thing from Costco with no markup and a bonus extra (quite large) pack of ink. We’ve been very happy with it and the ink isn’t actually very expensive at all. Given the electricity usage difference between laser and inkjet, it might even be cheaper per page.
Gehry was known to have a high propensity for completing projects on time and on budget because he insisted on using design and modeling software to work out all issues ahead of time. Many clients got angry with him in the early stages of projects, wanting him to break ground and start building. But in the end, he always delivered.
That's largely a myth told by people with shiny new Coscast engine blocks to sell you.
They run too hot because everyone runs lawnmower-grade 95 octane petrol these days, which contributes more than anything else to liners breaking free especially with the liners being thinner on later (90s onwards) 94mm-piston engines. I do wonder if the switch from thin steel "shim" head gaskets to composite ones allowed the liners to move more?
Anyway they only break liners free completely (the infamous "dropped liner") if you run them absolutely bone dry of water until one piston expands enough to jam in the liner and start hammering it up and down, just before the engine seizes entirely.
It's cheap and easy to get the liners knocked out and the block machined to take "top hat" liners, with a lip around the top that clamps them in place, something like £1800 last time I looked.
One of the interesting quirks of the Honda K-series is that it spins “backwards”. If you try to mate one to a different transmission (or try to mate a different engine to a K-series transmission), it’s going to give you, uh, interesting results! Lots of people found out the hard way when they used their Fast & Furious inspiration to do JDM swaps :)
It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it could ever actually leave a road.
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