I have a nephew that worked at Tesla as a software engineer for a couple years (he left about a year ago). I gave him the VIN to my Tesla and the amount of data he shared with me was crazy. He warned me that one of my brake lights was regularly logging errors. If their telemetry includes that sort of information then clearly they are logging a LOT of data.

There is no vaccine for Lyme that’s available to the public. Hopefully there will be one soon though. My wife and I have been volunteering for a Lyme vaccine trial for the past two years.

Changing a 120v line over to 240 is likely also against code even if the physical cable can handle it. 120V cable is typically white/black/green, and the electrical code prohibits using the white one as a hot leg. That’s why 240V cable of the same AWG is red/black/green. The red & black legs both carry 120V.

#1 is a terrible idea if you ever need to hire an electrician in the future, plan on selling your house, etc. The National Electric Code prohibits using white, green, or grey wire for a hot/load connection. The 120V cable will contain a black wire for the hot connection, white for neutral, and green for ground. To properly convert it to 240V you would need a cable that consists of black & red wires for the two 120V legs.

If your home ever suffered an electrical fire then this sort of jury rigging is precisely the sort of thing any competent insurance inspector would spot, and insurance carriers would deny coverage for since it clearly isn’t code compliant, which means a licensed electrician didn’t install it and it wasn’t properly inspected.

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First it was murder hornets, now regular bees are after us as well…

He’s so proud of those losers.

Definitely keep encouraging them. It’s something we always look for these days. You might even check if their state and/or electric utility offers any incentives for installing one.

My wife & I have done a few road trips in our Tesla now. We bring our two small dogs, so we would be stopping every couple hours for 15-20 minute breaks anyway to let them walk around a bit & pee.

The last trip we took just last month we stayed in 3 different AirBnBs. The first one had a free to use level 2 charger in its garage. The second one was across the street from a municipal lot with free level 2 chargers. The third one was the only one that required our use of SuperChargers every few days. So 2/3 of our trip we had free charging.

Airbnb appears to be encouraging renters to install EV chargers if they can. It’s a nice perk for those of us looking for them.

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I’m cautiously optimistic that this isn’t all his cards.

Given the recent announcements that countries like Germany have given Ukraine the ok to use their long range weapons against targets inside Russia I think it’s just a matter of time before we see this happen.

Frankly I was wondering why the bridge wasn’t attacked very quickly after that announcement was made. But with this report of the underwater sabotage I think it now makes sense. This underwater explosion likely took a long time to plan and carry out, and Ukraine probably wanted to see the results of it before launching any long range strikes on the bridge.

If there are other underwater explosives that have already been planted then I’d expect to see them detonated as well. After that then Ukraine might very well launch long range missiles to target the section(s) of the bridge that have now been weakened.

Voice controls also need 99%+ accuracy if manufacturers want drivers to trust and want them. My cars voice recognition system supports reading & sending of text messages based on the names in my phones address book. I have extended family whose last name is “Gay”. I have never been able to get the car to recognize commands like “text Bob Gay”.

Musk has been stubbornly clinging to the belief that a vision system similar to human stereoscopic vision is all that a self-driving vehicle needs and has ordered his engineers to produce such a vehicle.

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Actually the excuse Musk uses is that humans only use their eyes to drive, so that’s enough for cars as well.

Wrong on so many levels…

To be fair, the Tesla vision system has 3 cameras facing forward. One in the center above the front bumper grille and two behind the rear view mirror. Those two provide some level of stereoscopic vision to help judge distances.

But yeah, the lack of other sensors is a huge issue. Anything from bug splatter to mud to snow etc. can easily obscure one or more cameras and render the whole vision system unreliable.

We also process light differently than cameras do

To expand on this a little further, human vision has also developed the ability to filter out unnecessary information in order to avoid overloading the brain. When tracking moving objects the eyes mostly send deltas of the movement to the brain. Computers, however, are the exact opposite. The cameras essentially send a series of still images, and it’s up to the computer to compare them to look for any movement.

I recall that people blocked Waymo cars at one point by simply placing orange cones in front of them. Given Teslas only use cameras I wonder if you could just slap a sticker of an orange cone (or just a splash of orange paint) on the hood and confuse it enough that it wouldn’t move…

Edit: Or, if you really want to be a dick, get some black stickers (the stronger the glue the better) and surreptitiously put them over one or more cameras.

Contracts are meaningless if you can’t meet your promises. Starship is already supposed to be used for things like the Artemis moon missions. But to do that they not only need to get past these recent failures, but perfect in-orbit refueling as well. That alone will likely take a few years of testing.

The repeated failures of the SpaceX Starship test launches aren’t helping. Although the full cost isn’t public, one detailed analysis from two years ago estimated $5 billion so far.

Of the 9 Starship tests so far, 6 of them (including the last 3) have mostly been failures, although the booster did return successfully in two of those tests.

By comparison, by the 9th launch of the Saturn rockets used to eventually carry people to the moon, they were not only successfully completing multiple earth orbits but also successfully deploying satellites.

It’s looking like Starship will have a long way to go to reach either of those goals, much less start carrying humans. That $5 billion invested by 2023 is starting to look like peanuts at this point.