Hackaday Links: September 4, 2022
Say what you will about Tesla, but there is very little doubt that the electric car maker evokes a specified diploma of fanaticism in house owners. We’re employed to the kinds who can not halt going on about neck-snapping acceleration and a sci-fi inside. But the types we didn’t see coming are all those who feel their cars are so poor that they have to have to stage a starvation strike to get the interest of Tesla. The strike is getting arranged by a group of Tesla owners in Norway, who on their web-site enumerate a extended list of grievances, which includes style problems, producing issues, excellent manage troubles, and client assistance problems. It’s not clear how quite a few folks are in the group, despite the fact that we presume at least 18, as that is the range of Tesla autos they applied to spell out “HELP” in a parking lot. It’s also not very clear how or even if the group is actually off their feed, or if this is just a stunt to get the consideration of Tesla honcho and notorious social media gadfly Elon Musk.
No matter where you reside, the taxman always cometh. And technological know-how is earning the career of squeezing out every single little bit of earnings probable less difficult, as we figured out with the story this week that France is applying AI software to come across undeclared swimming swimming pools. A whole lot of swimming swimming pools have been built throughout pandemic lockdowns, and evidently a good variety of residence house owners forgot to mention that actuality to their area tax authorities. A single such company teamed up with Google, since of training course it is Google, to use device eyesight to search for pools in aerial imagery. After a pool is geolocated, it is cross-checked versus tax data to make confident the operator is paying their honest share. Truthfully even though, is this actually some thing that requires AI? Anybody who has at any time creeped on the neighbors by using Google Maps is familiar with that the unearthly turquoise glow of a pool actually jumps out at you it looks like this would have been considerably less expensive and less dystopic to just dump this work off on a summertime intern.
Let’s see, so far we’ve dumped on Tesla and Google, so who’s following? Amazon? Nah, let’s go for Apple! We’ve outlined their self-maintenance kits a handful of moments currently, and the bulky kits and advanced treatments do not seriously do considerably but spend lip assistance to the correct-to-restore movement. Honestly, for our local community, a major outdated package of specialty instruments and a couple hundred internet pages of documentation are more like Christmas early morning than a thing to complain about, but we can see wherever anything like that would be off-putting to the normies. But truly, the most fascinating point about this entire thing is understanding about the Apple pentalobe travel screw. Not remaining in the Apple ecosystem considerably, we hadn’t operate throughout that significantly hellish bit of hardware, but it was attention-grabbing learning a small about it — and contemplating up ways to defeat it without getting a specific software.
And finally, [Kyle Hill] carries on his fantastic “Half-Lifestyle Histories” series of brief documentaries with a seem at the Therac-25 disaster. We’d read of it just before, but what we hadn’t understood is that the notorious “single programmer” who wrote the buggy code was a hobbyist who seemingly wrote the code to management the impressive clinical linear accelerator as a form of side undertaking. The video does a great work breaking down the edge disorders that brought on the incidents, which resulted in 6 significant radiation overdoses and the death of 4 patients.