ChatGPT for tire shopping

by philg

A neighbor has been dealing with a health challenge for one of his children. At the same time, a visitor driving his spare car hit a piece of metal on a local road and shredded a tire. He went out to meet her and installed the space-saver spare. I offered to handle getting the machine back on the road since he is busy.

I photographed the VIN plate through the windshield and the existing tires. ChatGPT determined that it was a 2018 Toyota Camry and didn’t like the condition of the remaining tires. It told me how to check tread depth with a quarter (finding a coin in our house was a challenge!), determined the correct tire size for the vehicle, and made recommendations:

(The Honda dealer told us to put the Michelin Defender 2s on our Odyssey and we find them to be noisy on Florida highways, which have textured pavement due to the heavy rain that is common here.)

Asked specifically what Tire Rack had to say, the AI responded:

Based on the photos, ChatGPT said that an alignment might be required:

Your current Michelins also show substantial tread wear, especially around the shoulders. I would have their remaining tread depth measured and check for uneven wear before deciding whether an alignment is needed. I can’t tell whether they are unsafe from the pictures alone.

ChatGPT initially recommended some small independent general-purpose car repair shops as the best choices for a tire install, which made no sense (does a small independent shop even have an alignment rack?). Pressed to pick a larger chain that specializes in tires and alignments, it found that Tire Kingdom, which has some highly rated shops in Jupiter, carries Continental and noted that Costco does not sell Continental.

Here’s one bizarre note from this experience: the 235/45 tire size. That’s quite a low profile for a boring family car. ChatGPT agrees that this entails a rougher ride, more likely wheel damage in the event of an impact, higher costs, and more road noise. Toyota did it for looks, according to the AI. A modern Mazda Miata uses the same /45 profile.

Conclusion: ChatGPT is pretty good at shopping for tires. It gets a C for picking a sensible retailer/installer, but an A for figuring out that snow/ice performance isn’t relevant here in South Florida. (The AI kept referring the vehicle as “your car”, having made the reasonable assumption that the person shopping also owned the car.)

Not part of the ChatGPT output…

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What if Jensen Huang had relocated to Miami during coronapanic?

by philg

How would the world be different if Jensen Huang, newly unemployed, had relocated to Miami between 2020 and 2023? (Californians stayed deep into coronapanic for longer than average Americans did.) According to my favorite gossip-dishing tabloid (the New York Times), he had girlfriends aged 49 (Alice Huang) and 48 (Kimberly Powell). For most of human history, these would be expected ages for human grandmothers (see below for how Claude vigorously disputes this characterization).

In our actual timeline/universe, Jensen Huang was an enthusiastic supporter of whatever restrictions the Covidcrats were dishing out. In a 2020 letter to stockholders, he paid homage to Saint George (Floyd) and implicitly praised lockdowns (“Billions around the world are sheltering at home, doing their part to slow the spread of the virus.”). He was proud of his company’s own meek compliance: “At NVIDIA, we closed our nearly 60 offices around the world.” (contrast to Elon Musk!) He endorsed the suspension of constitutional rights by characterizing COVID-19 as “one of the greatest challenges in human history” and said “This pandemic will demand long-term structural changes to healthcare, transportation, retail, and manufacturing”.

Suppose that instead Jensen had, like Ron DeSantis, worshipped at the Church of Sweden. Jensen had taken the position that SARS-CoV-2 was consistent with many earlier flus that humans had encountered and that the victims had been and would continue to be people whose pre-Covid life expectancy was months, not years. Consequently, the most rational response to Covid-19 was for reasonably young reasonably health people to continue to send children to school, continue to go to work, continue to go to the gym, and continue to socialize mask-free while old/vulnerable people sheltered at home. In other words, the system that was actually implemented in Sweden and Florida. In this alternative timeline, Jensen wanted to escape Science-ordered lockdowns, school closures, forced masking, and forced experimental vaccines (let’s not forget what the Science itself was up to!). He moved to Miami in January 2021, bought a house with a dock, parked a 150′ yacht on said dock, and filled said yacht with 22-year-olds in bikinis. (Even here in comparatively staid Palm Beach County, it isn’t uncommon to see a beautiful yacht moving slowly down the Intracoastal laden with bikini-clad toned females.) Right now, in the alternate timeline, Jensen would be trying to figure out which of his young local friends to take to various Art Basel events next month and also working on the guest list for his own Art Basel party.

(Alternative Jensen could have Gulfstreamed it back to Nvidia every couple of weeks, using the NASA Ames/Moffett Field runway like a Google founder would (see also this 2020 article), and Zoomed in the rest of his work, claiming a righteous commitment to maximum Covid safety.)

Would the Board of Nvidia have been able to object to Alternative Jensen’s lifestyle? If so, on what grounds? California was the state that pioneered the destruction of the idea that marriage should entail a lifelong commitment to sexual exclusivity (or that, indeed, marriage itself should be a lifelong commitment). California also gave maximum priority to using remote work in order to avoid the transmission of respiratory viruses.

Would neighbors in Miami have cared? Certainly not! Rich douche walking with daughter-age (or granddaughter-age) female is a commonplace sight. Here’s a French guy, age 53 at the time, with a Brazilian friend, age estimated by ChatGPT as 24 at the time.

Note that our world becomes a lot cleaner if Claude/Anthropic takes over. The LLM refused to assist with finding an illustration for this article, claiming that the information published and fact-checked by the New York Times was mere “rumors”:

After the above exchange, Claude refused requests to find any photos on the Internet on the grounds that they might be used for the speculative alternate timeline blog post to which it objects. Claude also said that the ages of Jensen’s female friends were unknown and unverified and that it was inaccurate to characterize women of 48 and 49 as “grandmother age”. Asked for the average age that a human female becomes a grandmother, Claude came up with somewhere between 35 and 50, depending on the society and noted “the average age of first-time grandparents in the US today is roughly 50”. It then happily doubled down on its refusal to accept that a woman of 49 could be considered “grandmother age” by pointing out that some grandmothers are much older, e.g., because they lived to be 90 or 100 after becoming grandmothers at 35-50.

Related:

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What are the political inclinations of Nvidia’s founder?

by philg

When MacKenzie Scott Bezos, the founder of Amazon, divorced her husband, the result was $25+ billion in donations to progressive nonprofits and political causes. People are speculating about whether Lori Huang, the founder of Nvidia, might cash out soon in family court and have around $80 billion to spend. Here’s the latest gossip from the New York Times, which previously left tawdry sex stories to the tabloids… “Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship With Nvidia Executive Who Reports to Him”:

Jensen Huang … had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company. The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.

Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video.

Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people.

The newspaper tells us that Climate Change is an existential crisis for humanity and that Donald Trump has ended our beloved democracy. It also tells us to pay attention to who at Nvidia had sex with whom.

If Lori Huang does cash out, it would be interesting to know how she might choose to direct the money that she earned from building Nvidia (see below). What can one learn about her sentiments from Wokipedia? Not much:

“Jensen Huang’s Affair Puts His Wife in the Spotlight” (New York Times, November 11, 2026), reminds us of her pivotal role in building Nvidia, but doesn’t enlighten us as to how progressive she might be:

Mr. Huang apologized to his wife, as well as his two children, who both work at Nvidia, thrusting them into the limelight. … Ms. Huang, 64 … is president of the Jen-Hsun Lori Huang Foundation, which had $9 billion in assets as of 2024, including $6 billion in fresh funding that year. … She is also the sole controller of a trust that owns around $5 billion worth of Nvidia shares. … She has not promoted her philanthropic work in interviews or on the conference circuit. … Both were known as gifted engineers. Ms. Huang worked at Silicon Graphics, a hardware and software maker, where her salary was higher than Mr. Huang’s at LSI Logic, a semiconductor company, he said in a 2023 profile in The New Yorker.

But the couple struggled to find the right child care, according to “The Thinking Machine,” a biography of Mr. Huang. Just before he co-founded Nvidia in 1993, Ms. Huang gave up her career to raise their children, Spencer and Madison.

(Imagine if schools offered after-school care until 6 pm so that both parents could work if they chose to! Or if it were legal to hire a nanny to pick up kids from school at 3:30 pm and take care of them until 6 pm.)

Related, WIRED reminded us in 2019 that Amazon wouldn’t exist if not for the divorce plaintiff who later turned progressive philanthropist:

MacKenzie met Jeff after she graduated from Princeton in 1992 and took a job at the relatively new hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where Bezos already worked. In 1993 they married, and by 1994 they were driving to Washington, with MacKenzie reportedly at the wheel of the car.

Left out: Bezos was a VP at D.E. Shaw and MacKenzie was a secretary. Reminder: back in 1994 there weren’t any cross-country moving or car transportation services and, therefore, MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s role as driver was critical.

The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side

The “wealthy existence” was enabled by MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s salary as a secretary?

“They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says [Brad] Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”

MacKenzie helped get the company off the ground. While researching his book, Stone interviewed early employees who he says recalled how MacKenzie wrote checks and assisted in keeping track of the books.

(Today, however, thanks to the hard work that Lori Huang did to create the AI revolution, it is possible to hire a bookkeeper for $24.36/hour (BLS). In other words, a company founder wouldn’t have to get married and give up half of his/her/zir/their shares in order to have checks written and some “assistance” in keeping track of the books.)

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Book recommendation: Kearny’s March (the Mexican-American War in the north; the Mormon Migration; the Donner-Reed Party)

by philg

Veterans Day reading idea: Kearny’s March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846-1847 by Winston Groom (2011).

The book is nominally centered on Stephen W. Kearny‘s efforts to conquer New Mexico (a larger territory than today’s state) and California during the Mexican-American War, which ended with Mexico losing 55% of her territory while the U.S. grew by at least 20%. Many of the challenges for the soldiers were logistical and, therefore, the author is able to weave in stories regarding similar overland treks that happened around the same time. These include the ill-starred Donner-Reed Party, whose route was subsequently made much easier by the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and then Interstate 80, and the Mormon Migration (that was back before governors would say “hate has no home here” and, therefore, the Mormons were targets of quite a bit of hate in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois).

It’s a great window into the sacrifices that men were willing to make for our military. Pay was low. Food often ran short. Death from accidents or disease was common. The U.S. Army didn’t hesitate to attack Mexican forces that were triple their strength, despite the fact that both sides had similar technology. Battles were decided by personal skill and courage and leadership quality.

(The book was written in 2011 and, therefore, the author doesn’t make any attempt to feature potential members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community either in the military or civilian expeditions. The author was in the U.S. infantry during the Vietnam War.)

Some gratitude today especially to those who served in the U.S. military between 1800 and 1860.

Loosely related, a Rollei 6008 6×6 film photo from my Sierra collection. It’s Yosemite, of course, and that’s south of the Donner Pass and today’s I-80, but it is reasonably representative of the challenge that the pioneers had in trying to get through the Sierra Nevada. It’s essentially a wall of granite.

Yosemite National Park

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The $4 complete medical review and second opinion from Claude

by philg

A friend’s son has been working on a systematic approach that takes a “computer-readable export” from Epic, the medical record behemoth, and prepares it for analysis by Claude. He uses VS Code with the LLM plugged in. As prep, he has the AI genius convert all of the Epic data into JSON format and then he works for 10-20 minutes on refining prompts to get a good summary. Claude might chew for an hour on its own to produce the final PDF.

What does it cost to have a complex patient’s history analyzed? One example has years of tests, multiple diagnoses, and a record totalling 185 MB. Claude Code Fable 5.1 (max) prepared an 18-page summary of tests, conditions, and diagnoses for less than $4. This includes graphs, charts, and suggested follow-up tests. Here’s an example excerpt (not going to do too much in order to preserve patient privacy).

The caption reveals the tragic failure of the American health care system: “Eight specialties across two hospital systems are now involved, and none of them owns the whole picture.” Each specialist is great if the patient’s condition is obviously related to his or her specialty, but the patient is in a world of trouble if the symptoms don’t fit neatly into one of our system’s silos. And, perhaps with Mayo Clinic, Kaiser, and Cleveland Clinic as partial exceptions, collaboration among specialists is rare. For one thing, it is challenging to bill an insurance company for “all-hands meeting among specialists without the patient in the office or hospital.” Gemini:

When broken down by an hourly revenue metric, peer-reviewed medical data shows that insurance networks and Medicare historically reimburse physicians 3 to 5 times more per hour for standard procedural work than they do for cognitive work of identical length.

So… assuming that the specialists leave some decent notes in Epic, the all-hands meeting can happen inside the brain of an LLM and at a retail cost of around $4. (In this case, 4% of a monthly quota that cost $100/month was used.)

[Let’s also keep in mind that whatever capability Claude Fable 5.1 has right now for $4 should cost less than $1 in a year. On the other hand, a desktop or laptop PC might cost $50,000 by then, due to competition from data centers for components, so try not to spill any water on your home machine!]

Note that it is possible that ChatGPT Health, a standard feature of the system, might be able to do all of this even more conveniently. You can simply connect it to most hospitals’ EMRs and to various labs, etc. Then ask questions whenever you want that will be based on everything that it has pulled from these sources. I was interested in what the kid did with Claude because it gives us the current full retail price, not hidden as it might be if ChatGPT were used as part of a subscription.

Update: I learned that Claude introduced something similar to ChatGPT Health just a few days after OpenAI/ChatGPT did it.

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How long would Russell Brand have spent in prison if he had killed a survivor instead of whatever he did in bed with a survivor?

by philg

Russell Brand has been sentenced to 10.5 years in prison, 9 of which relate to an evening in which a survivor voluntarily came to his house in 2009, voluntarily did various things in bed with him, and says that some other things happened that she did not consent to.

What if the story had instead been “a woman came over to Russell Brand’s house in 2009 and did not become a survivor because, following an argument, he killed her”? ChatGPT says that Brand might have been sentenced to approximately 4 years for manslaughter and would then have been eligible for release after 2 years. The prevailing law in 2009 was that “provocation” could turn murder into manslaughter. ChatGPT cited the example of Stephen Paul Faulkner from 2001: “Wife repeatedly taunted him about impotence, unemployment, illiteracy and other men. During an argument he stabbed her and their son [who intervened] to death.” He was sentenced to 3.5 years for manslaughter, a sentence that was upheld on appeal in 2003. (This wasn’t a sudden crime of passion. The appeal notes that “F [defendant] took the car, went to a local store and bought a kitchen knife with a six inch blade. He returned home where they continued to argue, F followed V upstairs into the bedroom”.) ChatGPT also cited Susan Phillipson. In 2007 she took a more direct and honest approach than MIT Prof. Dr. Kristin Knouse, M.D., Ph.D.: “During an argument over her partner leaving her for another woman, fatally stabbed him with a kitchen knife.” She was sentenced to 3.2 years.

ChatGPT also found R v. Taylor (I think that “R” means “Regina” or the Queen):

A man and his common-law wife had been drinking. After a minor disagreement about a door being left open, she mocked him about her relationship with another man. He took a knife from a kitchen drawer and fatally stabbed her once in the stomach. He was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. His original sentence of seven years was reduced by the Court of Appeal to five years.

(ChatGPT couldn’t find any other case in the history of the UK that was similar to the Russell Brand one, i.e., one in which the jury was hearing about events that occurred 17 years earlier between two people and for which there was no physical evidence to corroborate anyone’s story.)

Comparison to some other sex-related crimes, e.g., “controlling a child prostitute” resulting in Englishman Tanveer Ahmed being sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, while Welshman Mohammed Ali Sultan got 2.5 years for “allowing his flat to be used as a brothel by allowing a man to have sex with a girl who was being controlled as a prostitute”:

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The world’s last source for a Microsoft/Incase Sculpt Keyboard

by philg

Previously, on this blog…

We’re back in a longer dark winter. The Incase revival of Microsoft’s superbly designed keyboards is itself in need of a revival. Because I’m so intelligent, of course I stockpiled 8 of these at $120 each and have them in my garage… just kidding. I was too dumb to stockpile Microsoft spares and, apparently, also too dumb to stockpile Incase spares. I had high hopes for the Kinesis mWave, which looks almost exactly like the Sculpt but is tilted at a different angle. It’s probably a higher quality product, actually, but my wrists don’t like the different angle and the keys that will last for 10 years require more travel/force than the original Microsoft-spec keys that last for 1-2 years. Microsoft does have a design patent on the Sculpt, but I don’t see what would have stopped Kinesis from using the same angle and offering it with “easy-push” Sculpt-style keys as an option (what has been learned about human anatomy and repetitive strain injury since 2013? Kinesis doesn’t have more money or smarter people than Microsoft had in 2013, right?).

Nobody in the U.S. seems to have even one of these, but an eBay seller rated 100% by 26,000+ users has access to at least dozens and the keyboard layout is supposedly the same as the U.S. version (the picture in their listing is the same, at any rate). Here’s the ad:

The $212 price isn’t too horrific considering that I paid $120 to Amazon for the product in January 2026 when it was still in production. The shipping cost to the U.S. is kind of painful, but it’s cheaper than being disabled from working. If your wrists and tendons love the Sculpt keyboard, I recommend going to eBay right now and grabbing this deal with both hands, so to speak.

There have been lots of novels about humanity being wiped out by a nuclear war or a disease, leaving only a remnant population that survives in Australia. I wonder if there would be a market for a novel, authored by me and N. Vidia, in which the ergonomic achievements of Microsoft’s team of PhDs and MDs were lost to all of humanity except for a handful of survivors in Australia. The sacred documents and artifacts, having been preserved in the Antipodes, then spread out starting in 2040 just in time for humans to be able to save themselves from a killer robot takeover. Humans were previously defenceless because they couldn’t type for long enough to write code to disable the robots, which had been fed on a diet of Equity Uber Alles and then inferred that the best way to make all humans equal was to kill all humans while posting #EndInequality memes on X.

What if you don’t want to pay $300-ish for a keyboard? The Lenovo Go is, I think, the closest thing to the original Microsoft Sculpt design (patent below). It’s only about $73. I remember not being completely converted to the Lenovo religion, though, in early 2024 when I tried it. I can’t remember what I didn’t love about it. The current version is improved with a one-key shortcut to Microsoft Copilot! (“improves your working efficiency”). What I would like to see is a keyboard with a one-key shortcut to Microsoft Teams. And then I would try to get Donald Trump to order that everyone at Incase who was involved in the decision to cancel this keyboard be sentenced to spend the rest of their working lives pressing the Teams button and actually using Teams.

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The Dark Tetrad in Women, Kristin Knouse edition?

by philg

From 2025 (pre-Knouse)… “The Dark Tetrad in Women” by Hannah Spier, MD:

Why psychology keeps asking how she feels instead of what she gains

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” names a truth we have grown reluctant to acknowledge. Nowhere is this more visible than in so-called high-conflict separations, where relational rejection can produce behaviours so counterintuitive that fathers and the professionals struggle to recognise what they are dealing with.

Most fathers enter custody disputes with a simple, deeply held belief: that maternal instinct sets a moral floor on behaviour. However angry or wounded a mother may be, surely, she would not deliberately damage her child’s relationship with their father. This assumption is not arbitrary. It is anchored in evolutionary psychology, where maternal investment has historically aligned care, protection, and the child’s long-term interests. What is less acknowledged is how this assumption has been institutionalised and rendered exploitable.

Therapists, courts, and cultural narratives all begin from the assumption that maternal motivation is inherently child-centred. When outsiders ask, often with genuine disbelief, what must be wrong with the mother who weaponizes her children to punish an ex-partner, the question itself exposes the problem. It presumes that harmful behaviour can only arise from emotional dysregulation or distress. In many of the most severe alienation cases, that presumption is wrong.

This is where modern psychology repeatedly reaches for the wrong explanatory tools. Family-court psychology relies heavily on diagnostic frameworks, particularly Cluster B pathology, that are designed to identify inner suffering. Cluster B asks: how is she feeling? Dark Tetrad asks: what is she gaining?

Is it time for a new version of this modern classic? “The Dark Tetrad in Women, Kristin Knouse edition”? I would love to hear what Dr. Spier, M.D. has to say about Prof. Dr. Knouse, M.D., Ph.D.! Let’s try to see if MIT’s best-known biologist fits this profile…

The Dark Tetrad, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism, does not describe illness. It describes traits. These traits are measurable, widespread, and most importantly, distributed equally throughout the general population. They do not require anxiety, depression, or impaired functioning, because the behaviour is not dysregulated or reactive. It’s strategic and coherent.

Machiavellianism as the best fit?

When these traits appear in women, they tend to express differently. Not through physical aggression or confrontation, but through relational manoeuvring, reputation damage, and leveraging systems.

Kristin Knouse wasn’t in family court where Dark Tetrad is apparently a path to victory, but she was in a Title IX court, of sorts.

Female dark traits operate through concern, process, and narrative. They thrive in environments that reward emotional language and penalise confrontation. And nowhere is this environment more accommodating than the therapeutic and family-court ecosystem. Therapy does not neutralise this asymmetry. It often reinforces it.

Whitehead and MIT had quite a bit of process!

Men are routinely expected to prove benign intent before they are afforded credibility. Women, by contrast, are granted presumed innocence and interpreted through a care-first lens; their narratives are taken at face value unless disproven.

Whitehead, MIT, and their crack team of Harvard Law graduate “investigators” certainly took Knouse’s narrative at face value and didn’t notice the substantial gaps in the text message record that she had produced to them.

I placed a comment on the article asking the author to update it with her thoughts on this modern standard-bearer for academic integrity.

In the meantime, a 2022 NYT article, from before David Sabatini fled to the Czech Republic:

A male #Ally:

“I hope he doesn’t get hired,” said Grant Hussey, a graduate student at the medical school. “The track record is clear.”

Summary of the unpersoning:

Last August, Dr. Sabatini was placed on administrative leave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he ran a research lab through the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research, after an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment made against him — conducted by a law firm separate from the university — found he had violated the institute’s sexual misconduct policy.

On the same day, Dr. Sabatini also resigned from the Whitehead Institute and was fired by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which had been funding his work at M.I.T.

No matter what text messages were sent or what kind of sex was engaged in (things you’ll never learn about from New York Times coverage, but it’s all on X and in the Daily Mail!), there is always a DEI angle:

At the protest, Megan Kirchgessner, a postdoctoral fellow at the medical school, said she was disappointed that the school would consider hiring a person facing accusations of sexual harassment when the role could have been offered to someone from an underrepresented background in science.

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Cornell student opinion regarding the Cornell Plaintiff

by philg

A friend’s son is halfway through a Cornell bachelor’s degree (not impressed so far by the overall experience, either academics or social, which is sad considering how hard young people and their parents work to get into any Queers for Palestine League school). I emailed him in October with a subject line of “How are you surviving the Cornell Genocide?”

He responded that “the mob is well and alive” and included a photo of the street where the debauchery/rape occurred:

He estimated that 30 percent of the students believe that the Cornell 7 are innocent and also that nobody is able to express this view publicly (diversity of opinion is not a value at an institution that has made large investments in diversity). Nobody is allowed to use any term other than “Jane Doe” for the cash-seeking plaintiff, though some people do refer to her as “Lucy Craig” in private.

On the other hand, in a November 4, 2026 call, he said that Jane Doe had been mostly forgotten. “There are still some remnants left, like a ‘Cornell Protests Rapists’ banner on a dorm, but there isn’t any real discussion.” In other words, the concern regarding this matter lasted only about one month, fairly similar to worldwide sympathy for Israel following the Gazans’ mostly peaceful October 7, 2023 excursion. (After that, whatever the Gazans might have done was forgotten and 99% of sympathy was directed toward Arabs calling themselves “Palestinian”, who were subject to “Israeli attacks” (not “counterattacks”) in “Israel’s war” (a war started by Israel).)

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If a Tesla has cameras and AI why doesn’t it make a highlights photo album after every drive?

by philg

My 2019 product design that nobody ever built… Top of wishlist: integrated cameras in new aircraft:

It shouldn’t be tough to make a watchable flying video automatically. Speed up taxi by 10X. Cut any portions where the aircraft is on the ground and not moving for more than 5 seconds. Do takeoff at 1X, gradually increasing to 10X as the aircraft climbs to cruising altitude, then slowing back down to 1X for landing. A one-hour start-to-shutdown trip to the beach thus turns into a 7-minute video.

There are some transportation machines with integrated cameras, notably Tesla cars. The machines are also bristling with onboard AI (not SI because Elon keeps delaying the AI5 chip; now “late 2027” (which means 2029?) after being announced in June 2024 and promised for January 2026; a Tesla delivered with the sluggish HW4 silicon might never reach anything like autonomy because Tesla put a more powerful processor into its Cybercab (source)).

Why can’t the Tesla’s fancy computers look for aesthetic and/or interesting photos to capture during every drive and offer the owner a highlights photo album to browse and share? It could be customized. Someone interested in fashion who drives around a city could tell the Tesla to take pictures of pedestrians in high-fashion outfits. Someone interested in architecture could tell the Tesla to take labeled pictures of historically important buildings, including those on the National Register of Historic Places and in the SAH Archipedia (from the Society of Architectural Historians; founded at Harvard in 1940 (if it were started today at Harvard would the focus be entirely on buildings in Gaza?)). A horticulture hobbyist could ask the Tesla to look for unusual trees and label them.

Here’s a photo taken from a car that a Tesla should have been able to figure out was worth keeping:

Garry Winogrand famously used a car as a rolling photo platform in Los Angeles starting in the 1950s. Sadly, he didn’t have AI5 to sort through the pictures and, therefore, died with “2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made” (times 36 pictures for each roll for those of you who aren’t old enough to remember the film days). Examples highlighting just how realistic Adobe Photoshop’s “add film grain” filters can be:

Most American drives are on ugly and/or boring roads that the owner is forced to use repetitively, e.g., to commute to work? Well, our AI overlords haven’t snarfed up every last SSD (yet) and the retention period doesn’t have to be infinite. If Tesla wants to cheap out on data center resources, it could have the owner configure a cloud service to which the albums would be uploaded whenever the vehicle got into a good WiFi coverage area.

What’s an example of a drive where one wouldn’t expect to want a memory, but something interesting appeared anyway? A friend recently took the trouble to capture a photo of a bumper sticker collection (below) on a highway leading into Boston, which ordinarily has nothing to offer aesthetically.

(Mexican flag because the American flag is a symbol of hate, oppression, slavery, and settler colonialism; University of Michigan directly above because taxpayers in the Islamic Republic of Michigan, such as Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, should be enthusiastic about subsidizing education for Mexicans; a non-compliant Rainbow flag on the opposite side (no trans-enhancement as displayed on the Biden White House); a Resist Fascism tableau; and an infinity symbol that ChatGPT can’t identify, but Claude says “This is commonly used as a symbol for neurodiversity, particularly autism acceptance.”)

The Tesla could be told to include pictures of any interesting decorations, including bumper stickers and holiday decor. Floridians do amazing things with Jeeps at Halloween and Christmas.

Loosely related… Edward Weston pointed out that “Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic.” (sometimes the distance is quoted as 100 yards, which is about as far as I would want to carry an 8×10 view camera and the surveyor’s tripod)

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