Author: philg

More Tesla Full Self-Driving reports

by philg

Our neighbor has a Model Y that is one generation behind the recently introduced one. He reports having made a 4-hour trip from Gainesville (home of University of Florida, which needs to branch out!) without once touching the steering wheel. I wonder if this supports a “yes” answer to Do self-driving cars work better in states with modern road networks, such as Florida?

A friend who is rich enough to pay $900/month to garage his Tesla X in Manhattan reports regular 3-hour trips to what he refers to as “Long Island” (fake humble; I suspect “the Hamptons” is more accurate) and intervening on average less than once per trip. The FSD feature was one of the reasons he was willing to purchase a second home that is so far away.

This CyberTruck in our neighborhood the other day is beginning to look better with every report like the above that I hear.

In other car news, Waymo is coming to Miami (this does not support my theory that Florida is easy because they say that the intermittent heavy rain in Florida interferes with their self-driving system (LIDAR?), though maybe a vision-based system such as Tesla’s is just as degraded and nobody cares because there is always a backup human available in the “supervised” FSD).

The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach has a fleet of EVs for ferrying guests around. They apparently didn’t want cars with a Nazi affiliation so, instead of Tesla, they’re using Maybach/Mercedes EQS 680s:

Also from The Breakers, a photo showing how much more beautiful cars have become over the years as humanity has advanced in aesthetic capability. In front we see a hideous old car and in the background the beautiful Chevrolet Suburban and the sinuous Mercedes G-Wagen (also Nazi-free):

The jalopy in the photo is, according to ChatGPT, “a 1963–1966 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III”.

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AI Product Idea: Alter Ego

by philg

How about this use of artificial intelligence/LLMs… a complete personality upgrade.

Consider that in-person interaction is becoming increasingly rare. Most of what is known about someone’s personality is based on whatever he/she/ze/they has typed into a computer or a phone. There is a range of personality quality and some of us are near the bottom, e.g., gratuitously annoying or offending people. What if phone and desktop operating systems were modified to include an AI personality adjuster? The user’s emails, social media posts, text messages, etc. would all be edited to read like whatever a person with a great (kind, optimistic, non-sarcastic, non-sour) personality would have written.

“I paid $45,000 for this car and your incompetent mechanics haven’t fixed the A/C after three visits” becomes “Thank you and your team for working hard to get my A/C fixed on the last three service visits. I appreciate your diligence, especially since you sold me the car for only $45,000, which I know was an especially fair deal. I am wondering if I can schedule a fourth service on the A/C.”

Here’s a tweet from someone with a terrible personality:

Instead of “How is an organization with a white male leader equipped to demand that others stop being racist?” this comment would be rewritten to “Thank you and your tireless UN colleagues for all of the work that you do to make the world a better place. I hope that you can stay in your Secretary-General job until you’re 95, but if you choose to enjoy a well-earned retirement it would be interesting to see what a Secretary-General of color would do.”

(Note how my reply got only 28 views; X has an algorithm to keep people in echo chambers. It has learned that nothing I write is going to make people who follow the UN happy or interested and, therefore, suppresses views for any comment that I might make on a UN post. Similar replies on conservative users’ tweet have gotten at least a few hundred views.)

This could have saved James Damore, the Google Heretic. His entire manifesto would have been reduced to “Women are so much better at programming than men because they just love a job where they sit by themselves and stare at a screen all day. It would be wonderful if Google would hire more females even if their education and skills don’t appear to be sufficient for the jobs.”

If fed statistics from online dating markets and told to write for success, the AI would rewrite most messages from men to women to be variations on “I am 6’2″ tall and earn $750,000 per year.” (see “Income attraction: An online dating field experiment”, for example) “Rammstein is my favorite group” would become “$10,000 is not too much to spend on a Taylor Swift concert.” The political stuff would be trivial for an AI to handle. If a man wrote “I voted for Donald Trump” that would be tweaked to “I am inspired by Kamala Harris and all of the other amazing Democrat women.”

A social media comment on a post celebrating a female aviation achievement under the Are women the new children? standard would go from “Don’t forget Hanna Reitsch, the first woman to fly a helicopter, and a passionate advocate for her government and nation.” to “Great to see someone breaking barriers.”

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The inherent value of men revealed by female preference

by philg

“American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage” (WSJ):

The 29-year-old always thought she’d have found her life partner by now. Instead, she’s house hunting solo and considering having kids on her own.

“I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, a Boston-based accountant. “I’m willing to accept being single versus settling for someone who isn’t the right fit.”

American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like.

“The numbers aren’t netting out,” said Daniel Cox, director of the survey center at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. He ticked off the data points: More women than men are attending college, buying houses and focusing on their friendships and careers over dating and marriage.

A 2022 Pew survey of single adults showed only 34% of single women were looking for romance, compared with 54% of single men, down from 38% and 61% in 2019. Men were also more likely than women to say they were worried that nobody would want to date them.

Coaching from mom:

Last year, Michele Kirsch told her three adult daughters she wanted them to have “boyfriends by Christmas.” She had a dream, she had told them, that each of them was standing in front of the lit-up tree next to “a hunk who liked to ski and went to a good school.”

“went to a good school” means “makes a well-above-median wage”?

Many of the men Katie [one of the adult daughters] met, she said, either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her.

“weren’t career-oriented enough” means “makes a well-above-median wage”? Here’s an example female who is upset that she can’t find a man who out-earns her:

A similar anecdote:

Rachael Gosetti, a 33-year-old real-estate agent in Savannah, Ga., said she broke up with her boyfriend, with whom she shares a 5-year-old son, over a year ago because she was tired of doing most of the child care, cooking and scheduling while also earning almost double her boyfriend’s salary. She has yet to date anyone else in part because she worries about living in a red state with a six-week abortion ban. “I have a child that I can’t leave behind to drive to Virginia if I had a pregnancy scare, and I definitely can’t afford another child as a single mom,” she said.

The last part is curious. Virginia allows abortion care only up to 27 weeks of pregnancy, unlike in Maskachusetts, where it would be legal at 37 weeks if a single doc believes abortion care would help the patient’s mental health. If Ms. Gosetti didn’t learn about her pregnancy until the 36th week, for example, she could fly from Savannah to Boston, receive abortion care, and return home by air.

My thoughts on the above… first, it shows that accessing a high-income man’s income/wealth is much more practical via a casual sexual encounter (perhaps Clomid-assisted; see “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”) than by trying to persuade one of the male unicorns to commit to marriage. Second, the article is consistent with the idea that men have essentially no inherent value to the typical woman. The man who earns $500,000 per year and is pursued by various females would not be desirable if he lost the job and all of his savings.

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How is it safe for consumers to handle a megawatt of power for electric car charging?

by philg

“BYD confirms new 1,000V ‘Super E-Platform’ capable of fast charging 400km in 5 minutes” (electrek):

Chinese auto conglomerate BYD has introduced a new 1,000-volt EV platform that can enable charging rates as fast (or perhaps faster) than a trip to the gas station. We’re talking five minutes. … offers 1,000V and charge rates up to 1,000 kW.

How can this be made safe? If everything is new and everything functions as designed, the car and the charger communicate before the cable is fully energized. A GFCI will trip if a portion of the 1000 amps starts leaking out to ground (via the human holding it?).

Let’s assume that there aren’t any mostly peaceful Massachusetts climate change warriors to vandalize the charging station:

Both car and charger still face the relentless enemies of time and corrosion. GFCI outlets in home situations are known to fail after 10-20 years. Consumers aren’t going to wear heavy rubber gloves the way that trained utility workers do. How long will it be before the foolproof failsafe systems fail either due to unforeseen foolishness or age/corrosion? That leaves the EV owner (wearing a MAGA hat since Democrat climate change alarmists have gone back to pavement-melting SUVs?) with his/her/zir/their hands on a failed cable carrying enough power to run 800 houses.

Maybe the argument is that people will be killed by these 1000V charging systems as they age and get maintained by the same Americans who can’t make public WiFi work, but it won’t be a higher number than are killed in freak gasoline fight accidents.

Loosely related… a carefully engineered high-voltage power system with full redundancy (CNN) …

Even more loosely related…

Here’s ChatGPT’s response to “Create an image of a nonbinary Tesla owner next to his/her/zir/their car” with the refinement prompt “The shirt should more clearly indicate that the person identifies as a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community”:

Grok seems to think that “nonbinary” is the same as “nonwhite”:

I asked ChatGPT “Redo the above image to look like a hand-drawn pen and ink sketch.” For some reason, it made a lot of other changes as well, including mirroring the orientation.

I wonder if someone could get an A in an online art class via the use of ChatGPT (the failure to spell “2SLGBTQQIA+” could be considered artistic license).

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The NYU data breach is legit

by philg

A friend whose child recently applied to NYU downloaded the hacker’s ZIP file of liberated data (canonical link; it may be that this has been getting updated with additional redactions) and found his child’s name and other identifiable characteristics.

Background… “Hacker claims responsibility for replacing NYU’s website with apparent test scores, racial epithet” (New York Post):

A dark web user claimed responsibility for briefly hacking New York University’s website Saturday, and replacing it with what appeared to be student test scores and an apparent racial epithet.

Instead of the usual images of college athletes and the Greenwich Village campus, the site featured a black background with green writing showing a message along with charts of what were purported to be SAT and ACT scores and GPAs for students in 2024, divided by race.

“On June 29 2023, racial affirmative action in college admissions was ruled illegal,” the female hacker’s message reads. “Computer N–gy Exploitation (CNE) reveals NYU continued anyway.”

My friend and his computer-oriented son played around with the data and found an interesting pattern… kids from their local high school were in the database as having applied early with certain SAT scores and GPA. The database showed that they were rejected (perhaps for being white, since their qualifications were above the medians for admitted precious Black applicants). In conversations at school, the kids claimed higher SAT/GPA numbers than they reported to NYU and the kids didn’t mention having applied to NYU (i.e., they kept their rejections secret).

What does it take to be accepted? My friend and his son found a good athlete from a Maskachusetts public high school. His (weighted GPA) was 4.15 and his SAT score was 1550. He’s the wrong kind of Brown (Indian), apparently, and was rejected.

The data download arrives as CSV files, but don’t try opening in Excel. The files are around 3 GB in size:

Whatever the test scores of the carefully-curated-by-skin-color NYU admittees. they can all be on the #RightSideOfHistory (link) with the NYU Queer Union:

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Report on the Expat Life in Spain

by philg

I recently caught up with a friend who bailed out of Brooklyn in August 2020. He retired in 2019 after a couple of moderately successful startups (by NY standards, not by NVIDIA/OpenAI standards). He, his wife, and two kids (now 6th and 8th grade) moved to a beautiful historical downtown of a small city in Spain (population 220,000) that is 30 minutes from the beach (admittedly cold/wet for most of the year; he’s not fighting it out with expat Brits on the Mediterranean coast).

He pays $1400/month for a five-bedroom apartment that is 180 square meters (1940 square feet) and children attend public school (as in Maskachusetts, and unlike in Florida, they teach to only one level. There is no gifted education and the teachers’ attitude to a kid who says everything is easy is “That’s great; you won’t have to work hard”. Nobody obsessively preps to gain admission to university). I asked about the cost of living, specifically health insurance:

Expats are required to get private health insurance, but that doesn’t mean what Americans think it means. In New York, my family’s insurance cost me about $25,000 in 2019. Here, it’s currently about $3,500. Point of comparison: a couple of years ago, I had a heart attack. The public hospital treated me (even though as an expat, I’m not part of the national healthcare system) and billed me afterwards. My private insurance informed me that because I’d gone to a public hospital, I had zero coverage. The total bill for ER admission, an ambulance ride, angioplasty with two stents, and three days in the coronary ICU came to about $3,000.

Mid-range cars are similar, but replace all the above-average-size ones (pickups and full-size SUV’s) with below-average-size ones (compact cars like the Audi A1 or Skoda Fabia). Since those cars retail between €20k – €30k, I’m guessing that brings the average price down. Not sure what a Tacoma or Suburban costs these days.

Groceries are way cheaper than the US — or at least than NYC. I don’t really know what food costs outside New York. I bought apples yesterday for about $1/pound; I think in New York it’s a lot more. A sandwich and a beer come to about €5; a prix-fixe lunch menu (very common here) runs €12 – €20; wine is €2 – €3 a glass; but an entree at dinner could go as high as €30, depending what you choose. Of course, you can pay more if you try; there are fine-dining restaurants that cost far more.

There is nothing that he misses about Brooklyn and his friends who are still there say that the quality of life in many Brooklyn neighborhoods and also in Manhattan has deteriorated dramatically. The heart attack is cautionary. He’s younger than I am and his lifestyle must be vastly superior and more relaxed.

Maybe Spain isn’t the best destination for Jews, unless they want to hang out in a working class town. As in the U.S., anti-Israel sentiment is correlated with education and left-wing politics (“Spanish public opinion regarding the recognition of the State of Palestine”, May 2024):

Related:

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Immigrant-poor Japan vs. immigrant-rich Germany

by philg

Pierre Poilievre, the potential replacement for Mx. Trudeau as Canada’s leader, recently highlighted this chart showing the stagnation of the Canadian economy from an individual’s perspective (the economy grew with the population, though, so politicians had more money to spend every year). Let’s look at Japan, a frequent example of a worst-case outcome for Population Doomsayers and Open Borders advocates:

Japan is right in the middle of this chart, with superior economic performance compared to immigrant-rich nations such as Canada, Germany, the UK, Australia, and France. In other words, Japan retained their language and culture, supported a growing fraction of the population that is elderly, and managed to achieve substantial per-capita GDP growth despite a falling percentage of the population being of working age.

There is a Scientific consensus that immigration is the only viable path to prosperity, especially for countries with low native birth rates and high median age. Yet the above chart, especially the bar for Japan, is completely inconsistent with Proven Science (TM).

Circling back to Canada, Aporia has some interesting charts on this best-case scenario for immigration.

Unlike in the US or Europe, where most immigrants are either illegals, refugees or persons brought in through family reunification, Canadian immigration is designed to be selective. Most permanent Canadian immigrants are granted that status through employment, while the (supposedly) temporary immigrants comprise about one-third students. I say “supposedly” because this group makes up a full 7.3% of the entire population of Canada, and there’s no plan or real mechanism to remove them from the country. Note that Canada has birthright citizenship, giving “temporary” immigrants an easy path to permanent residency and citizenship through anchor babies.

Unlike most countries, Canada has imported humans who do better on academic tasks than its natives do. Given the correlation between academic performance and later earnings, Canada’s economy should be doing quite well.

Canada chucked its culture, value system, and religion in hopes of achieving economic growth. What they achieved instead is a society of incel males living in apartments:

Despite the miracle of 2SLGBTQQIA+ Science, apparently it isn’t practical for an incel male to produce a baby:

Canada will thus have to double down on immigration in order to keep its politicians supplied with taxpayers. Support for this program is particularly confusing to me with respect to Quebec. The Québécois fought for two centuries to preserve their distinctive culture, religion, and language. In the past 10-20 years, though, they gave it all up because of their passion for open borders. Is there any scenario in which a Muslim from India would want to learn French, convert to Catholicism (punishable by death, traditionally, in Islam), and follow Québécois customs? If not, Quebec is guaranteed to lose its distinctive character and will become just another poorer-than-anywhere-in-the-US random assemblage of humans, cultures, and religions in which the English language is the only thing that people have in common.

Loosely related… a friend’s comment: “Canada will obliterate us in this kind of trade war because they are already poor and are happy staying that way.”

Related:

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Why did the bridge camera die?

by philg

I was recently asked to provide advice for a teenager with a $600 budget for a camera to take pictures of horses at horse nerd events. This girl is not interested in photography as a gadget fondling activity, but she needs a lens with a reasonably long reach. It’s the same situation as a soccer parent. There used to a category called bridge camera, in which a single high-quality lens was mated to a reasonably large sensor. Olympus was a pioneer in this area with the beautiful E-10 back in 2000, which had a 35-140mm/2-2.4 (35mm equivalent) lens and a camera built around it. I wrote a review of the E-10 in 2001. This category flourished for a while, but seems to have died in favor of absurdly long-range zooms in front of tiny mobile phone-sized sensors (i.e., probably worse image quality than an iPhone 16 for most images because Apple’s camera software is superior to what the camera companies themselves have made) or massive overkill on both sensor size (“full-frame” or at least four-thirds) and system complexity (interchangeable lenses for people who want just one lens). The problem with a sensor that is too big is that it forces the lenses to be too big and heavy. The problem with a sensor that is too small is that image quality is compromised, especially in lower light conditions.

Here’s what I wrote…

There is no point in carrying a camera with a less than “1 inch” sensor (nowhere near one inch in size!). Most of the cheap point and shoot cameras have sensors that are the same size as mobile phones so the image quality isn’t any better than on a phone. The compact cameras that offer insane telephoto limits, e.g., 3000mm, have these tiny sensors and, therefore, a tiny lens will yield a high 35mm equivalent focal length.

Your friend needs at least a 200mm equivalent telephoto. The best current camera that meets these specs is the Sony RX10 IV, but it costs $1700 (35mm equivalent: 25-600/2.4-4). The original RX10 (original review), which doesn’t have as long a telephoto reach, is available for $469 used in excellent condition from MPB, which is a reputable company. So your friend should probably get this. When it is time to move on, the camera can likely be sold for at least $400 (It was $1300 when originally sold).

You can see that the latest cameras with 1″ sensors and the same equivalent focal length have very small apertures extended (f/16 vs. f/8 for the RX10). From https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-zs100-tz100

image.png

At f/16, the sensor won’t be getting much light so the ISO has to be cranked way up unless it is very sunny out.

I can’t figure out why the 25-year-old Olympus concept is carried on by just one company (Sony). Why isn’t the market crowded with $600 1″-sensor bridge cameras wrapped around high quality 24-200mm lenses? They could be branded “SoccerCams”. Is it because the average consumer can’t be educated into realizing that sensor size is relevant? A camera with a reasonable size sensor will never be able to offer “83x optical zoom” the way the Nikon P950 does (can it be that the 1/2.3″ sensor, mobile phone size, of this camera actually produces great pictures somehow?).

Maybe this is just another data point to support the rule “If Philip likes the idea it will be a business disaster”?

Separately, at least once every year I have to publicly beg Apple to make a camera or two! So let this post be the 2025 request. A Sony RX10-spec camera with iPhone software and interfaces for direct uploading to social media would be amazing. Also, perhaps, a pocket-sized one-inch sensor camera like the Sony RX100 (latest version has a somewhat crazy 24-200mm lens that is f/16 maximum aperture at 200mm; maybe a very high quality 24-105 would be better).

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Department of USPS Efficiency

by philg

We sent out a Christmas card that was postmarked West Palm Beach, December 23, 2024. The destination was Brooklyn. It was returned as undeliverable (my friend moved) on March 18, 2024, nearly three months after being mailed. An opportunity for DOGE?

If the USPS were eliminated completely, I wonder if Amazon or UPS would replace it by installing a print-on-demand system for creating junk mail in their existing trucks. The trucks would go from house to house, as they already do now for packages, and drop junk mail, plus the occasional first class communication, on doorsteps. If the junk mail printer also stuffed everything privately into an envelope maybe this could replace mailing physical documents in most cases, e.g., medical bills and bank statements. The bank would pay UPS/Amazon to print out the statement right at the point of delivery.

Separately, the folks in West Palm Beach were stamping outgoing mail with a snowman. The most recent snowfall in Palm Beach County was January 19, 1977 (that was the only snowfall on record, though I guess we could attribute the lack of snow since 1977 to Climate Change).

Related:

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A drag show in Ocala, Florida

by philg

The Righteous accuse Florida of being deficient in drag shows, especially drag story time for toddlers at the public libraries. Ocala, Florida, however, is home to a permanent drag show: the pet-friendly Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing.

Here’s Wile E. Coyote’s dragster, which used “a rocket system from the NASA lunar program” and accelerated from 0-140 mph in one second. Four seconds and 352 mph in the quarter mile.

It seems that Don Garlits got his start in the 1950s in Tampa, Florida and was successful in 1957 with Swamp Rat I (8.23 seconds in the quarter mile):

Nerds will appreciate the engine room, which includes some cutaways:

For aviation enthusiasts, one of the best engines in the museum is a 2000 hp Allison V-12 from a P-40 fighter plane, purchased after WWII for $50.

The turbine engine in this 1993 Pontiac might be from an aircraft, but unfortunately few details are provided:

An adjacent building houses antique cars. Here’s an interesting example of how durable automotive paint is: a 1936 Ford with 72,000 miles (driven only during summers on Cape Cod; maybe for 25-35 years?) that has never needed repainting.

Adolf Hitler’s legacy is honored with a 1950 VW bug and a 1974 Karman Ghia:

We’re informed that our economy is inflation-free, so take $375 down to the local car dealer and ask to drive away in a new car:

After the museum, take a walk or bike ride on the 110-mile Cross Florida Greenway, built on the corpse of a Spanish canal idea from 1567 that was finally killed by Richard Nixon in 1971 partly due to efforts by Marjorie Harris Carr. To traverse the entire 110-mile trail requires a mountain bike, I think, because only about 35 miles is paved. The Florida Coast-to-Coast Trail (250 miles and 88 percent complete) is better-suited to a hybrid or road bike. It is about 50 miles south of the Greenway.

Downtown Ocala is small, but fun, and was the home of an important 1890 political movement (Ocala Demands). Unfortunately, like in most of the U.S., suburban sprawl with strip malls is how the once-walkable city grew. On the other hand, one can’t beat this vape shop’s name: Smocala.

Of course, Ocala is better-known for horse power (below) than horsepower, but I think the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing is worth a visit if you’re checking out The Villages.

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