I’m waiting for Apple to broadcast on their satellite services so I can point my phone up and get weather, news and maybe live traffic (on pre-downloaded maps). Wouldn’t need many kbps to get that even if it needs to constantly repeat. Especially with some spot beams for localization.
> if you need to replace one tire 20k miles in (i.e. due to a road hazard etc) you then have to replace the entire set to avoid damaging the drivetrain
Re-sell them to other vehicle operators that don’t need to worry about that to utilize the remaining life? Would be easier if we had more 3 wheelers but at least 2 tires can be sold as a set. And not extremely difficult to match sets of 3 odds together with another 3 odds if you have some infrastructure to get some network effects.
That’s me. Built a scraper do dump stuff to a csv of a list of images for further ocr and openCV processing. Now I have a convenient list of hits once I run the batch that used to be a loooot of manual sifting.
Once I work out the kinks, I’ll be able to further automate it.
Would have taken 10-100x as long for me to build it without AI and the AI version is probably better.
But yeah, I have enough knowledge to know what prompts are needed and figure out those “oh, I think it’s running slow or failing because of xyz” and further prompt to improve it based on that what I think it should do instead.
And I know where to make slight changes without burning my allotments.
With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.
Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.
> As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.
I guess this means that you have some good instincts or habits that would be good for a programmer, even if you didn't choose that path.
Programming is more than just knowing the syntax of the programming language and the APIs you want to use. It also requires clear communication and clear thinking, checking things, etc.
There is no reason why a non-programmer couldn't also think clearly or carefully. It's just a fact about humanity that most people don't; and many people have jobs that do not require this, so they never develop the skills. Some people develop them for job-unrelated reasons.
Now we are at the moment when the LLMs can do the syntax and APIs for you, but they still fail at clear thinking and proper caution. That elevates a good potential programmer to a good vibecoder.
This is broadly true of a bunch of jobs/fields with LLMs, but particularly true for programming. They raise the floor to a point where a generally capable person can put something like that together, or come up with a passably okay visual design, or decent-enough written language. I've been using them heavily to get some laughably basic CAD work done for small 3d printed projects. Stuff that absolutely makes my mechanical engineer friends roll their eyes at me.
An expert can either use the tool more effectively, or see all the issues in a less experienced person's output.
Both of these are good things, the mistake a ton of people are making is experiencing industrial scale Dunning-Kruger and thinking "Only my expertise is still valuable, every other white collar role is done!"
The second-order mistake is thinking that raising the floor like that devalues expertise instead of increasing demand for it. The net-effect of me starting to play with CAD because it's a little easier now isn't that I don't hire my friends who are experts to make a tiny spacer I'm going to 3d print, I never would have hired them for that, it's that maybe I start learning the skills and decide to take on a more ambitious project where I do need to hire one of them for some help, or start ordering custom CNC'd parts -- scale that to the entire economy.
It’s probably all well and good until a vehicle gets old and gaskets no longer seal, immersion becomes more of quicker contributor to failure, electric or not. E.g. cracked boots on a ball joint or not so sealed wheel bearings.
Also why I don’t like pressure washing anything mechanical.
E.g. Drove through a heavy rain storm and my ecu decided one of my wheel speed sensors was faulty and suspended my abs and traction control. Even after drying it out on a nice day of driving, the error persisted but I was able to reset it with my vehicle specific obd reader and not an issue again. Ugh.
eBay has always competed with print and online classifieds. And started the successful Kijiji (in Canada). If what you’re selling is niche enough, local doesn’t work, and has a lot of friction unless it’s something too big to ship.
I like to pay the cheapest price humanly possible but there’s often value in just paying the shipping and online premium. As a seller, it’s easier to put up a posting whenever I feel and stuff it in a box and label it only when I have cash in hand.
+ there’s some geo-arbitrage for sellers: chances are the person willing to pay the most isn’t local to you.
EBay is still more friction than Amazon and eBay commissions are like 16% these days so eBay’s completely lost the giant pie that is mass-manufactured goods.
Don’t even really need star link for that.
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