I saw a video where a mechanic replaced a pack on his Model S with a 100Wh pack. There were some minor issues of fit, which he had all figured out. There was a connector change and some sheet steel around the edges that needed changing out to make it physically fit. The procedure was to keep a table under the vehicle, lower the vehicle so that the pack rested on the table, remove the last retaining bolts on the bottom, and lift the car back up. Reverse for install except he had to align it first. He estimated it would take 2 hours total. This car was designed for fast pack exchange. The coolant connections were self connecting and disconnecting.
Then came the software. The amount of complexity and jargon and issues and roadblocks that come out of nowhere is extraordinary. You have to dive several layers deep in a menu system to do step 1, then get hung up on opening a "gateway", then dive down the same menu to do step 2 of a 2-step process. He had another problem that kept him busy but what impressed me is the amount of time and complexity to do the simplest things. He wasn't performing many steps, but just getting to the step required rebooting, waiting, pressing the brake pedal to see when it was time to move the right turn signal stalk, didn't work, go back, do something else for 10 minutes, try again, it seemed endless.
German automotive companies have historically been terrible at software. Just because Tesla hasn't simplified or integrated their various software components yet, doesn't mean others can't do it nicer. But any company that doesn't value software like the Americans do is going to have a real tough time with the EV software problem.
The article in question is published on Google's blog. Has Google resolved memory safety issues in its C++ code base? Did G port their code base to Rust or some other memsafe language? What's preventing them from doing that by themselves?
What's preventing Microsoft, or Apple, or the coagulate Linux kernel team, or any other kernel team, from adopting memsafe technology or practice by themselves for themselves?
The last thing we need are what are evidently incompetent organizations that can't take care of their own products making standards, or useless academics making standards to try to force other people to follow rules because they know better than everyone else.
If the team that designed and implemented KeyKos, or that designed Erlang, were pushing for standardized definitions or levels of memory safety, it would be less ridiculous.
At the same time, consciousness of security issues and memory safety has been growing quickly, and memory safety in programming languages has literally exploded in importance. It's treated in every new PL I've seen.
Putting pressure on big companies to fix their awful products is fine. No pressure needs to be applied to the rest of the industry, because it's already outpacing all of the producing entities that are calling for standards.
If Google has failed so far to resolve mem safety issues in their decades old giant code base, then I'd rather hear standardization ideas from someone who succeeded. If G succeeded at resolving those issues, then that's a concrete positive example for the rest of industry to consider following. They ought to lead by example.
It seems like decades-old giant code bases are precisely the ones hardest to migrate to memory safety. That's where coercion and enforcement is needed most. You and I don't need to be told to start a new project in not-C++ do we? Nearly every trained programmer has been brainwashed (in a good way) with formal methods, type systems, bounds checking, and security concerns. Now those same people who champion this stuff say it isn't enough, and therefore we need to do more of the same but with coercion. That's a failure to understand the problem.
> If Google has failed so far to resolve mem safety issues in their decades old giant code base, then I'd rather hear standardization ideas from someone who succeeded. If G succeeded at resolving those issues, then that's a concrete positive example for the rest of industry to consider following. They ought to lead by example.
Google saw "the percentage of memory safety vulnerabilities in Android dropped from 76% to 24% over 6 years as development shifted to memory safe languages" - which I'd say is a positive example.
It's not that they've already fully succeeded (I don't think anyone has on codebases of this size), but neither is it that they tried and failed - it's an ongoing effort.
> You and I don't need to be told to start a new project in not-C++ do we?
Don't need to be told because we all already avoid C++, or don't need to be told because it doesn't really matter if we do use C++?
I'd disagree with both. There are still many new projects (or new components of larger systems) being written in C++, and it's new code that tends to have the most vulnerabilities.
> And before anyone says, "well you call everyone neo-nazis!" Erm, self-proclaimed neo-nazis. They call themselves that.
You should watch the video before posting a link. Proud Boys don't call themselves neo nazis. Other parts of the video touch on stats about violence from who knows what source - left or right - and then touches on people "storming the capital" and "insurrection". So, nothing real or concerete and in particular nothing to do with neo nazis.
You're very quick to accuse others of not being in good faith.
I take it that left wingers feel that "community notes" isn't effective or sufficient to combat right wing beliefs that are wrong?
The people on the right seem satisfied for now that they can "combat misinformation with more information". (That's a misquote by the way, I believe he said better information, not more. On second thought, he may have said it both ways.)
Has anyone discussed why the right believes this can work, and the left doesn't?
> believing 2020 was stolen (which is one I'm willing to believe)
Interesting. What forms the basis of your belief?
Personally, I think it’s interesting that over 60 lawsuits were filed across the U.S. to challenge the 2020 result, and not a single one produced any evidence of widespread voter fraud. Even judges appointed by Trump himself agreed that there was no evidence to support the claims. What do you think the simplest explanation for this is?
Well at this point there are two plausible possibilities. 1) The circumstances around covid and last minute election rules changes made it possible to cheat in ways that slide beneath the high evidentiary standards of the courts. Or 2) Joe Biden was by far the most popular presidential candidate in history; easily getting many millions more votes than Barrack Obama, Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris.
Given that we are reliably informed that significant electoral fraud is impossible, we can only conclude the Democrats made a catastrophic own goal by forcing the greatest candidate ever out of the race.
> made it possible to cheat in ways that slide beneath the high evidentiary standards of the courts
But the issue isn't that the evidence didn't meet high standards -- it was that there wasn't any evidence at all. In many cases, the plaintiffs who filed these lawsuits dismissed them voluntarily, not even trying to put forth evidence.
> Or 2) Joe Biden was by far the most popular presidential candidate in history
I think we can all agree that's not the case. But have you considered that voters often turn out to vote against the other party rather than for their own candidate? At the end of 2020, a lot of people were feeling very unhappy with the incumbent administration. In fact, that was true globally -- incumbents fared terribly after the pandemic.
> But the issue isn't that the evidence didn't meet high standards -- it was that there wasn't any evidence at all. In many cases, the plaintiffs who filed these lawsuits dismissed them voluntarily, not even trying to put forth evidence.
Similarly, there is no evidence of shoplifting in San Francisco. Prosecutors don't even bring cases, let alone bring them and then dismiss them voluntarily. Therefore we can clearly conclude there is no shoplifting at all there, let alone shoplifting at a scale that would affect commerce.
So you’re suggesting that Donald Trump and his allies had the same level of disinterest in winning the 2020 election as San Francisco has in prosecuting theft? Huh.
Well because it's obvious and I figured that you're smart enough to see that.
To spell it out for you: the set of evidence that is admissible in court is a tiny fraction of the set of all evidence that exists. Furthermore, the set of evidence that is not only admissible in court, but is actually presented to a court is an even yet tinier proper subset of the admissible evidence.
When you exclude the vast majority of evidence that a thing may be happening, you don't actually have grounds to say that the thing isn't happening.
And you still avoid my question: WHY. Why didn't those litigants even try to proffer evidence? Why does it just so happen that the only evidence available to support these claims is so weak that it's not even worth trying?
I think the reason you keep avoiding my question is that you don't have an answer for it. All I see are repeated trips around a loop of self-reinforcing beliefs that are rooted in nothing. (Or do you even believe this stuff? Here I am trying to understand what's going on in your head, and perhaps you're just going through the motions...)
Anyway, you're wrong about evidence. Most evidence is admissible, especially if it's going before a bench. What the legal process doesn't allow is "evidence" lacking any indicia of trustworthiness. And as to your claim that the evidence "actually presented to a court is an even yet tinier proper subset of the admissible evidence", well, uh, that's entirely up to the litigants themselves. As I've said, if you won't even bother trying to put up your evidence, one has to wonder why.
A third possibility you aren't considering: a lot of Democrats were bored and stuck at home and had nothing better to do, so they voted for Biden in 2020. Come 2024, they had plenty of other things to do than vote, so many of those who had in 2020 decided not to bother.
Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information? Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source. We know policing speech doesn't work, whoever does the policing introduces their own biases, this was clear as day with the hunter laptop story and how the goverment put pressure on social media companies to supress it.
This “sounds smart” and I’m sure it circulates well in conversation. In practice, no. The point of “facts” is to identify useful truths that guide decisions. When some portion of the distribution of people identify misalignment, which is inevitable—not optional—then they will true up.
4 years on and a significant proportion of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Just how many years will it take for that to true up?
I notice you don't make a definite claim that it wasn't stolen. You're annoyed by the fact others believe it was, based on what you feel is insufficient evidence, yes?
Surely the burden of proof is on those making a claim of election interference? Elections are designed to be reliable and there haven't been reports of previous elections being "stolen", so I would think that reasonable evidence should be provided if people want to push the idea that an election was interfered with.
There is no burden of proof required to assert a hypothesis. This is how none of truth nor science nor security operate. There is evidence gathering activity which supports or undermines, strengthening or weakening a hypothesis. Ideally, one dispositive form of evidence affirms or denies a hypothesis. It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud, but in any case, other claims are weak evidence.
These are recounts, audits, and security guards. No recounts deviated by that much, even the massive Arizona recount found no significant deviation.
> It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud
Please provide that. The evidence AFAIK is counted as essentially "parts per million", it is so small. Meanwhile there are a variety of safeguards, audits, verifications & recounts.
The null hypothesis in this case I don't believe would be "fraudulent election", so it is a claim.
This is true, if you're billing your hypothesis as a hypothesis. The problem is that prominent Republicans billed their "election was stolen" hypothesis as a fact, claimed to have boatloads of evidence in order to convince the public, and then never published that evidence.
In the aftermath of this clearly deceptive behavior, they've maintained the support of Republican voters who still believe the lie despite none of the evidence ever being released.
It's one thing to claim something is true and that you have evidence, then release the evidence and find out that it's insufficient to win in court. It's another thing entirely to make a claim, say you have overwhelming evidence to support it, and never release any evidence at all. In the former case, maybe you got overzealous or maybe you were dealing with an unsympathetic judge. In the latter, the only rational way to interpret the situation is that you were intentionally misleading your audience.
Why do you say something is treated as fact? For example, are either the ‘cheating’ or ‘no cheating’ hypotheses verifiable in any productive regard? There may be confusion between “absence of evidence” versus “evidence of absence.”
It is absolutely fantastic that this assertion draws ire from those who have no substantial response. It is intended to poke you directly in the eyeballs. That crowd so often favors censorship to protect the same.
If you have a substantial response, cast it forth.
Your claim is not false, but not universally true either, the counter is alex jones, the flat earth movement, religion as well, you can spend nearly an infinity believing in lies. The human brain is quite malleable to lies.
So what? People have the right to be wrong and ignorant. It's far better than having The Ministry of Tru... sorry I mean Disinformation Governance Board. Even if lies spread far and wide they always get exposed eventually. For example consider the Iraq war, a war the american public was rushed into without the free flow of information, something you seem keen on, but now that the public has access to info the same republican base that was in support of the war now hates war hawks like john bolton.
> Even if lies spread far and wide they always get exposed eventually
Eventually, yes, but until it happens, bodies are piling up.
EDIT: Also, FWIW, the truth is often exposed nearly immediately, yet for some people, once they have chosen to believe the lie, they can't be convinced of the truth.
It's well established that adults who read incorrect information frequently don't find out it was wrong and become more skeptical of the source. Some people operate that way, but it's a small minority unfortunately.
In particular, it's been shown that people with dogmatic beliefs strengthen those beliefs when shown evidence to the contrary rather than questioning them.
> Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information?
Because I'd much rather my grandma get a COVID vaccine than trying to find a source of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
And I imagine the owners of Comet Ping Pong would have greatly preferred that adults didn't read lies about Hillary running a child sex ring in their basement. [0]
Haitian immigrants in Ohio certainly weren't fans of Trump claiming that they're kidnapping and eating pets.
Speech has consequences.
> Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source.
...have you been living in a cave for the last 10 years? I just can't fathom how someone can be so naive to actually think this.
If there was any truth to this, Infowars would have been damn near been dead on arrival. Fox News would have been bankrupt before Obama even began his second term.
Or maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse and operating under the assumption that people will accept when they're wrong.
Sorry but I'm not willing to live in an insane orwellian world just so your grandma gets her vaccine. It's her family's responsiblity to convince her and if she still refuses shes an adult she has the right to refuse treatment and vaccines.
As for libel, it has always existed and always will. There are laws against it to protect people if they suffer any damage from it. It's not without consequences.
What you're proposing is so much worse. Imagine a tyrant government is after you and has control on information like you propose. How will you protect yourself from the goverment's false accusations?
> Imagine a tyrant government is after you and has control on information like you propose
You're straw-manning. I never proposed anything like government enforcement against misinformation.
I don't think misinformation should be illegal, for the reasons you touch on: You certainly don't want government deciding the truth.
Who gets to decide what is misinformation is an entirely different issue. But I can at least hope you can agree that misinformation as a concept is unethical, right? People are literally dying because of misinformation. Again, set aside the question of "Well, who decides what is misinformation?" and consider just the mere concept of it.
Hmmm... I really wonder what the said tyrants did when they got into power? Oh that's right they imposed heavy restrictions on speech and all forms of media. And it's not like there was free speech before them, the Weimar republic tried banning them as well. It's almost like challenging ideas and defeating them on an intellectual level is far better than trying to supress them.
... Yeah but they didn't do that before they were in power. They abused misinformation to get to a position to then lock it down. That's indeed what I'm saying.n I'm not disagreeing that they lock it down once in power.
> Because I'd much rather my grandma get a COVID vaccine than trying to find a source of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
So the misinformation didn't affect your decision making. Instead, the misinformation you were exposed to was corrected by your exposure to more, better information.
Those are all valid disadvantages of community notes, and free speech in general.
How do you explain that there are smart people who have known about these very disadvantages for many years, and still respond positively to "the solution to misinformation is more/better information"?
I don't suppose you know of a solution (to a problem that I admit I haven't fully specified) that has no disadvantages. The proposed solutions I've seen appearing on the left are frightening.
> How do you explain that there are smart people who [..] respond positively to "the solution to misinformation is more/better information"
Someone can be intelligent and still have misplaced hope for humanity to the point where I would consider them to be outright naive.
All it took was an hour or two on social media back in 2020/21. You could easily find someone who insisted that Ivermectin cured COVID, point out tons of studies showing that it's worthless against COVID, and yet they would reject all those studies as lies.
> I don't suppose you know of a solution
Nope. :-(
Kids are taught the scientific method, but that doesn't seem to be enough. They learn enough to pass a test and then forget about it all.
> The proposed solutions I've seen appearing on the left are frightening.
Agreed, though be careful to not read words that aren't there. Elsewhere in this thread, someone accused me of being in favor of government enforcement against free speech despite me saying nothing of the sort. Arguments that misinformation is bad is not an argument that it should be legally enforced!
In other words, yes, some leftists believe that misinformation should be illegal, but not everyone arguing that misinformation is bad is arguing that it should be illegal.
I'm looking back with how much teenage edgelord/ironic/sarcastic speech that was rampant in my youth covered for people who actually held horrible views like white nationalism. I thought it was all just shock humor. I know better now, but I'm worried about that persisting in kids. I think it's always been that way. I don't know how to mitigate it.
I agree with the first part totally, and you're probably right I invented something there. I only meant that free speech / "more information helps" seems to resonate with the right, and censorship seems to resonate with the left. Not so?
Depends what you mean in regards to rewriting. If there's a position that runs counter to our current scientific consensus, I think it should be updated to reflect the current consensus, but when I was reading my history/physics books they would cover what people believed at a particular time period. I don't see any issue with that. We're always learning more about the world around us. We are not an omniscient species.
Unless there's a more specific example you can think of w.r.t rewriting.
Sounds like you haven't heard of the re-writing of books in the interest of over-enthusiastic DEI. There's non-fiction and fiction examples. Salman Rushdie described it as "absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed" [1].
Apparently children's books can't use the word "black" or "white" any more. And in the children's book "Witches", a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now poses as “a top scientist”. It's blunt-force rewriting by patronising leftists. Witches are not meant to be role models for little girls. It doesn’t matter where they work.
Neither the left nor right are monolithic enough to make those generalizations. The anti-communism suppression of the McCarthy era is a counter-example of that resonance & plenty of left wing examples of the exact idea of "more speech is what is needed to extinguish bad ideas." Those are counter examples to demonstrate it is not a monolithic group in neither time nor space.
Of course it's scalable. Community notes are written by people, so increasing the amount of people writing notes means it's scalable. Users find the added context helpful, so more notes are rated by more people more often. That's the definition of scale.
> the value of it has long since diminished.
No. The note remains forever on the tweet. There is no "diminishing". Anyone who has interacted with that post in the past is notified about the note. Our own Prime Minister here in Australia has had a few of his posts community noted. Politicians love to make bold claims about how awesome they are. They are note magnets. It's not a perfect system, but it's a good system.
> Anyone who has interacted with that post in the past is notified about the note.
Having read or seen a post seems to be the most important part. That is not defined as part of "interacted". AFAIK, most X posts are viewed once and then never viewed again. It is a tiny fraction that actually "interacts" with a post. Hence, the value is diminished since the majority of people that read a post are never informed of the community note.
Per X: "Community Notes sends notifications to everyone who has replied to, Liked or reposted a post after a note starts showing on it." [1]
> It is a tiny fraction that actually "interacts" with a post...Hence, the value is diminished
Are you claiming we're in "information danger" because community notes isn't there to watch people post things in real time? Exactly how much of a pre-school do you want the internet to be? Do you want a school teacher looking over your shoulder as you type?
As you should know, interaction with a post by liking or replying, means the post had the most impression on that reader. The people you're worried about who don't interact, you have zero data on. You don't know whether they disagreed with the post, disbelieved or otherwise unaffected by the post. In fact, we do have some data. The post made such little impression that they didn't bother liking or replying.
People are not damaged goods after reading an untrue post online. The internet contains endless examples of disputed information, corrected only after the first post is read. For example, right here on HN. This place historically contains the following pattern:
"I think X should Y because Z"
Later that day or week, someone counters:
"actually, you haven't considered A or B in your reasoning of Z, which points to Y being inadequate".
In other words, the claim or suggestion that community notes is "diminished" because it isn't correcting misinformation as it spills from our keyboards, is an irrational claim.
> "specification of system behavior" sounds like a programming language to me. A systems programming language, even.
Lamport has directly and repeatedly addressed the differences between what's desirable in a specification language versus what's desirable in a programming language. Understanding the difference is vital to writing specifications.
This appears to be downvoted, but why? I'd like to see the counterargument that we need to put each executive, author, director, or artist through a purity test before we can appreciate or purchase their work. How about listing a few pure American car CEOs.
Consumers are free to make choices based on anything they want: but whining in public about how some tweets affect your opinion on a car is not the same thing as privately making choices. This subject was opened for discussion and it remains open.
Why? Because art and business aren’t the same. “Love the capital, not the capitalist” doesn’t work because unlike artists, capital influences elections. It influences policy and thereby impacts real people’s lives in a real way.
Also unlike artists, the head of a company oversees hundreds or thousands of people. Their whims and actions likewise have direct impact on people’s lives.
> The K-202 could conduct a million operations per second – many more than the PCs that became popular a decade later.
That the K-202 was faster than the personal computers that came later is not unusual, because those later computers were based on microprocessors. Early microprocessors such as the 8008 and 8080 were not speed demons compared to LSI TTL designs of that time. The article mentions the [Data General] Super Nova as being similar in speed to the K-202.
Another interesting computer is the Datapoint 2200, another TTL design. The manufacturer went to Intel and TI to realize their CPU design on a single chip, which resulted in the 8008, a microprocessor with an almost identical instruction set and which ran slower than the original 2200.
The CPU for this computer is microcoded and is made out of a small number of discrete logic chips, plus an EEPROM. The data and address bus are 8 bits wide but the NOR unit operates on one bit only. The microcode has to loop in order to perform an 8 bit add.
I was looking for a hardware shifter in the diagram, because I figured it'd be necessary to access bits D1-D7. But there is none. He uses a lookup table in EEPROM to do the shift.
If you're interested in nice CPU designs, here's another one: the Novix NC4000 (also RTX2000), in which the bits in the instructions lead directly to control various muxes and units inside the chip. There's almost no decoding.
You appear to have your heart set on toasters, and that's fine. A coffee roaster for the prosumer, however, strikes me as a more interesting product to make. I think there's still an opportunity to make a better or at least different product, and the area has been heating up recently. It's a lot like a toaster, if you think about it. And there's more opportunity for software and hardware integration ("roast profiling").
I also have a question: if a product is sold as a kit where the buyer performs the "final assembly", does that alleviate any of the burden with UL testing, FCC, or product liability?
Then came the software. The amount of complexity and jargon and issues and roadblocks that come out of nowhere is extraordinary. You have to dive several layers deep in a menu system to do step 1, then get hung up on opening a "gateway", then dive down the same menu to do step 2 of a 2-step process. He had another problem that kept him busy but what impressed me is the amount of time and complexity to do the simplest things. He wasn't performing many steps, but just getting to the step required rebooting, waiting, pressing the brake pedal to see when it was time to move the right turn signal stalk, didn't work, go back, do something else for 10 minutes, try again, it seemed endless.
German automotive companies have historically been terrible at software. Just because Tesla hasn't simplified or integrated their various software components yet, doesn't mean others can't do it nicer. But any company that doesn't value software like the Americans do is going to have a real tough time with the EV software problem.
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