Posts by Pink Duck 122 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007
We’ve all been there, stuck behind the solid 43 mph-ers or the amazingly inconsistent throttle control drivers totally oblivious to signage.
In the former case something slowing them to 30 mph in the villages would be great. In the latter something to keep their speed stably correct would be great, until they want to turn I guess…
The reality is that the UK still abides by the World Forum UNECE Automotive Regulation per Working Group 29 GRVA, which as of now requires every self-driving action to be driver initiated.
While they are aiming to refine the wording by June, the whole Automated Vehicles Bill is just additional restriction upon self-drive systems conforming to the above.
The real delay is the 6 month timeframe for transport secretary to appoint the approvals body and for it to then begin its work of assessing candidate systems, once submitted. These systems need to be fully autonomous capable. To date, none are.
FSD has been around since Sept 2016. However, the Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control FSD feature wasn't available until 6th December 2020 firmware release at the earliest. The crash happened late 2019, so only standard AutoPilot in use (completely unaware of red lights and yield signs).
Only applies if you have personally identifying information held about yourself. The app looks likely to only request postcode out code and a couple of question responses to the nature of self-reported symptoms and only when reporting/donating contact history, device type and country code. That alone isn't uniquely identifying, but could be resolved back to a given handset via IP logging and cellular network providers and on to a rough triangulated location for each of the Bluetooth Low Energy active connection periods, plus name and address of service provider record.
Had Bulb-issued Gen2 smart meters plus IHD installed in mid-March, still not a single stat sent back via cellular to the account usage page. Nearing a month on since getting the emails (yes, two) about daily meter readings change, though did get the IHD in Welsh update. It really is quite stunning how a simple bit of JSON post-back isn't working through centralised DCC to the 'supplier'.
A few key things noted as missing from their latest FSD demo: detecting speed limits, navigating roundabouts. A few things not right with use in the UK: Zebra crossing zig-zags causing steering wobble, high contrast shadows under bridges causing phantom brake, through/right lane road arrow markings causing dangerous unwanted manoeuvres off navigation route, coping with average 2.4 m parking bays (US ones no narrower than 2.7 m typically). Plus it doesn't help that the EU cripple all systems from auto-steering tight rural road bends.
If it actually means their AutoPilot system will adhere to speed limits with the freed up space for calculation potential for neural net identification of objects, unlike their latest FSD demonstration drive that broke the speed limit several times due to out-of-date limits database. Given Elon time, expect this for H2 2020.
I suggest no-one wastes a day like I did with the update offered for a workstation only to find that Intel's latest on-board display drivers were blacklisted and the latest compatible graphics card matching the motherboard from AMD similarly. I ended up rolling back then re-patching. Thanks MS for that.
This is such a non-problem. For those with functioning vision there's little difference except 'signature lights' . For those without, the tyre and wind sounds are still notable at any speed of consequence (20 mph upwards). Nearly all modern EV/PHEVs typically come with pedestrian/cyclist sensors to mitigate frontal impacts too.
Surprised to find I had used Google to authenticate with them at some point. Wouldn't let me delete the account until setting a password though. So I did, "deleteme", then deleted the account. All a bit late, but these breaches are far too many and frequent now that we may as well give up all hope of having anything not widely known about us any more. Like most incidents like this, I just black-list the service and never use it again.
A delightful 58 MB download that, if up-to-date, will tell you to go use the Microsoft Store instead to get version 12, have no system tray icon, and additional clicks for everything.
Or, run the installer having set compatibility mode for Windows 8. Job done, realise your mistake, then go back to 7.4
I recently switched from OvoEnergy who want £60/year more for 100% renewable electricity to Bulb, a 100% renewable electricity offering with 10% biomass. Rather good bonus of £50 each for referrals and they're even paying the exit fees. Obligatory referral link.
I'll be scheduling my EV to charge from 01:30 to 08:00 and though there's nothing too evident in the UK grid graphs yet, there is a noticeable mini-peak between 00:00 and 01:30 for the Economy-7 users.
Received emails from old BT Yahoo! accounts suggesting a password reset recently, a little surprised to find they were still active. Rather bothersome to have relative's actual security answers out in the wild now, just re-enforcing my view that they should always be made-up.
What's disgraceful are the sites that don't allow passwords to be set up from any Unicode characters of any length. Worse still the ones that allow you to set a password but then only log in with the DB clipped 15 characters of it. Particularly bothersome has been BBC ID and UK GOV, where passwords have to be downgraded to work through mobile authentication. I keep notes on the rejected characters and weird rules for the various sites. I'm also developing a new system with proper client and server-side salted hashing and SSL/TLS.
Edge still feels like an under development browser. It currently breaks our major work web portals unlike any other browser out there, even with feature detection and sane browser sniffing where utterly necessary. An irritating one for me is client-side XSLT outputting Document instead of XmlDocument from a transform to XML.
It's worth pointing out that OpenStreetMap's coverage of speed limits is very much a work in progress. That significantly affects the routing decisions of satellite navigation using its data. Most of the time it works well enough, but there are roads that without tagging are presumed to be 60 mph but are likely a lower limit in reality.
1. Map updates aren't free
2. Updates aren't available to older kit
3. Map reports take years to get fixed
Solution? Something that's free to use, quick to fix and non-proprietary. OpenStreetMap comes to mind, but there's still a few years to go before it has complete UK road network coverage.
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