Posts by that one in the corner 5497 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
Joshua looks suspiciously like Obi Wan resorting to a woodsaber - on his way to Alder-an?
Today's Lesson: practice what these guys preach and create an LLM prompt for that hokey old religion[1]. The best one wins the coveted title of "Jedi for the straight guy".
May The Fourth Be With You.
(click) psssshhhh thrmmmm thrmm bnngg bnngg krssshh
[1] please, no midichlorians, we are a respectable Original Trilogy congregation.
Apollo was funded and pushed to succeed purely as a political stunt to beat the commie Ruskies, without going all out and deliberately heating up the Cold War.
Although it is getting close, the current anti-China posturing has to be very carefully managed: we need to get the US into the correct "beat the commie Chinese" attitude and then into Space Race II but without getting into "beat their faces into the ground" territory.
We currently don't have anything that is both as physically safe and as startling as Sputnik was, to put the proper wind up Joe Public and John Politician: paranoia about "them listening in to all our phone calls" isn't quite the right push (even though it is really all just about the fact that "they" mustn't get to beat "us" at our own game).
Perhaps if anyone has the right contacts, you could drop a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's "Watch This Space" onto the desk of Huawei's chief of marketing: if we see a Red Moon Rising then the Right Stuff will Rise to The Lunar Surface once again, if only to sweep it clean.
It also needs the right sort of push, a bit of "we actually want to see this done" from the politicos, to get the designs a bit closer to "what do we actually need to get this to work" and a little less "we'll make the biggest thing possible right from the start, how hard can in-space refuelling be anyway!".
Less running, but faster means more centri(petal and/or fugal, your choice) force needed/imparted and hence more leg strength, heart pumping etc.
(jmch beat me to it, so I won't continue by saying that is one step away from "Rollerball - on the Mooooooon!")
Which I'll take as a Good Sign, as it indicates that people *are* investigating issues in software other than The Usual Suspects.
[1] which probably means it actually Does Important Things With Infrastructure instead of just being another boring OS to run yet another tiresome spreadsheet on.
Translation:
+++ "We throw any old crap at it and see what sticks to the wall"
> Despite the challenges
+++ Despite our total lack of ability to even test before we publish
> Duffy expects AI will improve over time
+++ damn it, we must get lucky someday! More monkeys, more typewriters!
> we see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience
Sigh. All they had to do was deepen publisher's pockets.
The shorted sightedness of OpenAI et al is mind-boggling: if they had just bothered to pay for a subscriptions up front from all the big publishers then they wouldn't be getting attacked by the very people who can publicise their misdeeds.
And if OpenAI weren't being attacked by Big Players then they could just have shrugged off a few complaints by individuals - aka the little people, fodder - as silly little incidents. Instead of priming the media to have a reason for presenting the individual's accusations as (rightfully) problems that need addressing (instead of daft incidents to fill a gap).
As it is, they went right ahead and created this situation so perfectly you would almost believe it was planned.
Hmm, never before come across anyone implying that not having call centre staff would doom an economy.
Wonder what the real figures for the value of call centres actually is (my Google-fu isn't up to the task this evening - found a 2003 figure from Yale, giving India a $2 billion per annum figure, which is probably(!) out of date, and a bunch of infographics from random "web analyst sites" that are too flashy to inspire confidence in their accuracy).
It is probably one of those startlingly large numbers that is frightening to consider and which really put the pittance pais to NASA into perspective.
But back to your point:
> Just because AI has issues doesn't mean it doesn't fill a useful role
Indeed. It is probably true that ChatGPT (which is what we are discussing, not all of AI, btw) may have a role it could fill and be useful (to the users, that is - it is clearly already "useful" at making large sums of money flow through the fingers of OpenAI et al).
Just - do you think you could possibly bring yourself to actually describe that role to us? And explain to us why that is useful to us, as users? Why we should support it? Pretty please?
PS
I don't accept your claim that *ALL* call centre staff have the same "issues" as ChatGPT.
Some[1] are bad, of course (May I show you a graph? Note this bell-shaped curve...).
And the worst ones - where they have been given a script that is downright malicious (e.g. scam call centres) - those centres are breaking regulations, yet the industry as a whole would survive even if we properly enforced those regs and shut them down. Actually, the industry would get a better rep with the public and improve if those bad players *were* shut down, so they ought to be calling for those regs to be tightened.
[1] yes, yes, we all have tales of that one call centre person - or even that one entire call centre (ref scams etc above) that was a horrible, horrible experience. But unless you have actually been keeping track of the stats and can genuinely show they are *ALL* suffering these same "issues" then those tales are nice (!?) anecdotes but not evidence.
> While a made up DoB has little legal impact, other fake facts could be.
Absolutely nothing that comes out of ChatGPT should have any legal impact at all.
Sadly, it probably will - and that is a situation entirely created by the hyping of ChatGPT, the misapplication of the technology, not the technology itself[1].
[1] although you can argue that, given the state of the thing and the altercations it is causing, there was no need to create the technology, just leave it as an interesting bit of CS without a practical application - yet.
> How can you erase something that doesn't exist? We are told that the requested DOB is not on the net, and is therefore not in chatGPT's training data and so cannot be removed from or corrected there.
> But to suggest that chatGPT is producing personal data from thin air, whether accurate or not, is ludicrous.
Those are the type of statements that are both totally correct and at the same time painfully at odds with the real world - or, to be more accurate, the presentation of ChatGPT to that real world.
The problem is simply that ChatGPT is being presented as something that you *can* query for usable results and it is freely available for everybody to use. Which is being responded to as though all of the responses it generates are being published (no matter that they are, as you point out, highly likely to be transient and simply rephrasing the prompt could generate an entirely different result).
The sad result is that we can safely publish the statement "When I asked him, my three year son said that Fred was born on ..." and it is a silly anecdocte that no sensible person would object to, even if it turned out to be correct, but publishing "When I asked ChatGPT..." it is treated differently. At the insistence of all the people who have invested in these LLMs.
So, the bottom line is that you have been completely correct in your statements about the tech, but the people who are hyping that very same tech have created the situation for themselves where they do have to comply with GDPR et al; no matter how ludicrous that situation is when viewed from a techie's side, it is the one that they created for themselves.
PS
The stuff about logging is entirely a red-herring; you can - and should - keep logs of when inaccurate data is generated. Keeping those logs is not against GDPR or the like, whether it is NOYB or OpenAI or The Register or any who grabbed a screenshot of the story who are keeping them. Snipping out the inaccurate data and publishing that on its own, without the context or any other disclaimer that it is inaccurate, would, however, not be a good idea. It is a bit of a shame you included that.
> Some kind of blockchain/SSL on data. [1]
AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Not the bleeping blockchain! Combining the two biggest wastes of electricity and compute into one! Ye Gods!
And can you imagine the arms race that that would create? "If we can get 51% of the blockchain that guards all known human knowledge, we can rewrite history!"
"Mr. President, we must not allow... a blockchain mining gap!"
> AI is a database. It is multi-dimensional vector mostly with relational databases providing training and structured authenticated data - your bank's fraud detection uses AI on a relational database of authenticated data
Re-read your own comment - you got it right in the middle but then veered off course again:
> AI is a database
Nope.
> your bank's fraud detection uses AI on a relational database
Correct!
AI is *not* a database. But you *can* use AI[1] as a front-end to work *with* a database.
The DOB error is present - and incorrectable - because ChatGPT is not backed by a database and too many people are pretending that it *is* a database.
[1] or techniques derived from AI research, even if they have been so constrained that you are saying "that is too simple, it is not AI": remember "If it works, it isn't AI.
> Yes, but
Hmm... not sure that you are actually responding to (disagreeing with) anything that I've actually said, but skipping over that...
> making up a random date when you don't know the real date is not an "intelligent" response.
> If for example you know when they attended university, you can make some sort of educated guess at the year of birth from that, based on the typical age of people attending that particular university, with a high degree of uncertainty, though they are more likely to be older than younger.
Yes, but :-)
That line of argument is not relevant to using LLMs on their own. LLMs are not intelligent, they do not contain that sort of logical reasoning[1] so talking about how *you* mght calculate a good approximation is - well, not relevant. NOW, there IS a line of AI that does allow a machine to do what you've just done: Expert Systems and all things related to them. Sadly, although those work nicely in small(ish) domains, we've not got a set of rules big enough to do provide that chain of reasoning in *every* domain that ChatGPT is being applied to.
Although, if you re-read my comment:
>> let us call it a "database"
you can replace "database" with "XPS"...
[1] disclaimer - they *might* be able to generate a line of "generic reasoning in a really, really restricted area" just because it is a pattern they have spotted, but it won't be generalisable (i.e. it may be able to "do" simple multiplication in response to one prompt and totally fail the same arithmetic in response to another prompt!
> chatGPT doesn't store that information, it just goes and find it every time it wants it.
ChatGPT qua ChatGPT doesn't go and find anything.
A search engine that was front-ended by (something like) ChatGPT *could* go and find it, but
> I suspect that isn't the case though
Good suspiscion instincts.
> Similar to the challenges Google had years ago when it was clear they were trawling the web and storing search results preemptively, not finding them on the fly whenever requested.
Ummm, only sort of. Pre-storing (or just re-using) genuine search results still produces (produced) correct search results. They were just perhaps not as up to date as they could be, but they were still correct. And it had a really useful effect: Google used to provide you with a link to their cached copy, which was *really* useful (repetition for stress): you got faster access to a page on a slow or down server (good when it was DDOSed or, as we called it, Slashdotted) *and* you could read embarrasing material for a few days when it was retracted. Oopsie - "Right to be forgotten" (which is a Good Thing, don't misunderstand me) put paid to that, as it is just simpler to drop the whole idea than to correct piecemeal and face continually doing that for all eternity. And we lose the nice bits as well as the bad, hey ho.,
The problem with the "information" in ChatGPT is that it isn't held in a nicely cached copy of the original data, so you can't just delete that page (or just stop caching completely). So Google was faced with a problem, but one that had a very clear solution (although it was resisted because that solution has a day to day increase in costs). ChatGPT does not have a very clear solution at all. So the challenge for ChatGPT is at a far more existential level than it was for Google (no matter what Google claimed).
> You seem to think that blocking LLMs will clear the way for what comes next
How very kind of you to point out to me what I think.
Please compare your sentence to mine:
>> undirected and uncontrolled LLM
>> fling it all in a bucket and call it an LLM
Notice the subtle nuance I've applied to their development methods?
> "blocking LLMs"
Nope, try "using them appropriately" - and using them as databases is not appropriate.
> There has been research in AI for at least 50 years, and this is the first time it has actually produced something useful enough that businesses are able to use it.
Even your opening sentence is twaddle (came from ChatGPT did it?).
In that 50 years, AI groups have produced many useful results which many, many businesses have, can and do use. From things that you will dismiss as "that isn't AI" but is still what they developed, to daily use of neural nets (i.e. the tech LLMs are based on).
As the mantra goes, "If it works, it isn't AI" - tongue in cheek self-deprecation.
> , if not you doom your economy to falling behind the rest of the world.
Your first paragraph has spot on. Well done.
Then it started going down hill, gathering speed until it went totally off the rails with the last few words, as quote above.
You do realise that your whole comment comes down to "our economy is reliant on something we *know* is uncontrollable, inaccurate and not correctable": if that is true, think again about whose economy is at greatest risk.
> So what's the point of using it?
ChatGPT? None.
Well, there are times random twaddle is useful - Lorum Ipsem is neat but using English twaddle text geared towards his interest may sway the buyer of your web design. Expensive way of doing, though.
Other LLM-based systems? So long as you avoid the obvious issues (mainly comes down to attempts at fraud), pretty-picture generators create, well, pretty pictures and we have a never-ending desire for them and Lissajous gets boring after a while.
Other neural nets? Really, really useful, especially in areas where the costs of checking and dismissing a false result are outweighed by the value of an otherwise too easily missed true result.
Damn shame the crap gets all the media attention - but then, the bridge that falls down is the one that gets the news coverage.
> any inherent biases or problems with the OpenAI model will also be embedded in Microsoft's product unless those specific issues have been tweaked and fixed during MS' refinement process.
The biases and problems were built up over all the years of running massive amounts of compute to produce a tangled and incomprehensible pile of nadans. There is absolutely no way to "tweak" that pile, other than doing it all again from scratch and keeping your fingers crossed that *this* time it won't be quite so bad. Maybe you could consider checking the training materials and removing any initial bias there - oh, but the whole basis of their approach is that the bulk of the training inputs hasn't been hand-checked, tagged and filtered (no matter the cost of hardware and energy - carbon - to build the crude way, that is just peanuts compared to the cost of hand-checking everything).
The best they can do is add some form of post-processing[1] as a "quick fix" - and we saw how that goes badly, look up the "AI now can not create images of mixed-race couples" for an easy to see example. And tales of working around "safeguards" by rewording prompts.
Those biasses are in there to stay.
The article says it: the geezer's date of birth isn't known to the LLM, so why is it a surprise when it comes back with the wrong one?
This thing isn't a database, no matter how much people want it to be. If you want accurate data spat out, including nulls, then it has to be attached to some kind of - well, let us call it a "database" - whose contents can be verified, updated and even erased in a demonstrable fashion.
People like OpenAI *could* have created a system that worked like that - and even used the same training concepts to have had the machines populate the database, tagging the material with its origins[1] etc. But that isn't mystical, magical, revolutionary - i.e. can't be done just by shovelling in data, buying more GPUs, pouring in data by the bucketload, buying more GPUs, pouring in data by the skipful, buying more cycles - no, it takes design, thinking and runs the real risk of not getting a working database (all queries met with silence). Doing it the way they have, at each stage the system will always puke out *a* response that can be sold to the gullible, with the promise that it'll get more bamboozling - sorrt, more complex and therefore good and "useful" - next year: money, please.
[1] you know, all the stuff that was being argued about in these El Reg forums last year, all those repetitious comments about "the LLM isn't storing the data verbatim" - "oh yes it is, otherwise how can it reproduce quotes?" - "because..."
> Not good for the next technical revolution
What? It is going to be absolutely fantastic for the next technical revolution, whatever that turns out to be, if the EU (and hopefully UK, but...) aren't wasting their time and money on all this undirected and uncontrolled LLM twaddle.
Oh, wait, you thought this OpenAI stuff *is* the next revolution? Bwaaa ha ha!
No, no, this "fling it all in a bucket and call it an LLM" approach isn't working and won't. Well, it is "working" but only so far as any Ponzi scheme does: the last one to buy into it will lose, big. But that isn't tech working.
They could try creating a system that is useful (hint: as this story shows, don't treat the contents of the LLM as if it contains factual data; there is a better way to store data...) but that takes more subtlety than those people are capable of putting in.
Well, no.
Because nobody has offered them any money to do so. Yet.
You will be amazed how easy it'll be to arrange sharing once the chequebooks are opened.
In the meantime:
> For example, if ChatGPT knows a significant other is a big fan of kittens, that information won't find its way into the Artful Greeting Card GPT or vice versa.
But it may just so happen that Artful are surprisingly good at guessing that every now and again, as the CEO of Artful is emailed copies of chats that resulted in sales after "an admission of accidental leakage from another GPT, for which we apologise (winky face)".
> Default, serial number, passwords are not fixed passwords
And many of the factory set, one code used everywhere, default passwords are not fixed either. Plenty are, but not all.
And plenty of SN based one are fixed (especially ones based on MACs, presumably because the people who are too lazy to burn separate SN into a device are too lazy to consider security).
> I've never had a device that I couldn't initially login to and change the password
Two things:
1. Lucky you
2. But are you - or anyone here - the target for this?
So you bought a device with an initial password set, you went in and changed it. Good. As you should.
BUT that IMMEDIATELY takes you out of the group of people who leave the initial password; you know, all the people whose gadgets can be broken into using the factory set password.
We *know* that group of people exist, or this would not be a discussion.
And a factory set password based on the serial number is barely, if at all, stronger than setting them all to "MySecret12" or any other fixed value: both would be leaked to the Web and tada, the door is wide open.
>
> . That leaves the issue of how they supply that to customers.
Hardly a massive problem to solve. They just need to be bothered to do it.
The same way that some routers are supplied with a plastic card (and even a place to keep that card) wth the pre-set SSID and password for the WiFi. Or, if not considerate, a sticker at the back of the manual (put it somewhere convenient for you) or even, ick, a sticker on the bottom of the device.
And the best manufacturers should provide a blank card or space on the sticker, with a note in bright colours that you can write your own choice of password in said blank and here is how to change it on the gadget. But that is getting into pipedream territory.
Oh, and NOT using the device's serial number, or a trivial transform of it, for any part of the credentials!
You should be able to tell people (e.g. help desk reps, people on advice forums who know that number is in the range where the gadget had such and such a quirk, ...) the SN without them then knowing immediately how to log into your widget.
> markings on the Kirin 9010 "technically new but remarkably similar" ...
The markings on this newer Motorola IC are remarkably similar to *this* Motorola IC, hmm, sounds fishy.
> exposed Huawei's use of Kirin 9000s
Ah ha, we have exposed you! So much cleverer of us than just, you know, looking up the part number.
> TechInsights referred to as a "repackaged"
Just like the sneaky Chinese, repackaging as though it is cheap knockoff sneakers in a fancy new box. You won't catch us changing the IC packaging and giving it a fancy number that is obviously in the same series. Nope, DIL now, DIL forever!
> proceeded to roll the ball around with his finger
Very sensible, use the skills learnt in the video arcade.
(Why don't we use trackballs more? Ought to get mine out again, it was easier to use on desk too cluttered for a mousepad after all, and that does seem to be the normal state of my desk these days! Guess I too got suckered in by Big Mouse and neglected the alternatives)
> never seen a digitiser tablet with a puck
Tell them to watch the Stargate film and explain that you could also move those cross-hairs manually around the big star map (after the MALP vanishes, around 3 min 10 secs)
> Some once said that using a mouse is only intuitive after the user has been shown how to use it...
That is pretty much true of every bit of the computer UI, especially GUIs. I ask "why do I have to click on a hamburger to get a menu?"[1], whippersnapper asks "why do I have to click on a front-loader washing machine to open a file?".
Maybe a keyboard is actually intuitive - although you still have to mash keys to see what all of them do, you can't deduce the behaviour of the SHIFT key just by looking at the keyboard, it does nothing at when you just press it, unlike the letter keys, and then ALT or CTRL are just nightmares to "intuit" what they do.
[1] as well as "Why don't clickable items have clear hit boxes around them? Why don't buttons show they are being depressed as I start to click on them?" And, of course, "Why do I have to fish around *below* the bottom border of a window to grab that border, what was wrong with just clicking *on* the border?". Don't get me started on 'phone UIs!
> It took Dr. Evil several months to figure out putting the mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard greatly enhanced his UX
I'm as right-handed as they come - and within the first day of being plunked down in front of a mouse (on a Three Rivers PERQ) I'd moved the mouse to my left hand, so that I could take notes with my right hand. And there the mouse has stayed.
To be totally honest, I've never really understood why just about everyone uses their dominant hand for the mouse - maybe you get better precision or speed when playing some video games, but for word processing, general file fiddling etc if you are struggling with the mouse it doesn't even need to be pixel precise (and graphics programs, CAD etc can just zoom in). And, of course, Real Programmers/SysOps/IT Deskers use the command line as much as possible!
The dominant hand is then free for the important tasks of note taking, doodling, dunking biscuits, holding the coffee cup - and, for a right-hander, operating the numeric keypad when typing into the timesheet spreadsheet.
Still, horses for courses, your mileage may vary, mice may go down as well as up etc etc.
Just know that, as confused as you are to see my mouse on the "wrong" side, I'm as confused by the position of your mouse - on the "wrong" side!
That could be fun.
We dev drones had to be nagged into remembering to using their products most of the time, with regular orders from above...
Project Manager: you must remember to log everything into Jira as and when you do it, so we can track progress across all clients.
Customer Relations: you must update all our customer reported issues at least twice evey 24 hours until closed, to hit our SLAs.
QA: you must connect the latest automated build and test modules so they update the CTO's Dashboard.
Managers: you must put all of your meeting minutes into Confluence and all your actions into Jira.
Finance (company wide email): guys, slow down, stop doing all that!
> they are expensive so I can only imagine that they are reasonably good cars, otherwise people would be spending their money on alternatives.
Have a think about "Veblen goods" and "conspicuous consumption" and stretch your imagination.
> "It's analogous to Amazon Web Services, where people didn't expect that AWS would be the most valuable part of Amazon when it started out as a bookstore,"
> "I think you could have on the order of 100 gigawatts of useful compute."
Hang on, now he is talking about selling compute time from the fleet of Tesla vehicles in order to compete with AWS? And this is going to be from a fleet where many of the vehicles are driverless taxis?
"Bong
"Already, nearly two hundred Tesla passengers (or payload units, as the car maker refers to them) have been reported to have perished in this, the second week of The Elon Traffic Jam, as they remain trapped in their vehicles on the side roads across the country, lost to the world now after their mobile phone batteries died as the vehicles re-arranged themselves for optimum mesh positioning.
"Bong
"Tesla stocks remain buoyant as Musk continues to send out messages to his followers on X, excitedly describing how his company is using the combined computer power of all the now static vehicles, promising that the new ML model being calculated will 'almost certainly be good enough to finally allow the Tesla Optimus to walk up a flight of at least seven stairs before falling backwards'.
"Bong
"And finally, on a lighter note, lawyers on both sides of the hearing on the appeals of the bereaved were heard laughing today as the Tesla Terms and Conditions were entered: 'They actually signed that! What!? Why?'"
> There's lots of space in the file explorer, the user's desktop and the task bar to add additional advertising venues!
"We can sell 80 percent of the screen WITHOUT inducing seizures!" - Ready Player One
"We can use another 10% of the screen to sell our new Seizure-Be-Gone app, in the Windows Store now!" - Microsoft
> We are able to do simple factory tasks or at least, I should say, factory tasks in the lab[1]. We do think we will have Optimus in limited production in the natural factory itself, doing useful tasks before the end of this year.
This is a "status report" worthy of being relevant to the analysts?
> These are just guesses.
So the answer to that question is - No. No, this is not a status report.
> And then I think we may be able to sell it externally by the end of next year.
Well, you managed to sell more than one of that flame thrower, so there is probably *someone* who is willing to buy one, if only as a curio.
[1] it can pass a cup of tea but only if the mug is lab-quality ceramicware, with no greasy contanimants and stirred with one of those magnetic bars, so no risk of the spoon sticking out at an awkward angle.
> This is why code compiled for a specific AMD CPU performs substantially better than code compiled just for x64.
So what are the differences going to between a specific AMD[1] CPU versus any old generic x64? Answer: extra interesting additional hardware units and their associated extra instructions, plus differences in precise timings of opcodes in the generic portion.
So what are the differences going to between a specific RISC-V CPU versus any old generic RISC-V? Answer: extra interesting additional hardware units and their associated extra instructions, plus differences in precise timings of opcodes in the generic portion.
As you point out, compiler writers know how to cope with the variants in the x64 to optimise for a specific CPU (we can even generate code that selects the best paths at run time, depending upon the, after reading the processor abilities register) - and exactly the same techniques work for optimising for variants of RISC-V, ARM or any of the myriad other CPU architectures that have been widely used and even those that have just played with as an exercise.
GCC and LLVM are both very capable compilers *and* have plenty of published material (in books, taught courses, blogs - oh, and the complete open source code) on how they work and how to port them.[2]
It is still a specialised area, of course, but with a bit of concentration any RISC-V company can come up with an optimised toolset.[3]
[1] or a specific Intel CPU, of course.
[2] Not to mention the wealth of knowledge on how to build compilers from scratch, if you happen to have a few thousand man hours to dedicate to creating a new toolchain [3]
[3] especially if you happen to have a government that can drop very heavy hints about how good it would be if everyone got together to work on a communal project for all the bits every implementation has in common (like optimising across a table of opcode timings, irrespective of the precise contents of that table per variant device).
> Microscopes and hot air stations are fairly cheap these days. With that, you can even solder BGA chips "by hand".
> It's actually much easier and quicker to work with surface mount components than THT.
Whilst that is no doubt true, for SMT to become easy to work with you need to move on from " a soldering iron and temporary use of a flat surface" to, as you describe, a proper work cell.
For the casual constructor, SMT is a PITA and it is quite a jump, even now with PCBWay etc, to get into diy'ing a circuit, compared to a bit of strip board or a through-hole kit (with all the SMT pre-done). Speaking as someone whose desk always has a soldering iron and helping hands stashed next to the keyboard.
> We're also sure that owners will not be thrilled that a mechanic is taking a drill to the pickup
All they had to do was include a drill bit in the kit, paint it purple and describe it as "specialised equipment for precisely modifying the accelerator pedal whilst fully retaining its bulletproof rating".
> how often do you really spend looking at the accelerator pedal in a car?
I always assumed that the Cybertruck had a camera in the footwell, so you the driver could see a dramatic shot of his foot pressing down as he pretended to be Batman
Don't you know these things are only meant as collector's items? There are fewer than 4,000 in existence!
You shouldn't wash them - heck, you shouldn't even peel off the plastics from the windscreen. Collector's items should *always* be kept mint in box[1]
[1] and put it between two bits of cardboard, to stop it getting bent.
Meter data going over your home LAN.
How long until every website in Christendom is snarfing your meter readings to sell to advertisers?
Oh, it is encrypted over a separate vlan, you say? Whoops, you'll never guess what that latest firmware update (sponsored by those nice people at Meta) has just done!
And you remember the stories about being able to figure out what your telly is showing, based on the fluctuating power it draws? No Smart TV needed anymore...
Oh, and you know that remote cutoff that only the suppliers can access? Well, read the next malware popup *very* carefully; can you type in your Bitcoin key before the lights go out?
> Run it on any old computer or a Raspberry Pi
Still something to be purchased. Not even every geek has that hardware lying around unutilised and available to be (re)purposed.
Oh, and are the power savings going to be greater than that needed to keep "any old computer" running?
And that *still* doesn't address the issue of physically controlling the appliances...
