Originally published on Tugboat Today
January 2024, Mountain view
Would be sad to lose Berkeley, because otherwise this seems worth it, it’s just so obvious.
There are questions in the replies about whether these welds are as strong as traditional welding, but they sure look impressive.
People who don’t live in the Bay Area (and some who do) act like self driving technology is still over a decade away (cached). I don’t know if it’s still true, but a year ago there were people who thought that AI breaking high school essays was more than a decade away. The future is here already, it’s just geofenced to San Francisco and Austin.
ICE sent a military convoy to that new Hyundai plant (cached). I mentioned a few days ago, they arrested 300 people, all but one had valid work visas. The last one had a training / conference visa, which covered what he was doing. Just absolutely insane to be undermining new manufacturing like this. Trump’s approval on border security is now below 50% (cached) and he’s at 43% overall (cached) in a recent poll. Sadly, the percentage of Americans who say immigration should be increased is not up by as much (cached).
Flock, who make drones for police, is claiming that their drones are solving 700k crime reports per year (cached). Seems quite impressive, although you’ve gotta discount for the fact that this is startup hype.
Longer Reads
• Over the last three years, London has almost entirely stopped building new homes. Here’s a detailed thread about why. One of the factors is that they copied the US dual-staircase mandate, despite first calculating that the costs outweighed the benefits by more than 100x. (src)(cached)
• Great thread of new kinds of inspection and maintenance robots that are being rolled into service. Where previously you might need to build scaffolding over a smokestack or a ship hull to inspect it, which could take a month, now a robot can just scan the whole thing up close, looking for defects. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– It’s important to know which progressive issues are winners with the electorate. 58% of voters support a woman’s right to an abortion “for any reason whatsoever”. Up from 42% 12 years ago. (src)(cached)
– Interesting idea from some families in Portland, Maine: they got landlines for their kids instead of cell phones. (src)
– A ton of people dunking on Ken Klippenstein, who seems to be under the impression that the US educational system is worse than Germany’s. But whether you measure by PISA standardized tests or by percentage of the population with post-secondary education, the US does quite well. Generally Europeans end up getting a skewed understanding of the US (cached) (src)(cached)
– Musk keeps lying about the costs and benefits of LiDAR and Radar in self driving applications. There are reasons not to use them, but it’s not that they make the car’s perception stack less accurate. (src)(cached)
– If you’re wondering why power costs are going up so much recently, it’s last-mile infrastructure, poles, wires, undergrounding, and transformers. (src)(cached)
– “You can tell if a country is, basically, living or dying if it focuses more on dreams or memories”. Don’t let old people end property taxes and defund education. (src)(cached)
– A missile fired from a drone shot down a russian fighter jet, probably the first time in history that has happened. Also, china is now showing off their unmanned fighter jet. (src)(cached)