Toyota CEO: “Unless things change, we will not survive.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/toyota-just-issued-stark-warning-173055087.html

It’s sad watching the U.S. and Japanese auto industry self-destruct in slow motion. There are a lot of smart and capable people in the auto industry, but the management are stuck in an 80s design and manufacturing process.

Yes, but nobody in their right mind will use boost at OS kernel or driver level. Also, using C++ has vtable/exception overhead. No-go.

I worked at companies that tried both. They no longer exist.

So many system bugs are because of unclear memory ownership, buffer overflows, and race conditions. C/C++ don’t help you avoid any of these footguns. Any other system that relies on GC is non-deterministic and prone to mystery hiccups, which is why OS and driver tech has been pretty much the same foundation since the 70s.

Rust lets you avoid 2 of those 3 issues (thread race conditions are still a thing). And being compiled, instead of interpreted bytecode means you can get reasonable performance on smaller machines. No wonder these OS guys are so excited.

I’ve got a pretty large Rust/Tauri program going. Breaking things into crates help, but if you touch enough bits of common libraries, everything needs to get rebuilt anyway.

I use Makefiles for everything. What I found helps is breaking out the parts that don’t change much into separate Make commands (like generating icons, linting, frontend, tests, etc), then leaving “make go” as the simplest inner iteration loop. That way, it’s a lot more bearable.

There’s also “make build” and “make fullclean.” You start one of those and take a long break.

It’s really unfortunate Apple dropped the iPod Nano. The ones with a physical scroll wheel and small display were just the right size for sticking in your pocket and going for a walk, run, or bike. Great way to leave distractions behind.

This one looks like it’s got some good design ideas. Nowadays, most people have streaming playlists. If they add software to snapshot those playlists onto the device in high quality, they might have something.

Google and Microsoft already tried underwater data centers to better handle heat dissipation. It wasn’t worth it. Hardware can fail and you need somebody to go in and swap boards and faulty cables. Every complex system has multiple points of failure. The wrong board and the whole container stops working. It was so much pain trying to maintain it under water they all gave up after the Proof of Concept stage.

How are they going to deal with it cost effectively up in orbit? Little nanosat modules? Humanoid robots that barely work today?

Be a lot cheaper (and faster) sending a tech in a little cargo van and a toolbox out to the suburbs of Memphis, Phoenix, or Bakersfield.

Hyundai USA has been taking social influencer types on tours of their GA factory lately.

The location is pretty sparse already. Super automated. Mainly floor lift robots rolling partly assembled cars from station to station, with big Fanuc arms moving and welding other parts. All pre-programmed. Nothing we haven’t already seen in Chinese car factories. They all hide the final assembly stages requiring humans fitting and finishing the harnesses and sensitive parts.

In the last video I saw, Hyundai had sprinkled their tour route with a few Boston Dynamics robots. The humanoid one was just standing around. The Spot yellow doggy ones, however, were doing synchronized dancing, similar to what they did on America’s Got Talent. Nobody’s figured out what to do with them that doesn’t require machine-gun attachments. They’re so desperate they’re even floating them as glorified package delivery platforms: https://www.theverge.com/tech/965378/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-dog-delivery-assistant

If all these robots were anywhere ready near for full production, you can bet they would be showing them building the whole car. Boston Dynamics, despite all the robot gymnastics and being around for 30+ years, has not really shipped anything commercially viable. It’s already been passed around to Google, Softbank, and now Hyundai, and its CEO of many years just resigned in February.

My guess is this is all a lot of marketing flaff.

Don’t be a potential meat-crayon. Always wear a helmet and pads, folks.

Looks great. Installing the free trial to give it a try.

Let’s see if it can figure out all the weird IOT devices on my network :-)

Yes, the 20th one. The school had long closed, so it was at a hotel ballroom at a city central to everyone. It was awesome hanging with old friends and catching up. Even better was seeing the bullies turn into meek little men. After too many drinks, one tearfully apologized for being such an asshole. Lots of closure all around.

A couple of retired teachers showed up, and it was great talking to them like peers. And the one EVERYONE had a crush on, now with two kids and an ex-husband. Still hot as hell.

Nothing like Grosse Pointe Blank, but still fun.

Jabba the Hutt reference.

I did a lot of work in ElderTech. There were a lot of complex psychological issues around caring, connection, and fear of abandonment.

Tech can help, or at least mitigate the harm. But fooling people, or messing with their emotions really isn’t a winning recipe.

Hey, they could connect the car ‘driver attention camera’ thing, the OBD car speed stuff, and the in-car GPS to the municipality, the insurance company, and your credit card or bank account.

That way, the minute you look away, go a little over the speed limit, or check your phone message, they just gouge some cash out of your bank account. After three of these, your insurance rate goes up. After the tenth time, your health insurance and employer will be notified.

Fun times! 🎉

Edit: every damn step of this is now available via APIs or Agentic MCPs. There is zero technical barrier for this happening. Sleep tight y’all.

Yes, the code says:

if (testMode) {
  // tweak settings
}

But we didn’t intend for it to defeat tests.

Wait till you get to the religion v. religion part. It’s a hoot.

“On the one hand, this is good news. On the other hand…”

Those are rookie numbers.