Australia already has a government digital ID verification service, so this social media ban is just a first step towards legislators realising they can force people to just integrate and use that, then there is no user data changing hands.
Edit: > or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID service to prove their age
Here you go. If you’re concerned about your personal data, only use platforms that integrate and use this.
There has only been one accredited Digital ID that sort of isn't government and that's Australia Post's Digital ID which they're now winding down in favour of the government's. While the Digital ID act does allow for these third-party accredited providers, I think we can realistically expect that the only one that will be in use will be the federal government's.
> the generation of >400 milliwatts per square meter of mechanical power with a potential for >6 watts per square meter.
Keep in mind the power is fully mechanical so no electricity or control circuit is required. And based on the simplicity it seems like a good candidate to power something that you need to last 100 years with no maintenance for example.
I think the "last 100 years with no maintenance" is not likely feasible with this approach. The top plate has a coating that supports high infrared emissivity -- and I think it would need to be regularly cleaned to work well. And you can't really prevent it from getting dirty by enclosing it b/c that both substantially changes the performance and moves the maintenance burden to cleaning the enclosure.
Air bearings run dry until they get some moisture. Then they fail. Old joke about making radio enclosures: make it as watertight as possible, then drill a small hole on the bottom to let the water escape.
Until they are replaced with dust, pollution, hair, animals, leaf litter, aggressive plants, seismic events, pollen, skin particles, birdshit, fallen logs, slime mold, etc.
Teslas are dead simple, to the point where people are putting Tesla anything in virtually anything you can think of - classic cars, random sedans, you name it.
There’s also that guy on YouTube who updated the electricals in his original Model S with electricals from a 10 years later Model 3 Highland just by buying spare parts, and it was pretty doable with fairly basic and limited tools/public information.
So the complexity in this article is just a BMW/PHEV thing, not an EV thing.
As they point out, the Tesla pyro fuse (at least on a Model S) is a cheap part. However, in some model years it's on top of the pack, which means you have to drop the pack to get to it. And, from memory, it's a 10 year lifespan part. However, on other Model S cars, it's easily accessible from the bottom.
I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars. Obviously, right-to-repair and allowing access to documentation and tools for independent shops is a a necessary but not sufficient step.
I shudder to think at some of the other possibilities -- heavy-handed attempts to regulate how much specific repairs can cost.
Maybe mandating the sale of manufacturer-provided extended warranties for no more than x% the cost of the vehicle purchase price would be an incentive to keep repair cost in check?
The majority of their cars (Y/3 models) have the penthouse (top) of battery pack super easily accessible from under the back seat, no need to drop a pack.
Not to mention Tesla has the best service mode system in their computer of any brand of all time. They also have the best free to owners assembly/disassembly manuals in the service portal https://service.tesla.com/. They have taken self-service literally to the next level compared to anything I've ever driven ICE, Hybrid or EV and I've owned all of them.
+1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service.
Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench:
- Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters.
- Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so).
- Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle.
- Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc).
- Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.
> I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars.
New mandatory test suite: Have executives/leading personnel do common repairs and time it. Publish min/max/avg time next to fuel efficiency and safety rating.
On the Model 3, you have to drop the HV battery pack to replace the brake lines that prematurely rust in wintery climates, so Tesla is not fully immune either.
And check some videos of what you have to do to swap the door-actuating motor (which gets guaranteed water ingress) in the front doors (yes, not the gullwings) of a Model X.
I have two, Ducky One 2 TKL (Cherry Brown), and a Durgod Taurus K320 TKL (Cherry Blue). Good keyboards and both similar to each other, but just find the magic keyboard a nicer experience.
This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like.
I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.
I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).
At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?
He was at Microsoft for a few months, and Google for 16 years before that.
I worked pretty closely with him and his team for a bit at Google, and he seemed like a great human being, in addition to being a great engineer. I wouldn't read too much into a few-month stint at Microsoft.
I use Windows every day and see no AI anywhere. It's trivial to turn off (thankfully) and we wouldn't even hear about it if there wasn't an outrage industry around Microsoft.
Aside from all the 365 subscription prices turning into “+ Copilot” editions and silently going up in price like 20%, that you then have to access hidden flows to opt-out of, right?
Perhaps you are not getting it rammed down your throat because you’re not a business user? On personal editions one area where AI has been a failure is taking over the search bar, but you’re right, you can disable it.
I personally think all the gains in productivity that happened with WFH were just because people were stressed and WFH acted like a pressure relief. But too much of a good thing and people get lazy (seeing it right now, some people are filling full timesheets and not even starting let alone getting through a day of work in a week), so the right balance is somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps… the right balance is actually working only 4 days a week, always from the office, and just having the 5th day proper-off instead.
I think people go through “grinds” to get big projects done, and then plateau’s of “cooling down”. I think every person only has so much grind to give, and extra days doesn’t mean more work, so the ideal employee is one you pay for 3-4 days per week only.
We just need a metric that can't be gamed which will reliably show who is performing and who is not, and we can rid ourselves of the latter. Everyone else can continue to work wherever the hell they want.
But that's a tall order, so maybe we just need managers to pay attention. It doesn't take that much effort to stay involved enough to know who is slacking and who is pulling their weight, and a good manager can do it without seeming to micromanage. Maybe they'll do this when they realize that what they're doing now could largely be replaced by an LLM...
Having done a fair amount of audio physical modeling, I'll just say a synthesized version that's both fast and realistic would be possible but difficult. The difficulty is at least "it would make an impressive presentation at DAFx [1]", though I might be underestimating it, and it's more "you could make it your master's thesis at CCRMA [2]"
Ideal springs are a common, simple element in this field, but this kind of spring is very much not that.
You're probably better off improving the sample-based version by fading out the audio when necessary and using different samples based on the way it's triggered. If you have "ultra-dry" samples (maybe taken with a contact mic), you can add a convolution effect with a well-chosen impulse response, this will allow you to sharply cut off or adjust the audio and still have a natural-sounding tail.
I'm extremely grateful for this. My most deeply held secret is that I wish I could do this for a living - digitally modeling weird/beautiful objects/instruments and work on that forever haha. (And maybe make pedals out of them, I don't know)
If you don't mind humoring me (I'm quite the novice in this field), if I automated the recording of "all" possible positions for a spring (say I had a motor positioned in a way that would let me pull the spring in any polar direction), would that make modeling potentially easier?
There might be a "train an AI, here's 1000 recordings" angle, but I'm not necessarily interested in/asking about that.
Just strictly for modeling, would it help the R&D phase to have a lot of high sample rate recordings? Thanks a lot!
P.S. Also, if you have a good intro to DSP class/book, I'd love to hear it. I know about a few, but a recc is always appreciated
That's funny, I was trying to do other stuff after posting my comment, but my brain kept working in the background, against my will, looking for the best approach to actually model this. Honestly, I was probably being pessimistic about the difficulty of a synthesized version, but I still think your current approach (don't synthesize, use samples) is more reasonable and can be made more responsive.
I don't think that recording a large number of starting positions would help that much with creating a (non-ML) model, and I doubt a high sample rate would provide much useful information either. A more common approach would be to try getting separate sounds for the impulse and the resonant body, though they may be impossible to really separate, and the actual model may end up more complex than that.
You probably have a good starting point already with your code for the animated model. I think the sound mostly comes from the collision between coils (collisions not visible in your animated model), and almost entirely from the lowest couple of windings that are against the wall. This is your impulse. The resonant body might be in 2 parts: the wall and the long end of the spring. Your existing model can tell you when to trigger the impulses, and how much force to put into them.
Julius O. Smith has an encyclopedic amount of content on the topic, though it's often condensed into math that can be hard to apply: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/
Obligatory comment every time one of these threads comes up that Synology, sure, the hardware is a bit dated but… as far as set and forget goes:
I’ve run multiple Synology NAS at home, business, etc. and you can literally forget that it’s not someone else’s cloud. It auto updates on Sundays, always comes online again, and you can go for years (in one case, nearly a decade) without even logging into the admin and it just hums along and works.
Synology also has a bit of a software moat with its BTRFS-backed SHR implementation. You can throw in drives of arbitrary size and it'll automatically maximize the available free space. ZFS can't do that, though AnyRaid should make it possible in the future: https://docs.hexos.com/blog/2025-05-22.html
Synology adds some additional logic to automatically recover data from other RAID drives when the BTRFS layer encounters a checksum failure. I don’t think there’s any way to homebrew that part.
I love synology; bought one around 2018, runs nicely until this day; received last DSM 7.3 update so will be supported until 2028 but I will probably keep it running until it dies as I don't expose it to The Evil Internet anyway
does everything and more I need it to (backups, photos, storage, jellyfin, various media servers, torrents etc.)
What makes you think that Synology hardware is special in that sense?
Most quality hardware will easily last decades. I have servers in my homelab from 2012 that are still humming along just fine. Some might need a change of fans, but every other component is built to last.
I started a new job a couple months ago and a week hasn't gone by where I haven't said "For less than we're paying annually for [some software / SaaS], we could buy three Synologys sized to do that thing, at least as good if not significantly better, with a high-availability cluster on-prem plus a remote replica, with no more administration overhead than we have now."
And invariably the conversation turns to hardware specs. SMDH.
Edit: > or use an Australian Government accredited digital ID service to prove their age
Here you go. If you’re concerned about your personal data, only use platforms that integrate and use this.
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