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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I have owned VWs in the past and been pretty happy with them, however, the last reviews I’ve seen of the ID series indicated there were still some software and build quality issues to iron out.

    The front runner for me at the moment is the Polestar 2 - the latest refresh has switched to RWD from FWD and upgraded the motor and battery, which is now 82kWh (about twice the capacity of my current car), and as a result now promises a real world range of somewhere between 200-300 miles depending on conditions - that should be enough to get me from my place to my parents in just about a single charge, whereas currently I need to stop twice en-route.

    It’s not priced as competitively as a Model 3, but it’s probably its nearest competitor at the moment. I’ll have to make a call about what I want to do in the next month or two, as there is an upcoming change to vehicle tax over here which would make any EV in this price bracket make less financial sense if purchased after the cutoff date. (Tesla, predictably, have snuck their base level Model 3 in just below this threshold.)


  • Same, my Model 3 turns 5 years old soon. My original plan was to keep it for at least 8 years until the HV battery warranty expires - but, it has had its first major breakdown in the last 6 months, and although Tesla did manage to fix it I’m now window shopping for a replacement.

    I don’t think I’ll get another Tesla, at least not as the situation stands. If Elon decided to sell it to some unobtrusive billionaire who is content to sit there, shut up and get even richer without meddling in geopolitics - and if they put back the fucking turn signal stalks - then maybe I would consider it, as otherwise the car is easy to live with, pleasant to drive and has acceptable range for what I need - and newer versions will go even further. But, there are a lot of alternatives on the market to consider now as well.

    I am sure there is a team of very talented engineers at Tesla, and that they are the reason the company has been as successful as it is, despite the moron in charge of it.




  • I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

    Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

    First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

    Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

    Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

    I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.


  • I decided to set up Fedora on my new laptop as it was either take a chance on that or spend like 3 hours debloating a Win11 install.

    It’s been over 10 years since I last tried dailying Linux, we have come a long way in that time. Everything just worked out of the box. No fucking around needed.

    Even relatively niche stuff like my thunderbolt dock and the laptop’s fingerprint sensor was picked up. And, thanks to the investment Valve has been putting into Wine and Proton, pretty much every game I’ve tried has worked with no issue.

    Next time my desktop is due for a clean install I’ll definitely be doing the same there.











  • Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

    Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

    No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.



  • I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

    To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

    Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.


  • Rookeh@startrek.websitetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldCyber Stuck
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    6 months ago

    My daily driver is a pure EV, but while I was on holiday a few months ago I was driving a Yaris Hybrid as a rental (which to my understanding is basically a Prius drivetrain in a Yaris body).

    Fuck me it was terrible. Every time I applied even mild acceleration it sounded like the valves were going to eject out of the engine, meanwhile it had about as much get up and go as a sedated elephant. 0-60 in four to six business days. On ramps were an interesting experience.

    The only saving grace was that we only used about a third of a tank of gas during our week long trip.

    I’ll stick with pure electric thanks. No complicated drivetrain with multiple systems to go wrong, no compromised performance, enough range to get me everywhere I need to go, and good enough charging infrastructure (at least in my country) to make longer journeys trivial.