Maybe in California :) In other places you need defrost, windshield defog etc.
I regularly cross our (small) mountains on holidays and that means temperature and humidity outside can change every 20 min on a trip as you go from a depression to a mountain pass and back to a different depression with a different weather.
The target temperature control stays unmoved, but i randomly have to turn on and off the defog, for example. Can't keep the defog on all the time because it pushes a ton of hot air to the windshield and then in my face, rather keep it off when i don't need it.
Hey speaking of fog, do Teslas even have fog lights? How many layers of menu do you have to go through to turn them on and off?
Newer cars read the outside temperature, and adjust the auto. I don’t know if they sense condensation on the inside. I know that they sense water on the outside to automatically engage wipers.
I have found even the best ones though, to get the rear defrost right, but fail to get front defrost correct in high humidity conditions that aren’t just normal rain. (Very dense fog, snow, sleet ).
Subaru front facing cameras just shut off the eye sight system when the window fogs. The defrost selection is a button, which means it's computer controlled.
In theory the computer knows when it needs defrost.
So yesterday was a windchill of -5F or something equally miserable. I spent about 20 minutes out in it and then drove home. When I got into the car, the heat felt perfect on full blast as I shivered and thawed. About 15 minutes into my 30 minute drive, my body temperature caught up and I had to turn the heat down to low as I was getting too warm.
A couple months from now, I'll have the same situation, except it will be 95 F outside after a long, hot work day and I'll jack the AC up to get down to a comfortable body temperature. Once I cool off, the AC on full blast will be way too cold to tolerate.
Thankfully, I've got an 8-year-old base model car that allows me to do all that with physical dials that don't take my attention off the road. I can't imagine what it would take to program an "auto" mode that knows how long it takes for my body to reach a comfortable temperature after being out in the elements. I think I'd lose my mind if my car just blithely set itself to 70 degrees and assumed that would work for me. That may be an option for office workers in milder climates, but they're not the only ones buying cars.
A lot of these solutions that people are mentioning, or the types of cars with climate controls they like, seem to be posting from places like San Diego or the California Bay area as opposed to places like, you know, the Midwest or the South or the Pacific Northwest or, you know, New England.
That's a reasonable point. Too bad an auto mode for my music and podcasts (of varying volume; also varying with whether I have a passenger) is probably not a thing...
On the other hand, my sense with how I use temperature control in my car is that most of my interactions are (a) set mode at start of driving (b) incrementally turn the temperature dial a notch or two without looking at it.
My current daily vehicle does a pretty fine job of figuring out what mode I want for HVAC.
Sometimes, I do mash the defroster button when weather commands warm/dry air on the windshield and it's easy enough to find that with muscle memory.
Otherwise, in normal seasonal weather, it works well and I don't change modes or temperature. Windows up, down, hot, cold, sunny, cloudy, dark, whatever -- it all works about the same.
Previously, I drove an older version of the same vehicle. It also worked well until it forgot how to figure out what day it was due to a software issue. After that, it kind of had a mind of its own.
(Now, a sane person would ask why that would have to do anything to do with HVAC performance.
It gathered the current date, time, and position from GPS, the bearing from the nav's compass, and the solar intensity from a sensor on th dashboard.
A bit of math and/or an almanac lookup later, and it also knows the position and angle of the sun relative to the car.
So it knows when sunlight is streaming on through the driver's window, and adjusts automatically to compensate by providing relatively cool air from the dash vents only on that side. It also knows not to do this on a cloudy day as well as other things that seem obvious once a person starts thinking about them.
Which is a magical kind of automation -- until the calendar is off by both years and months because Honda broke the clock and its understanding of the sun broke with it: https://didhondafixtheclocks.com/ )
Ok, that's pretty neat sounding. I'm behind the times with a 15 year old Saturn that's fully manual controls (except headlights turning on).
My temperature adjustments are the old fashioned "what temperature air to blow" and not "I want this end result temperature", so my previous comment is a whole different paradigm. Thinking about it, with more recent rentals, I haven't messed with temperature controls much either.
The older one was a 2007 Honda van -- the newer one is from 2012. I think that system was introduced in MY 2005.
Either way, it's almost certainly old enough that the patents are expired.
And I was surprised by it myself. It would have seemed like absolute wizardry to me if I knew of it back in '05.
You raise an interesting point about more-recent rentals: People don't talk much about how stuff like this works, because if it is working well then they don't need to think about it at all. They don't even need to notice it.
And it's not perfect, but it's still Really, Really Good at accomplishing that task of being out of mind.
I was complaining about lack of physical buttons in my VW compared to my BMW before it, but then I thought about it - what do I actually use? Climate control is set to 20C and stays there. Carplay starts when I board the car and resumes what it was doing the last ride. Seat and wheel heating start dependent on temperature. There is actually nothing to set besides window heating (dedicated buttons) and volume (slider and wheel buttons). I was a bit angry at capacitive wheel buttons, but since I've discovered that I can set speed by 10 steps with a swipe I have to say that I don't care that much.
I still think that Skoda has much better controls, though. They also look and work quite similar to the control in OP.
It's seemingly not going to get any better soon, either. A new candidate for mayor of Boston has 3 main policy agendas [1]: Housing affordability, public school quality, and removing bike lanes.
Despite being farther from Cambridge (a different city than Boston, so they have a different mayor), I prioritize biking to places there to meet friends or go out to dinner. It is just a much more pleasant experience than nearly anywhere in Boston proper.
Pretty standard actually. Affordable housing rarely has a definition or measurable success criteria, but if something gets built it isn't going to be built where their constituents or they themselves live. Similar to how superficially progressive people are all for drug liberalization or a less heavy-handed approach to crime, as long as it has zero impact on their lives.
These same people are ostensibly liberal, "we're all for people riding bikes, or getting a stupid little condo, whatever you kids like to do for fun" they say, but in practice will do anything in their power to prevent any impediment to their car commute, even if their fear is at-best specious.
Same thing in Toronto. In Vancouver Canada we're a fair bit better about the bike lane thing, though it's still fragile, but in the affordable housing issue they actually just subsidized the huge home owners that already owned land, so a majority of new units that have come on the market are in their basements or backyard and can't be owned, furthering
a class divide. They marginally upzoned, but now a duplex or small townhouse is over a million at the low end. There isn't an incentive to make housing less expensive except the vague sense that the municipal/regional economy will eventually collapse on someone else's watch.
No, there should be fewer "bike lanes" in the US. Bike lanes are silly unless they are separate "roads" as in the Netherlands. There is absolutely zero chance of this happening in the US. Just stop with the pretense and stop giving cyclists a false sense of security. I rode a bike all over Los Angeles as a teen before the bike lane fantasies took hold. That takes a different set of survival skills and attitude than the suicidal bike lane followers of today. What we do now is just killing cyclists.
It's been very funny hearing neighbors talk about how the literal billionaire is somehow just a common Boston man and Michelle Wu is an "elitist carpetbagger". How are all these billionaires being seen as relatable and meanwhile middle class academics and scientists are all the elites?
This should be expected blowback. The billionaires are taking advantage of a large group of people who feel alienated. All the billionaires have to do is not call them racist, transphobic, nazis, and they'll get their votes. Regardless of misaligned economic interests.
Whatever you think about all those issues, and how stupid you think the hoi polloi are, there has been a massive strategic miscalculation about which issues to focus on, and how to address them over the last number of years.
I know using the phone can be uncomfortable if you don't do it often and that's okay. It gets easier the more you do it, and you don't need to word everything perfectly. The important thing is that you get your point across. "My name is x, I live in county y, and I'm calling to say I expect a yes/no vote on issue z."
I just did this for the first time, I found all three of mine had websites with a form to fill in which I used to leave my message. I hope filling in the form counts as much as a phone call? I left one a phone message too, but do kind of hate calling people...
Email is NOT as good! Phone calls are the most effective means by far. I know it's uncomfortable, it is for me too, but you need to power through that feeling. It gets easier the more you do it.
I called and kept calling until I got through. There were busy signals for 30 minutes before I got in. Be persistent. Keep trying!
To add, as someone who’s called offices to share opinions over the last several years:
You may get either voicemail or someone will pick up. A staffer will be who gets these messages, so be polite. Simply being polite means you’d be doing better than a lot of other callers.
I state my name, that I am a constituent, my city+ZIP, a brief message stating that I urge the congressperson to support/oppose an action and why.
If you’re talking to a human, give them a moment to jot it down and you’re done.
Also, you don’t have to call their DC office. If that line is busy, try a field office.
My 2019 Audi S5 was excellent at this. It would ping pong at most once then auto-correct itself to be perfectly centered in the lane.
It did some weird things like if the car in front of you was driving a bit too far to the left/right of a lane, it would copy them. Other than that it was nearly perfect, though. Never had it take an exit by accident, etc.
Their tuning on when to accelerate/brake and make it smooth needed a fair bit of work, but I found that switching the drive mode from Dynamic (Sport) to Comfort changed the eagerness of the system and smoothed things out.
> It did some weird things like if the car in front of you was driving a bit too far to the left/right of a lane, it would copy them
Wouldn't that conceptually be the right thing for the software to do, copy the human in front of it (unless it has demonstrably better information)? OT1H, "lemmings," but OTOH unless the whole line of cars were all on openpilot my life experience has been that the person in front of me by definition has more visibility than I do since their car is not blocking their view as it is mine
I am totally talking out of school, because I'm not in that space and my poor BMW chose to do its own thing[1] so it doesn't work with openpilot[2] -- although they have a dedicated #flexray channel[3] so hope springs eternal
> Wouldn't that conceptually be the right thing for the software to do, copy the human in front of it (
I see people failing to follow the rules for bad reasons far more often than for any good reason. I don't want my car driving off to the side of the lane just because the car in front isn't centred. It should assume the right thing to do is to follow the rules, and hand off to me in cases that are more complicated.
Ugh. So I’m working on a fork of openpilot and the way the OP model is designed, it has its own rules that is not rooted in any legal driving framework for any state. The simple one is staying right. My state says your vehicle must stay on the right side of the road including roads without markings. OP will try to drive in the middle of the road. Another one is how OP does not distinguish people from parked cars or how oncoming cars are not tracked but simply an object the car should try to avoid (though it does not do this very well and experiences frequent disengagements due to it)
Obviously a model which manage these conditions would fair better but the comma hardware is fairly underpowered for any stronger use case.
I have added dedicated compute to my car to handle a lot of driving rules but now my solution is independent of comma. I tie into the LVDS display on the console so the integration is immersive, but it also means I don’t need comma for the hardware. My fork is also starting to diverge from OP so I may have a competing (but tangential) product!
I also notice this phenomenon in Audi. It’s as if the steering motor is applying inputs after the steering setting has been applied. So if your steering wheel is in sport mode then the motor requires additional force to turn.
I run my own forked copy of openpilot and the car cannot keep up with turns in dynamic mode. When set to comfort it can handle all turns with ease.
Been working in the Fintech space for the past 3 years and what I've learned is that deep down no bank trusts any other. No other bank wouldn't trust that a random bank actually correctly verified the persons identity before giving them an account.
I imagine this also works with other vendors. All you need is 1 company with a weak process.
Probably a lot of it is due to know your customer (KYC) rules. I am not allowed to take your word that you've done your due diligence; I have to do my own.
I've spent ~20 years working in and around finance, on the trading side. If your lawyers aren't paranoid about KYC, that's a major red flag.
I completely agree! The company I'm currently working on is pretty cyclical such that we get a bunch of new activity towards the middle of each month and nothing at the beginning or end. This leads to our notifications to go wild sometimes making us super happy then trailing off and making us worry other times.
I agree with this as good practice in general, but I think the human vs LLM thing is not a great comparison in this case.
When I ask a friend something I assume that they are in good faith telling me what they know. Now, they could be wrong (which could be them saying "I'm not 100% sure on this") or they could not be remembering correctly, but there's some good faith there.
An LLM, on the other hand, just makes up facts and doesn't know if they're incorrect or not or even what percentage sure it is. And to top things off, it will speak with absolute certainty the whole time.
That’s why I never make friends with my LLMs. It’s also true that when I use a push motorized lawn mower it has a different safety operating model than a weed whacker vs a reel mower vs an industrial field cutter and bailing system. But we still use all of these regularly and no one points out the industrial device is extraordinarily dangerous and there’s a continuum of safety with different techniques to address the challenges for the user to adopt. Arguably LLMs maybe shouldn’t be used by the uniformed to make medical decisions and maybe it’s dangerous that people do. But in the mean time I’m fine with having access to powerful tools and using them with caution but using them for what gives me value. I’m sure we will safety wrap everything if soon enough to the point it’s useless and wrapped in advertisements for our safety.
