Last week Tesla and ANCAP were proudly proclaiming that the Model Y is the safest car ever to be put through the testing program. Not long after that announcement, a Tesla hacker calling themselves Green "found unusual details that could point to a program to allow the electric car maker to detect safety testing programs", specifically called out "ANCAP support in their code" and wonders why Tesla "give testing houses one-off builds with the testing house in the name (with tweaked settings?)" Dunno what the code does exactly, but the mere fact Tesla is giving crash testing agencies special code that isn't on production vehicles and the cars happen to get excellent marks on those tests. ANCAP is investigating.
Google lost its appeal against the EU's 4.34 billion euro fine for forcing OEMs to include Chrome and Google Search on devices with the Play Store. The fine was reduced to 4.125 billion euro, but the EU General Court still reckons Google acted unlawfully. Suck shit Google. Meanwhile, the EU and the UK are holding up another Big Tech company's progress towards ultimate domination - Microsoft's $75b acquisition of Activision Blzzard, announced 8 months ago. They're concerned that it'll mean fewer cross-platform titles, with Microsoft stitching up popular game franchises for its own consoles, leaving Sony and Nintendo out in the cold. It'll probably end up like Nvidia's attempt to buy ARM, which died due to regulators expressing similar concerns.
Popular chat/community platform Discord has a new feature called Forum Channels. They "appear like sub-channels and can be used by server owners to branch off conversations about particular topics or to avoid having to create yet another channel for focused conversations". When I was a young man we had IRC channels and vBulletin forums to do this. Everything changes, but nothing changes! Time is a flat circle! Discord's FAQ has a post explaining how to use Forum Channels so people who used the internet in the 90s can get their head around what the kids are doing in 2022.
In 2019 I co-founded an electric car charging startup called EV Up. It didn't go well. In 2020 I tried again with Park N Plug. It has also not gone well. Almost 3 years of work, not a single charger installed. I'd call that a failure. I haven't 100% given up, but in as attempt to salvage something from all the effort I put into those two businesses I wrote a lengthy blog post compiling all my knowledge on the topic of public EV charging in a single location. It's kinda boring, but the LinkedIn crowd liked it and it got me a few free lunches with rich dudes and a spot on a panel at an automotive dealer conference next week (2:55PM - prime time!).
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