The Californian DMV has told General Motors' Cruise to cease operating driverless taxi services in the state immediately, declaring "based upon the performance of the vehicles, the Department determines the manufacturer's vehicles are not safe for the public's operation" and that "the manufacturer has misrepresented any information related to safety of the autonomous technology of its vehicles". Big claims for along with Waymo, were considered the gold standard of autonomous driving. Vice reckons Cruise tried to cover up a rather nasty pedestrian incident, on top of campaigning from San Francisco emergency services who are sick of dealing with the bullshit these cars create on public roads.
Qualcomm has finally announced a product based on their acquisition of Nuvia, the CPU startup co-founded by a bunch of senior Apple engineers. The Snapdragon X Elite is an ARM SoC designed for laptops running Windows, probably manufactured by TSMC on their N4P process, has 12x "Oryon" cores running at 3.8GHz (can boost up to 4.3GHz on 2x cores), supports rather speedy LPDDR5x-8533 RAM and everything else you'd expect from a modern SoC. No performance figures but Qualcomm claims it is "up to 2x faster than the competition" while using a third of the power - dunno what they're comparing it against (Intel laptop CPUs? Apple Silicon SoCs??) but we will find out more in mid-2024 when the Snapdragon X Elite hits the market. Oh and Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC too, coming to an Android phone near you early next year. Meanwhile, Apple announced an event for the 30th of October dubbed "Scary Fast" where the rumour mill reckons there will be new iMacs, potentially packing a M3 SoC.
Agg over at OCAU (hello if you're still reading The Sizzle!) made a forum post over there about his experience setting up BirdNET - "you get a Raspberry Pi with a USB microphone, and stick it somewhere where it can hear the outside world. It listens for birdsong, then identifies the birds it hears and serves up a website with the recordings, stats and info on the birds. You can even listen live to the audio feed and watch a spectrogram of it if you like". I should really set this up on the side of my backyard shed. A nice little enclosure, battery and solar panel would let it live outside and not need to be near a power outlet.
Public telephone in Osaka, Japan (Andrew Leu/Unsplash)
📻 Lightning Field - Quicksand
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