They mean the Bluetooth MAC address. It’ll capture your phone’s and can tell who the manufacturer is but the rest of the address is randomized. That said, lots of watches/earbuds/assorted smart Bluetooth things aren’t randomized because manufacturers are lazy.

And if your nav system crashes, so does your car

Yes, but it’s harder to fight such a large incumbent when all the money is just going to the incumbent

This seems like an odd move. Let China pay money to use ClosedAI hallucinations instead of using the money to develop their own hallucinations that the US has no insight into.

There’s no technology transfer if they just using the hallucination outputs, it’s just free money for trash.

Not wrong, but the issue is complex. Drones are very obviously one of the bullets in any upcoming conflict. It’s not really about spying and phoning home, it’s that it would be insane to try to tell China “hey, don’t invade other countries mkay?” And then say “oh also we need ammo to stop you but we don’t have the ability to make brass cases or gunpowder anymore, can you send us some”.

Now, while we “can”, to some extent, manufacture components and complete systems, the thing about a war is that it’s basically a wizard duel but with money hoses. You can’t win if the Chinese are producing slaughter bots for $500 ea and the US equivalent is $100,000 (literally). Congress is praying that this will light a fire under US and more friendly foreign manufacturing supply chains to invest more because they might have a chance of breaking into a lucrative market. That said, it probably just paves the way for a two tiered market where China makes their slaughter bots for $500 and the US makes them for $50,000 but all the civil use cases get caught in the cross fire for the short to mid term…so everyone still loses, just harder.

Its like we’ve adopted the economic policies we forced on third world nations, and found ourselves with a third world economy

Foucault’s boomerang at work, just like US counter insurgency tactics now being employed by US police.

I’m adjacent to the industry. This is dumb but I understand the reasoning. We’re getting left behind in the electronics world. Nobody is creating hardware startups because every few months there’s a viral blog post with a “hardware is hard” title on HN and none of the VC assholes want to fund anything but web based surveillance capitalism ad tech because it’s a surefire way to make money. Even if you do get funded and you’re US based you’re absolutely doing all your manufacturing in China if you’re remotely consumer facing (b2big-b has different rules). That means Chinese companies get all the benefits of all the labor from your highly trained engineers when they get the design files. If you try to build anything at volume in the US you have strikingly few options for boards and parts. Everything is whole number multiples of fucking PCBway and half the time it’s lower quality unless you’re paying aero-defense prices which is the only business anyone wants.

Literally all of the alternatives are open and much more capable for it. You can go buy a pixhawk and basically any frame and have something much more powerful for much less money, you just have to be willing to bolt two or three parts together.

I look forward to running their shit in an Android emulator that feeds it bullshit until my rates go down

I got screeched at for covering up a super bright blinking light on a red eye. Their FAs are next level stupid.

Making ai more efficient will just mean more ai

I hate that it needs to be said but love that they said it so plainly

Part of the issue is the whole thing smells weird.

Like they won’t talk about their monetization strategy at all but they acknowledge that there will be one. They’re trying to randomly apply crypto to something that’s literally already the one proven blockchain tech, and they started at the height of the crypto token scam industry and it looks a lot like they’re trying to suck up the last dregs of that cycle.

If you are hammering crypto into things that don’t obviously need crypto you really need to justify it thoroughly. A relatively old company just hand waving all of it should raise all of the red flags.

They were shilling on HN too. People were getting frustrated because they were being incredibly evasive about their monetization strategy but, being HN, business model critiques were not well received…

Installed it in k3s and then pulled up the Android app but all it does is say every single file is a duplicate and overload my notifications tray while not uploading anything

Yeah, that’s the issue ultimately. The ESP32 chips are nice and easy to use but still pale in comparison to getting things working on a pi for the average developer without embedded experience. These devs may not even know they exist to be completely honest.

I’m not intimately familiar with the BCM2711 but I believe it’s a reasonable, albeit somewhat overpowered, processor for the application. It can be put into a variety of low power states and probably pulled out of sleep by various events like the GSM chip sending packets or accelerometer motion (frequently the peripheral chips have dedicated “wakeup” pins that you can wire to interrupts). It’s not the most cost effective option by far, there are sub $5 microcontrollers with multiple cores for handling communications and real time motor control concurrently but you’d need to hire someone like me for a few months @$200/hr to write the low level drivers and design the boards. The rpi lets random web-only devs fumble their way through hardware development using whatever GitHub Python libraries they can find. If you only need a hundred scooters it makes more sense to just yolo it and buy up the remaining supply of rpis to start your grift.