During the rulemaking process, the Bureau of Industry and Security found that certain technologies originating from China or Russia present an undue and unacceptable risk to U.S. national security.
“Cars today aren’t just steel on wheels – they’re computers,” outgoing Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a news release Tuesday. “They have cameras, microphones, GPS tracking, and other technologies that are connected to the internet. Through this rule, the Commerce Department is taking a necessary step to safeguard U.S. national security and protect Americans’ privacy by keeping foreign adversaries from manipulating these technologies to access sensitive or personal information.”
The software bans will apply to Model 2027 cars, while the hardware bans will apply to Model 2030 vehicles.
A recent audit report delivered a scathing report of mismanagement and high taxes.
Specific items they unearthed: Lawmakers and voters have enacted at least 20 major taxes that hit Portlanders since 2009. Local taxes on city businesses rose 82% from 2019 to 2023. People leaving Portland have higher incomes than new arrivals. About 40% of transportation assets are in bad shape.
Metro’s supportive housing services tax and Multnomah County’s Preschool for All tax, both assessed on high earners, lifted Portland into second place behind New York in terms of the top marginal tax rate. Portland’s is 13.9%, compared with 14.8% for New York. And: Portland’s homelessness rate is four times the U.S. average.
But fear not, the taxes are slated to go higher as both the Preschool for All income tax and Homeless services tax are slated to increase every few years. By 2027, Portlanders making over $125,000/year will pay a higher tax rate than New York millionaires.
Security researcher Sam Curry found a security flaw in the always connected Starlink system integrated into Subaru cars. It allows bad actors to obtain drivers’ personal information include VINs, location history, the odometer, and personal owner information, including customer names, phone numbers, and email addresses.
Using the obtained data, the hackers could proceed to the next phase of the attack and use the access to Starlink servers to create new administrator accounts to a connected vehicle. Doing this granted the attacker full access to remote control features, meaning that a bad actor would have obtained permission to start a connected Subaru car, lock and unlock it, and see where it was in real-time.
Voxon has been showing off it’s Voxon VX2 VLED technology to create interactive volumetric holograms. It costs $6,800 so it’s definitely not cheap.
It’s likely using a high rpm spinning panel to generate the image which means that dampening the sound of the spinning array, keeping the display carefully synced to avoid pixel drift, and are some of the primary engineering concerns. They do provide a Unity and Blender SDK which is interesting.
Here’s a version of Doom playing on the volumetric display
In the study, 183 children, ages 7–13, were asked to copy the dance-like movements of a video avatar for 1 minute, while their imitation performance was measured using CAMI. CAMI was able to correctly identify children with autism vs neurotypical children with a 80% success rate – importantly, CAMI also differentiated autism from ADHD with 70% accuracy.
Developer: “Yesterday was mostly meetings. I wrote some code, but there was backlog grooming sync, then a retro, then another meeting about improving our meeting efficiency.” Lead: “My friend, one glorious day we will simply do the work instead of talking about it for hours”
How is this an improvement from waterfall development? Meetings should serve a purpose and have a clear outcome or decision. Meeting should have the minimal people needed to avoid disruption. Steve Jobs threw people out of meetings if they weren’t necessary to the decision being made. There should be no meeting if there is no decision.
Scrum is too often poor at timely decision making. Instead of meeting after meeting in which everyone has to be present and people with stronger wills get their way too often; I have found a subset of scrum meetings can, and should, be done by just the people needed with a report out generated for others to remain in sync and give feedback if they were wrong. Example: PO’s exploring feasibility for direction don’t need the whole team there to make estimates. One or two senior folks can give good enough estimates. The whole team doesn’t need to be involved in a component design discussion – leave it to the story owners who then double-check if it doesn’t impact others. Map day shouldn’t be an 8 hour long snooze fest about scoping each story from scratch. If the scoping/design work is done by people interested in those stories before you get there, they can present a single slide on the estimate/work and get any critical feedback. Team leads and the PO can do backlog grooming alone.
Yes, this is a bit of a twist on the scrumm idea that the entire team commits to a delivery – but some decisions can be made by senior/trusted individuals owning the story/architecture.
