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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months ago

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“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #automation #humans in the loop #centaurs #reverse centaurs #labor #ai safety #sanity checks #spot the mistake #code review #driving instructor

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the-hinky-panda · 11 months ago

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The Drowning Kind : Part 1

Title: The Drowning Kind

Pairing: Captain Sean Renard x OFC (written as a reader)

Rating: Explicit

Summary: You heard of the Portland Grimm and leave your fundamentalist group of naiads in Vancouver. You just wanted a safe fresh start; you didn't expect to fall in love with a royal hybrid police captain.

“Lots of men want to stay in a boat because they're afraid of drowning. But a mermaid knows: life is just not worth living if you're not ready to drown a few times.”

― C. JoyBell C.

Captain Sean Reynard has many secrets. Some are larger than others. This one is fairly small, relatively speaking.

He owns a kayak.

It’s dusty, and hasn't been used in years. He had bought it on a whim, trying to impress a woman long forgotten now, and now he’s thankful for that impulsive purchase. It’s almost eleven at night when he unlatches it from the roof rack of his car and slips the front of it into the water. The moon is full tonight, turning the river silver and the trees on the river bank more gray than black. He’s grabbing the paddle when he hears your footsteps on the soft riverbank.

“I wasn’t sure if you were making it out tonight,” you say. “Heard it was a rough day in the office.”

“Rough day in the office means meeting up with you will be a certainty.”

Your eyes glint in the bright moonlight as you smile at his comment. He still is getting used to having someone genuinely pleased to have him in their presence, no expectations or favors. You’re already dressed in your swimsuit, bare feet, toes curling into the soft silt as the river laps around your ankles. He knows you’ve spent most of the hot summer day in the river, that you know the currents, branches, and estuaries as well as he knows all the roads and neighborhoods in Portland. The perks of being a naiad and a police captain.

He moves towards you, leaning down to kiss you but you retreat a couple steps further into the river with a coy smile. “You’re going to have to catch me first.”

“Well that hardly seems fair.”

“I’ll go easy on you,” you give him a wink before turning and disappearing under the silver water.

He watches the ripples of your movement as you do your laps under the surface and wait for him to launch the kayak. By the time he’s made it to the halfway point in the river, he can see the electric blue glow of your gills as you circle around the kayak. He pulls his paddle out of the water and rests it across his lap. He waits for a few moments, enjoying the silence, letting his eyes adjust to the night sky as more stars start to appear in his vision. He needs this after the frustrations today; he needs the quiet, the physical effort…you.

Your electric blue eyes are peering at him from the pointed bow of the kayak. You sink below the surface again but appear at the side of the kayak, effortlessly pulling yourself up and sitting, perfectly balanced, in front of him with minimal shifting of the boat. You stay in your naiad form to help with your balancing, air whistling and chirping quietly from the gills along your neck.

“Do you want to talk about your day?”

He shakes his head. “No. I’d rather hear about your day.”

“All my swimming and playing with my fishy friends?”

“Says the woman who got kicked out of the all you can eat sushi bar last week?”

“I almost got kicked out! Get your facts straight, Captain.”

“My apologies.” He lays a hand over yours and you instinctively pull it away but he catches it, slipping his fingers through yours like a hook and halting your retreat. He can feel the scars of the cutting, the lack of webbing between your fingers. He knows if he looks at your feet, he’ll find the same disfigurement there too. He changes into his hybrid form and waits for your eyes to meet his. “You’re not the only one with marks of shame.”

You squeeze his hand back and give him a small smile. This is usually when you start listing the differences between them: he had zero control over his heritage, you had made the conscious decision to go against eons of tradition. His mother had tried to protect him as best she could. Your husband had stood by and watched you be cut by the village elders so they wouldn’t do the same to him. He has tried to convince you, shame is shame, details be damned. One day, he hopes you’ll believe him that when he sees you, all he can see is strength, resilience, and bravery.

He sees everything he wants to be and that’s a much bigger secret than the kayak.

#sean renard x you #sean renard x reader #sean renard x ofc #captain sean renard x you #captain sean renard x reader #captain sean renard x ofc #sean renard fic #captain sean renard fic #grimm fic

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paintthedeadflag · 6 months ago

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Okay, list of albums I enjoy for anyone that even vaguely might want it.

Albums:

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel (I love this album so so so much)

All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats

Purple Mountains by Purple Mountains

Twin Fantasy by car seat headrest

Roman candle by Elliott smith

Ceilidhs an island by the Vancouver special (please give this guy some love on bandcamp and Spotify, I love his music)

Tops and roots (вершки и корешки) by Yegor Letov (Егор Летов)

The natural bridge by silver jews

Electric magnolia co. By songs: ohia

How to leave town by car seat headrest

Merriweather post pavillion by the animal collective

Sung tongs by the animal collective

Strawberry jam by the animal collective

On Avery island by neutral milk hotel

Hype city soundtrack by neutral milk hotel

Tallahassee by the mountain goats

Corky's debt to his father by mayo Thompson

Our endless numbered days by iron and wine

Live at jittery Joe's by Jeff mangum

Pinkerton by weezer

A crow looked at me by mount eerie

Mountain rock by dear nora

The orbiting human circus by the music tapes

Lift your skinny fists like antennas to heaven by godspeed you! Black emporer

Nervous young man by car seat headrest

Surfer Rosa by the pixies

Giles Corey by Giles Corey

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myhauntedsalem · 1 year ago

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The Unexplained Mystery of Granger

A young man, Granger Taylor was a mechanical genius that was self-taught. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade, however, at the age of only fourteen he built a one-cylinder automobile which is now on display the Duncan Forest Museum along with a steam locomotive that he hauled out of the woods and restored. At age seventeen he overhauled a bulldozer that no one else could repair. He built a replica of a World War II fighter plane that was snatched-up by a collector for $20,000.

Granger always wondered how Flying Saucer were powered. He built his own out of two satellite dishes, one top and one bottom, as an inspiration. His “flying saucer” became a home-away-from-home with couch, TV and a wood stove. He would often sleep in his “space craft”.

He later said he was in contact with extraterrestrials that were going to show him how their technology works. He told everyone he was going for a trip on an alien space ship. Then one night in November of 1980 he disappeared and left a note for his family. To this day, despite an RCMP investigation, he has never been found, nor have they found any possible clues as to his whereabouts.

The Granger Affair is certainly a great Canadian mystery. Surely a man of his obvious mechanical talents would not go unnoticed had he simply slipped away in the night. After a four year investigation authorities haven’t a single lead to where he might be.

The Granger Taylor Flying Saucer rests on stilts in the backyard of the Taylor home at Duncan on Vancouver Island. It is a mute memorial to its builder, young Granger Taylor.

“He built his spaceship out of two satellite receiving dishes and outfitted it with a television, a couch, and a wood-burning stove. He became obsessed with finding out how flying saucers were powered, spending hours sitting in the ship thinking and often sleeping there,” wrote Douglas Curran in his book: In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space (1985).

Then one November night in 1980 Granger Taylor simply disappeared.

He left behind a yard strewn with old tractors; machine engines, vintage automobiles, a bulldozer, as well as a note which read:

Dear Mother and Father, I have gone away to walk aboard an alien ship, as recurring dreams assured a 42 month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe, then return. I am leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any. Please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help. Love, Granger.

The forty-two months were up in May 1984 and his parents, Jim and Grace Taylor, leave the back door unlocked in case their son shows up. But he never has.

Granger Taylor left school in the eighth grade and found work as a mechanic’s helper, showing a flair for repairing machinery. At the age of fourteen he built a one-cylinder car which is on display at the Duncan Forest Museum. He constructed a replica of a World War II fighter plane, and he left behind his silver-and-red flying saucer.

He told a friend a month before he disappeared that he was in mental contact with someone from another galaxy and that he was in receipt of an invitation to go on a trip through the Solar System.

“On the night that Granger disappeared, ” wrote Curran, ” a storm struck the central part of Vancouver Island. Hurricane winds were reported and electrical power was knocked out. Granger vanished, along with his blue pick-up truck.

“After four years of ‘exhaustive checks’ of hospital, passport, employment, and vehicle records, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not uncovered a single clue as to the whereabouts of Granger Taylor. ‘I can hardly believe Granger’s off in a spaceship, ‘his father said. ‘But if there is a flying object out there, he’s the one to find it.’ ”

#ghost and hauntings #paranormal #ghost and spirits #haunted locations #haunted salem #myhauntedsalem #unsolved mystery #granger taylor

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parkeryangs · 1 year ago

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woe.begone au where matt isn't real.

mike was a loner in college— he had a roommate he never saw, classmates that were too blunt or too pretentious for him to enjoy the company of, so he kept to himself and kept his head down, spending free evenings arguing on the internet with strangers and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle.

he was a loner and he hated that, the deep-seated feeling that nobody was looking out for him, nobody cared what happened to him. but matt did. mike's solitude had turned to inventing a friend that he never had, with a bright smile and dark eyes and hair, who smoked and played electric guitar and would do anything for mike.

it's not that matt just died, he just never existed; but he was real to mike, real enough that he left space on his bed for the other to sit, snagged extra bottles of water from the fridge and, even by hinself, never felt as lonely as he had before. it was so far from healthy and mike was far too aware of the fact, but—well—he liked having a friend.

then, it gets easy enough to ignore the fact that matt is just a hallucination. it gets easy enough to, when he runs into his roommate on a friday afternoon, say he's busy that weekend. he has plans with his friend matt, and oh, you probably wouldn't know him, he transferred here last semester. it gets easy enough that mike starts to fall a little bit in love with this person who isn't even real.

matt becomes the only constant in mike's life as he graduates and moves into a one-bedroom apartment, in a city where nobody knows him and he likes it that way. here, he manages to make some friends, gets a partner—john—and loses him in a shattered argument, and matt becomes an old friend in the stories he tells, though at the apartment he still speaks like matt is right there, curled up on the couch or half-buried underneath the blankets in their bed.

still not quite shaking the loner streak, mike spends a lot of time online when he stumbles on woe.begone, and his curiosity gets the better of him. he's not even thinking about matt, but he does think the gamerunners must be playing tricks on him when, the day after the voicemail to john, he wakes up knowing matt is alive and living in vancouver.

it doesn't make sense; matt was never alive, he was a figment of mike's imagination, created in desperate attempts to cope. he couldn't be alive, couldn't have died in the car wreck mike now remembers distantly, a wreck that had never actually happened, but— he calls matt, and matt answers, and they talk and matt sounds just like what he'd always imagined and mike wants to know everything but he's scared that one wrong question would wreck...whatever this was.

still; he's alive and now mike is fighting to keep him that way.

#i just think itd be fucked up to have to kill the guy you saved from literally. nonexistence #like yeah its to save him but he WASNT ALIVE BEFORE how does mike know he can even ''die'' in a normal human sense #do u get it #wbgblogging #finch chirps #i've been rambling so much lately. instead of writing my actual fanfics LOL #matt woe.begone #woe.begone #w.bg

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helmetkeeper · 1 year ago

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could you make a playlist based on whale-kin? harmonies and lyrics about oceans/space would be nice. song inspo: "on board" by Alana Henderson and joshua burnside, "saturn" by sleeping at last, "Vancouver waves" by august and after, "hey there young sailor" by the impatient sisters, "air so sweet" by dodie, "staying" by koda.

hello! i couldn't find many that seemed to fit the vibe, but i hope you like some of these :]. happy new year and apologies for the wait!!

songs go like "song" + "artist"

"Ternyata" + "Estrella"

"Take It Slow" + "Estrella"

"Some Space" + "Estrella"

"Light Writing" + "Liyana Fizi"

"(They Long to Be) Close to You" + "The Macarons Project"

"Heartbeat" + "Joe Hisaishi"

"In the Sea of Corruption" + "Joe Hisaishi"

"Whale Song" + "Kula Kriya"

"Call It Fate, Call It Karma" + "The Strokes"

"Show Me How" + "Men I Trust"

"Ship in a Bottle" + "fin"

"Abandon Ship" + "fin"

"Lost" + "fin"

"Leaving London" + "fin"

"The Moss" + "Cosmo Sheldrake"

"Seals" + "Cosmo Sheldrake"

"Linger Longer" + "Cosmo Sheldrake"

"Soldier, Poet, King" + "The Oh Hellos"

"Thus Always To Tyrants" + "The Oh Hellos"

"Rule #13 - Waterfall" + "Fish in a Birdcage" and "Kristina Helene"

"Rule #15 - Four Aces" + "Fish in a Birdcage"

"Song Of The Sea" + "Lisa Hannigan"

"The Milk Carton" + "Madilyn Mei"

"La Seine" (Extrait de la bande originale un monstre à Paris) + "Vanessa Paradis" + "-M-"

"Curses" + "The Crane Wives"

"Nights Like These" + "Pigeon Pit"

"tide pools" (session) + "Pigeon Pit"

"Sarah" + "Alex G"

" "Listen to Your Heart." "No." " + "Cheekface"

"Sober to Death" + "Car Seat Headrest"

"Desert Diddy" + "Vundabar"

"Harness Your Hopes - B-side" + "Pavement"

"like the sun" + "downssides"

"Two-Headed Boy" + "Neutral Milk Hotel"

"Starchild" + "Elujay"

"Why iii Love The Moon." + "Phony Ppl"

"Come Back to Earth" + "Mac Miller"

"Eternal Venus Sunset" + "A.L.I.S.O.N"

"We're Finally Landing" + "Home"

"Pluto Projector" + "Rex Orange County"

"Jupiter" + "The Marías"

"Jupiter" + "STRFKR"

"Static Space Lover" + "Foster The People"

"Man On The Moon" + "R.E.M."

"Space Walk" + "Lemon Jelly"

"Subterranean Homesick Alien" + "Radiohead"

"Eclipse" + "Pink Floyd"

"Ticket to the Moon" + "Electric Light Orchestra"

dividers from @/animatedglittergraphics-n-more and @/578d4e

#kin music #kin playlist #whalekin #whale therian #anonymous request #playlists | groove is in the heart! deee-lite #request accepted | applause! lady gaga

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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This summer, a Vancouver car mechanic named Max got a perplexing ping on his phone: Betty White was in Ukraine and needed his help. This was surprising because she had died on a Canadian highway back in January.

When Max last saw Betty White, his nickname for his Tesla Model Y Performance, they were both in rough shape after getting sideswiped on the highway. Max’s rotator cuff was torn in several places. The small SUV had bounced off multiple concrete barriers at high speed and was bashed in on all four corners, its wheels ripped to pieces. Coolant appeared to be leaking into the battery chamber. From his own work on EVs in the garage, Max knew that Betty was done for. “No auto shop would put a repair person at risk with that kind of damage,” says Max, whose last name isn’t being used out of doxing concerns. A damaged EV battery can become dangerous due to the risk of shocks, fire, and toxic fumes. His insurer agreed, and Betty was written off and sent to a salvage yard.

Months after he had last seen the car, Max’s Tesla app was now telling him that Betty needed a software update. It showed the car with an extra 200 kilometers on the odometer, fully charged, and parked in Uman, a town in Ukraine’s Cherkasy Oblast, midway between Kyiv and the front line with Russia’s invasion force. Minutes after that first ping, the app showed the car in service mode, suggesting Betty was undergoing repairs. “I thought it must be a mistake,” Max says.

There was no mistake. WIRED tracked Betty down to a Ukrainian auto auction website, looking good as new, maybe even better, with newly tinted windows and rearview mirrors wrapped in black. Betty 2.0 was being sold by “Mikhailo,” who wrote that the car had suffered “a small blow” in Canada and been repaired with original Tesla parts. The price, $55,000, was roughly the same as a new Model Y Performance costs in the US.

Betty White’s intercontinental resurrection was impressive but not unusual. For a long time, cars written off in North America have found their way to Eastern European repair shops willing to take on damage that US and Canadian mechanics won’t touch. In 2021, the most recent data available, Ukraine was a top-three destination for used US passenger vehicles sent overseas, close behind Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. And Ukraine’s wreck importers and repairers are particularly known for their ingenuity. Some have made fixing EVs written off across the Atlantic into a specialty, helping to drive a surge in the number of electric vehicles on the country’s roads, even as the war with Russia rages.

Though few automakers sell new EVs in Ukraine, the share of newly registered vehicles that are fully electric, 9 percent, is about the same as in the US and nearly double that of neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic. Most of Ukraine’s refurbished EVs come from North America, and many arrive with major damage.

There’s a ready supply of crashed North American EVs in part because electrics are becoming more common, and also because in recent years, relatively new EVs with low mileage have been written off at a higher rate than their gas-powered equivalents, according to data from insurers. US and Canadian repair shops and insurers see them as more dangerous and difficult to fix. Scrapyards find it hard to make money from their parts and instead ship them abroad.

Ivan Malakhovsky is not afraid to work on cases like Betty White. His five-year-old repair business in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, fixes about 100 Teslas a month, roughly a fifth of them from overseas, and employs a staff that varies between six to 10 people. He’s currently away from home, serving with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but he manages his workers, and sometimes makes software-mediated repairs, remotely. “We have problems in our lives and can fix them, whether a battery or a full-scale invasion,” says Malakhovsky. “Electric cars, electric car batteries—it’s no problem.”

An electric vehicle battery is made up of thousands of individual cells, which store and release energy. Sometimes, Malakhovsky says, he and his coworkers will break up large EV batteries damaged beyond repair and repurpose the cells to power electric scooters or even drones for the war effort. He says the vast majority of Teslas on Ukrainian roads were once involved in wrecks in North America.

The war has even boosted Ukraine’s EV resurrection business at times, by driving up gas prices and making electrics more attractive to drivers. Ukraine has a public charging network of some 11,000 chargers, according to Volodymyr Ivanov, the head of communications at Nissan Motor Ukraine—that’s more than the state of New York, and double the number in neighboring Poland. Since 2018, Ukraine’s government has removed most taxes and customs duties on used EV imports. In the US, electric vehicles tend to be expensive, and the average EV driver is still a high-income male homeowner. North American wrecks, Ukraine’s EV incentives, and its relatively low electricity prices have created a different picture. “There is a joke here that all poor people are driving electric cars, and all the rich people are driving petrol cars,” says Malakhovsky. “Tesla is a common-people, popular car because it’s very cheap in maintenance.”

That’s a relatively recent development, says Hans Eric Melin, head of Circular Energy Storage, a UK-based consultancy that tracks the international flows of used EVs and batteries. He began watching the Ukraine market in particular a few years ago, after he noticed more ads for Nissan Leafs on auction sites listed in Ukrainian than in English. At the time, the Leaf, a pioneer among EVs, was essentially the only one that had been around long enough to develop a healthy used market. Over time, Ukraine’s electric fleet grew to encompass the full range of EVs sold around the world, including Teslas, as more cars hit the roads and aged or got into crashes.

Melin had suspected Ukraine’s EV boom would end with the war. “I was completely wrong,” he says. By this summer, Ukraine’s EV fleet had doubled since July 2021, to 64,312, according to data compiled by the Automotive Market Research Institute, a Ukrainian research and advocacy group.

Roman Tyschenko, a 25-year-old IT worker who lives in Kyiv, decided last September that he was sick of his Jeep’s $400-a-month gas bill. Friends had purchased used, damaged electric cars on an online auction website called Copart, a US-based public auto reseller with 200 locations around the world. He logged on and spent $24,000 on a gray 2021 Tesla Model Y that had taken a solid blow to its passenger side in Dallas, Texas. Its bumper was almost fully detached; its hood was tented; some of its airbags had deployed.

That Texan Model Y was likely declared totaled by an insurer. From there, it probably moved to a salvage auction in the US, where licensed exporters, salvage shops, and repairers tried to figure out how much value they could squeeze out of the wreck. The winner, or perhaps the insurer itself, listed the car on Copart, which made it available to anyone around the world who wanted a smashed-up Tesla and was willing to pay for shipping.

If Tyschenko hadn’t brought the Texan Tesla to Ukraine himself, it had a good chance of being shipped there anyway by someone who professionally flips cars to countries like Ukraine. These exporters look for wrecks potentially worth more than their scrap value, but little enough that an expensive US repair and resale wouldn’t make sense. Some ship vehicles directly to Ukrainian repairers and pay for the fix, while others import damaged cars and relist them for sale to Ukrainian buyers who can figure it out for themselves.

It takes a damaged North American car between one and five months to reach a nearby port. Before the war, wrecked cars headed to Ukraine’s Port of Odessa on the Black Sea. Since Russia invaded in 2022, they come through Klaipėda in Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, or Koper in Slovenia on the Adriatic, and are brought to Ukraine by truck. A shop like Malakhovsky’s can fix a Tesla in somewhere between one week and one year, depending on the damage.

Tyschenko arranged for his Model Y to be shipped to a local repair shop in Kyiv, where it arrived in February 2023, five months after he hit the Buy button online. The technician sent him videos of the EV’s ongoing revamp every few weeks, and Tyschenko stopped by to visit a handful of times. By May, he had paid the technician some $25,000 for his work and was driving the Model Y around Kyiv.

Two months later, the battery died and Tyschenko spent another $4,000 to replace it—a demonstration of the risks of electric vehicle rescues. Still, he’s happy with how things worked out, and now pays just $10 to $100 a month to refuel his car, depending on whether he charges at home or at public stations.

Finding parts to repair Teslas and other EVs can be a challenge. On Facebook and Telegram, groups like “Renault Zoe Club Ukraine” host thousands of EV owners who barter with each other for spare parts. Oleksandr Perepelitsa, a 25-year-old electric vehicle repairer in Kyiv, says that when he first began his work three years ago, he and his business partners would buy two wrecked Teslas from overseas to create a single working vehicle to sell to local Ukranians. “Even that was profitable for us,” he says. Now, business connections can send Tesla parts from the US or Europe, or repairers buy cheaper Chinese reproductions.

The success of Ukraine’s EV resurrection industry is the flip side of the failure of insurers and manufacturers in North America to figure out what to do when a shiny new EV becomes roadkill.

US insurers are more willing to write off vehicles of all kinds that in the past may have been fixed. New vehicle repairs have gotten more expensive, in part due to vehicles getting more complex and computerized, as well as a shortage of vehicle technicians. In the past decade, the damaged cars up for auction “are better and less damaged,” Copart CEO Jeff Liaw told investors on an earnings call this year.

Industry-wide data is hard to come by, but numerous sources suggest that EVs are more likely to be written off than gas-powered cars, and can be declared unfixable after even minor crashes. A Reuters analysis this year found that a “large portion” of damaged EVs sold for scrap were low-mileage, nearly-new vehicles. While one in 10 new cars sold in the US and Canada this year are forecasted to be electric, the infrastructure and expertise needed to assess and fix damaged EVs can be patchy. “In an ideal world, electric vehicles are as easy to repair as internal combustion engine vehicles,” says Mark Fry, research manager at Thatcham Research, which crunches auto market data for insurers and other clients. It recently found British EVs get written off at disproportionately high rates.

The main reason EV repairs are so tricky comes down to a lack of agreement on how to handle EV batteries after a crash. Worldwide, there is no industry standard for measuring battery health. Vehicle manufacturers sometimes refuse to sanction battery repairs because of liability concerns. “If you repair the battery, what's it going to be like after another two, three years and another 50,000 miles?” Fry says. It’s easier to let nearly new vehicles be declared dead than to find out.

The North American scrap industry is also somewhat leery of EVs, says Megan Slattery, a researcher at UC Davis who studies what happens to damaged EV batteries. Scrap businesses generally make money by taking cars apart to extract the most valuable widgets to resell. But dismantling a battery takes dedicated workers, equipment, and—most important of all—space, due to the fire risks of storing lithium-ion cells. Many mom-and-pop dismantlers don’t have any of that.

Plus, EVs tend to have simpler drivetrains, with more plastic and large, prefabricated body components that can’t be easily pulled apart. In some electric vehicles, the battery is built directly into the car’s structure, making it especially difficult to dismantle or repair. All of that means that exporters looking to sell to eager buyers abroad have less competition when bidding on totaled cars.

In the US, there’s increasing pressure to keep broken EVs from heading overseas. Regulators are concerned about safety, hoping to better track broken batteries through shipping channels as fears rise of fires sparked by used EVs, including on cargo ships. Another is to avoid dumping e-waste on countries without the means to recycle or repurpose, and instead keep the valuable minerals inside batteries local. Battery recycling startups have received vast amounts of private and public investment—both in Western Europe and the US, with funds from the Inflation Reduction Act—with a promise to help shore up raw material supply chains. But so far, they have received only a trickle of used batteries.

Policies that wind up choking off the export of EV wrecks would in some ways be a shame, Slattery says. More stringent European Union export rules for used cars and EV batteries in particular are one reason why the supply of Teslas to Eastern Europe is so dependent on North American wrecks. Without them, the electric revolution would be much less advanced in places like Ukraine, where US and Canadian write-offs have helped support the emergence of charger networks, trained repair specialists, and a wide familiarity and acceptance that electric propulsion is not just green but also practical.

In North America, there's a widespread belief that “people don't want electric vehicles and that it's just laws and regulations that push us to buy them,” says Melin, the used EV analyst. “There are other markets that want to have electrics.” It’s a testament to a system that is working, Melin adds, that used EVs end up in places like Ukraine, where new models are difficult to come by.

For Max in Vancouver, Betty White’s reappearance overseas did cause some headaches. The car was still logged into his Google, Netflix, and Spotify accounts, potentially allowing the new owners to access his personal data. When he asked Tesla support, he was advised to change his passwords, Max says. (Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions.)

But looking back on the crash, and now driving a new Model Y—named Black Betty—Max says his old car’s resurrection is the best possible outcome. “I’m happy to see that Betty White has lived to see another day,” he says.

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mightyflamethrower · 1 year ago

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The far-left Washington Post is awfully excited about an electric vehicle (EV) driving 20,0000 miles from the Arctic to the South Pole and just as ecstatic to bury the inconvenient facts about this ludicrously dumb legendary trip.

“They drove from the Arctic to the South Pole – in an electric car,” screams the excited headline from one of the most dishonest publications on the planet.

“Scottish adventurers Chris and Julie Ramsey wanted to prove their electric SUV was as rugged and reliable as a conventional car. To do it, they decided to take it on a drive,” the Post reports.

“That drive started in March on the frozen waters of the Arctic Circle near the North Pole. It ended in December, about nine months and approximately 20,000 miles later, at the south pole in Antarctica.”

“The couple … hoped their feat could inspire other adventurers and any consumers considering electric vehicles,” the Post adds. “We could have failed at any moment, for whatever reason, and you just don’t know if you’re going to make it,” Julie Ramsey told the Post. “It just proves that EVs can go the distance.”

Yep, those amazing EVs, currently stuck in what is far from the coldest of cold weather in Chicago, certainly can go the distance. Who wouldn’t want to purchase a battery-powered car capable of driving 20,000 miles in nine months? After all, such a miraculous accom— Wait. According to my public school math, that’s an average of only 80 miles daily.

Hey, maybe 80 miles per day is impressive, considering the harsh environment.

Or maybe not…

As they continued south through Calgary, Alberta, and Vancouver, B.C., before entering Washington state, the couple said they faced another challenge: unreliable charging stations. The Ramseys praised the size and coverage of the electric-vehicle charging network in the United States but said they often encountered stations across the country that weren’t working.

Maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe averaging 80 miles daily is a way not to rush and enjoy the trip.

Or maybe not…”The Ramseys stopped to sightsee but spent much of their time on the road, nervously watching their speed and battery levels to avoid getting stuck.”

Hey, at least they made it without any special treatment, right?

Or maybe not…

Before the trip, the couple partnered with an energy company, Enel X, to arrange the installation of more than 20 new electric-vehicle charging stations in countries including Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, where they spotted gaps in the coverage of existing stations[.]

But let’s not pick at nits here. The only thing that matters is that no fossil fuels were burned during this trip.

Or maybe not…”The remote location meant the Ramseys couldn’t eschew fossil fuels entirely – they recharged the vehicle using a gas-powered generator[.]”

Do you have any idea how stupid this all is? The Post wants us to believe this is like Charles Lindbergh’s historic non-stop flight from New York to Paris. Well, it’s not. What Lindbergh accomplished improved travel, sped it up, and made it more convenient than it was before, when the only way to cross the Atlantic was on a slow ocean voyage.

EVs do not improve travel. EVs are a step back in convenience, stress levels, and speed. Driving an EV from the Arctic to the South Pole is more like Lindbergh paddling a canoe across the Atlantic. Great job, Lindy, but I believe in progress.

It’s like these stupid high-speed trains. Hey, you can travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in two hours. That’s not progress. I can do that now in an airplane without spending a trillion tax dollars.

An EV that allows you to unplug at home, make your daily commute, and then plug back in at home… That makes sense if you live in a warm climate. An EV for anything is nothing more than an invitation to stress, breakdowns, and inconvenience.

Maybe someday EVs will become more practical, but even then, why? You power the EV battery with electricity generated by fossil fuels. Won’t somebody please explain the upside to me — other than a sense of smuggery included with each Prius?

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