Celebrities get wide latitude to protect themselves from imitators. Impressionists can do “satire” etc. but this isn’t that. It’s explicitly a reference to her voice in the movie, and as such she’s protected by law from them going around her and hiring someone else to imitate her.

It was explicitly represented as her voice when he tweeted “Her” in relation to the product, referencing a movie which she voiced. It’s not a legal grey area in the US. He sank his own ship here.

He tweeted “Her”, which explicitly tells us it’s a deliberate imitation of Scarlett’s voice in that movie. And he tried to negotiate licencing her famous voice, which she rejected.

So it’s more than just a coincidence, it’s deliberate bad faith behaviour. Legally you can’t misrepresent a product as being from a famous person when it wasn’t, and he very much did that. I guess he was hoping she’d give in and accept the licensing agreement post-facto. But instead it looks he’s in legal deep water now.

All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.

Meanwhile Mercedes has already reached level 3.

Lithium is used in grid storage:

• Hawaii
• Ventura County
• Collie
• Hornsdale
• Bouldercombe
• Geelong

And that’s just what I could find in a couple of minutes.

They’re meant to survive an order of magnitude more cycles than Li-ion. But I’m containing my enthusiasm until we see them lasting a long time in real life use.

They’re meant to have a much wider temperature range than Li-ion, theoretically.

They have devices installed which include GPS and an accelerometer. They report back to base via a cellular connection when you drive erratically or aggressively etc.

It’s not just EVs - most new cars have these tracking devices where they sell your data to your insurance company to be used against you.

The STM32WB55 in the flipper has a versatile wireless peripheral built in which can be used to implement various protocols including Bluetooth, zigbee, etc… Support for I2C, I2S and CAN is pretty standard stuff - the ESP32 is nothing special in these respects.

Maybe they chose the STM32WB55 because its wireless support is more flexible than the ESP32 and allows them to implement a wider variety of protocols? Or possibly just better documented, giving them the chance to do things they can’t on the ESP32? I haven’t compared the inner workings of the two chips’ wireless support so I can’t say for sure.

The ESP32s are nice chips, but the STM32s are also really nice to work with and will work fine for this task. Changing to an ESP32 wouldn’t make any real difference to the user so the choice is moot really.

I’ve designed products around both CPUs and they’re both pretty nice. The STM32 has somewhat better documentation, has cleaner low power modes and is a bit simpler when delving into the nitty gritty details. The ESP is more powerful and has some nice if complex features but I don’t like its low power handling as much.

Overall I think I’d choose the STM32 for this task since it’s a little easier to make small, battery powered devices with it.

Even if that’s true AI isn’t just LLMs. Saying that all AI is a surveillance technology is just stupid from a technical standpoint - you can train AIs on whatever data you like and it doesn’t have to be surveilled data. Adding to that there are plenty of non-LLM AI technologies that have nothing to do with data gathered by surveillance.

When does it stop being “malware-like” and end up being just malware?

That’s the story they’re selling but I don’t think it really holds water. Sure, they’ll have to remove the fitout and upgrade the plumbing and that costs money but no more than anyone would expect when building apartments. Some office buildings won’t be suitable for residential use due to their shape and they obviously won’t be converted but most are suitable and they’ll be fine.

The business lobby pointing at the ones which are unsuitable and saying “but this whole thing is going to be impossible!” looks disingenuous to me. There are plenty of good options and there’s no reason to expect they won’t be converted.

Their wanting you in the office is about control - it’s nothing to do with productivity or any of the other excuses.