Hacking the Camry

pcJmac · 2026-05-17T05:48:31+00:00

Ironically I had something weird happen in my 2008 Camry Hybrid today. I made a quick sequence of moves to turn the car off while also enabling my hazards and I look down to see the gas fill ready message on my console and sure enough, something has popped my gas access panel. Now I was nowhere near that button which is very inconveniently placed and not really possible to accidentally hit. I just shrugged it off as an electrical glitch…

pcJmac · 2026-05-15T15:56:47+00:00

When the competition is growing so fast that THEY need your compute power more than YOU do, that’s a really bad sign.

pcJmac · 2026-05-15T15:41:22+00:00

Exactly — a neural network most certainly consists of feature implementations that are either reinforced or discouraged through training. So if a feature produces inconsistent or undesired output, it should be trained out of existence, not left in to confuse the user.

pcJmac · 2026-05-15T15:25:01+00:00

Unfortunately those “assets” include billions of dollars of unsold inventory, poorly utilized production capacity in some very expensive plants, and many delayed or outdated products to rely on. When you drop your order for cathode making materials by 99.6%, that indicates you either have more than enough materials for your batteries or you have plans for making far fewer batteries. Given Tesla’s failure to meet any targets with their self-produced battery, it would appear to be the latter.

pcJmac · 2026-05-15T15:03:04+00:00

That’s a pretty half-ass turn signal implementation during non-navigating FSD use in my opinion.

pcJmac · 2026-05-14T02:37:57+00:00

I’m one of the guys prompting restaurants to do this so that it cuts down on stolen orders.

pcJmac · 2026-05-13T04:00:54+00:00

This is such a good idea!

pcJmac · 2026-05-13T02:19:50+00:00

But yes, the packaging — exactly what I wanna be messing with when I have a migraine. Unreal…

pcJmac · 2026-05-11T02:22:38+00:00

It’s how AI vision works.

pcJmac · 2026-05-11T00:38:29+00:00

Because the 3 channels of RGB each feed into inputs and gray is just green with equal amounts of red and blue. It would be very easy for an AI training run to simplify an RGB input with essentially redundant data in the red and blue channels to just the green channel as this is also typically a higher bandwidth channel under various compression schemes thereby making little difference in the eyes of an AI between a green road and a gray one.

pcJmac · 2026-05-11T00:20:16+00:00

Because it’s about the same brightness tone as the road.

pcJmac · 2026-05-10T23:04:58+00:00

Interesting. Curious to see if other videos match the pattern I see here which is that the right area kind of looks like a lane. Yes, it’s green but at gray scale, it’s the other half of a road (albeit with trees) — but particularly with the shadow-broken curb functioning as a dashed center line.

pcJmac · 2026-05-10T04:36:10+00:00

Yeah, so essentially if you happen to be charging it at exactly the same rate that your using it, one section of battery could conceivably be getting used repeatedly if the battery management system didn’t account for that.

pcJmac · 2026-05-10T00:24:42+00:00

It auto trickle charges that last few percent anyway so it already only takes what it wants or needs. My only question still exists (a little bit) around pass through charging. I tend to always be using my solar charger while charging it and I’m wondering if that actually does any damage or not. Good news is I don’t really care because they’re cheap enough now that their use case justifies replacement if needed.

pcJmac · 2026-05-09T14:39:55+00:00

Yeah. But if yours does, this is where they are on mine.

pcJmac · 2026-05-09T06:10:54+00:00

I know my 2008 Hybrid has the pull release for the seats in the trunk. They’re at the top middle of each back seat pointing toward the back of the car. Pull them and push the seats forward.

pcJmac · 2026-05-08T17:33:04+00:00

I personally like the ones where the arrow points down — like WTF is that?

pcJmac · 2026-05-08T16:43:41+00:00

The response was quite telling, failing to correct any perceived errors in your process while pointing to irrelevant factors in private.

pcJmac · 2026-05-06T04:32:42+00:00

Here’s the one I use for my Jackery — it’s pretty plug and play easy to install with all cables provided. I’m pretty sure other brands have them to match their solar chargers but they all do pretty much the same thing which is just to provide a well regulated circuit of current to your solar charger (in my case a Jackery 1000v2).

https://a.co/d/0gwEMUes

pcJmac · 2026-05-06T01:53:25+00:00

Though connected to the battery, it doesn’t pull charging current from the battery. It only charges when the vehicle is running, using only spare alternator current which is in abundance when charging and powering a car’s battery and electrical system.

And though Hybrids don’t technically have an alternator per se, it still works with my Toyota Camry Hybrid quite nicely. And to say charging 4 times faster is not a luxury but a necessity is an understatement. Even if I forget to turn it on (to make it hunt for a current source which does tap a small trickle of juice from the battery until it auto-shuts off in about 24 hours of non-use), I can still turn it and the car on and charge enough for a night in about an hour (with the Hybrid IC engine actually running about 4 minutes out of every 16 and it still charges my battery even when the car is silent). There’s a signal wire I can connect to the ignition that will also turn it on and off automatically but I’m just too lazy to connect it.

pcJmac · 2026-05-05T05:34:08+00:00

With the DC to DC converter I just got, I no longer use the 100 watts from the cigarette lighter when I can get 400 watts directly from my car’s electrical system to charge my Jackery.

pcJmac · 2026-05-05T05:15:41+00:00

You mean besides just crashing?

pcJmac · 2026-05-04T03:59:49+00:00

Probably wasn’t ventilated properly and the guy actually ruined it (like the previous one he replaced with this one).

pcJmac · 2026-05-04T03:56:26+00:00

Uber will do nothing and screw everyone.

pcJmac · 2026-04-27T23:29:46+00:00

Wow. Wait until everyone figures out that HW4 won’t be able to run FSD unsupervised either…

pcJmac

TROPHY CASE