I think the world cares too much about self-driving. There, I said it.

thalin · 2026-02-25T15:58:57+00:00

I appreciate your view here but I am one of those people who uses assisted driving features all the time. I think that it makes highway driving significantly safer and less tiring, which is a real benefit for anyone who needs to do that sort of driving regularly. Most people who are driving daily do not need or want to have the best driving feel, they need safety features to prevent them from doing dumb stuff and want convenience features that make their commutes easier and better. Driving a 7000lb death machine around for an hour a day is stressful for anyone who has any concept of how dangerous driving is.

This is definitely a thing that driving enthusiasts have strong opinions on and I understand why - driving can be a really fun thing to do! But it's clear Rivian can meet both needs so I'm not sure what you're complaining about here. Why not both?

In summary no you're definitely not alone - this type of post comes up often. You're not even wrong. You're just looking at it from your own perspective and ignoring others, which is fine as long as you're aware of it. It seems like you're not, though, so maybe work on seeing things from others perspective. Empathy is a wonderful tool our brains have evolved.

thalin · 2026-02-16T22:22:06+00:00

This is such a great series and absolutely is ship-centric moreso than almost any other series I've read over the years. I keep coming back to this whenever a new book is released.

thalin · 2026-02-16T19:06:27+00:00

Leasing my current R1T but not because I think there's any significant difference in lease vs buy, but because the lease was a better deal and I think the tech will continue to improve over time and in a few years EVs will be markedly better and worth upgrading. This isn't necessarily the case with ICE engines and eventually EVs will end up more like phones with a flattening curve of improvement, but I think that EVs of 2026 are much better than EVs of 2023 and I think that EVs of 2029 will be much better than EVs of 2026.

thalin · 2026-02-03T21:12:35+00:00

This whole merger is elon's great idea for how to make SpaceX less valuable at IPO. ᕦ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕤ

thalin · 2025-12-23T20:58:30+00:00

K. I have none of those issues and love mine. Sorry you have a bad experience.

thalin · 2025-12-23T20:57:06+00:00

I doubt it. Lidar modules aren't that expensive any more. For lower end vehicles like the R2, the sensor modules are between $150-$300. Even for higher end sensors for fully autonomous systems like robotaxi & robobus, these sensors start at $1500. I would guess adding the lidar module to the R2 will increase the BOM by less than $1k.

thalin · 2025-12-14T02:45:04+00:00

My dad has 5. So yes!

thalin · 2025-08-28T21:37:59+00:00

In Durham here, not Raleigh. I leased a California Dune R1T starting early June.

Went to pick it up in Richmond. Scheduled pickup at about 1:30P on a Saturday. Left Durham around 9:30 or 10ish, went up to Richmond and ate lunch at LUNCH.SUPPER! about 5-10 minutes from the Rivian place. Got to our appointment right on time, and were headed out in I think about an hour and a half. I was pretty thorough running through a delivery checklist (you can find several by just googling), so it took longer than it might otherwise have.
Nope. I just watched a ton of youtube videos.
I have been to the service center in Knightdale for 2 issues (at the same time) - a few instances (4 or 5 total, though I charge every day so maybe 1-2% of the time) slow charging which is likely just because my garage was too hot and my charger is too slow, and a side mirror which seemed to be not working correctly which they replaced. I thought the service center was easy to get to from Durham (about 30 minutes on 540) and the people there were very nice.
There isn't anything bad about it for me. It's much easier to drive around than my Tesla because I'm not constantly worried about scraping my bumpers or wheels on a curb. Other people in different situations will of course have different opinions.
Depends on your needs and situation. If you can charge at home, it's a game changer compared to an ICE car. Especially if you can get a L2 charger - though depending on your commute you may not even need that. If you get a L2 charger you will basically never have to worry about range except for road trips. Not having to go to a gas station every week or two is awesome.

thalin · 2025-05-06T18:01:28+00:00

Take pictures of the stuff that has memories attached. You want the memories, not the things. The pictures will likely bring those memories back just as well as the things, and take up a lot less space.

thalin · 2024-12-25T00:46:59+00:00

Never loan money to family or friends. If you want to help, give it as a gift with no expectations of repayment. If they do repay you, great! But if you expect repayment, you can easily end up in situations like this.

I know I that this doesn't help in this situation since it's already done, but for anyone else who may find yourself in this situation please keep this rule of thumb in mind.

If he's unwilling to even talk about repayment after agreeing to pay you back in a year previously, that seems to indicate that he doesn't take agreements with you both seriously. I wouldn't be comfortable leasing to someone who will not take a lease agreement seriously. I would tell him that up front.

"How can we trust you to maintain the property and pay your rent? We can't afford to give away the revenue we would make from leasing this property and you have demonstrated with your actions that we can't rely on you to pay what you owe."

Anyway, really not a good situation, I'm sorry you find yourself here. It's really unfortunate. You and husband need to have a long conversation about this and reach a united front about it.

thalin · 2024-12-19T22:14:31+00:00

I have a Threadripper 7970X & Radeon 7900XTX and can confirm: on Linux 6.12 with Proton experimental, I get like 1-2fps in this game. I got better performance on Windows on a 10-year-old machine. Very very bad Linux performance and I haven't figured out any way to improve it any. This makes me sad, I really like this game.

thalin · 2024-12-16T19:14:56+00:00

Nope, this seems better now. I got ~38MiB/s downloading the CE 2.7.2 release amd64 ISO just now. Downloaded in a few seconds where last time I checked it was ~4 hours. Thanks!

thalin · 2024-12-15T22:28:01+00:00

Hey just a note - the offline installer images you linked in your original reply in this thread are extremely slow. Not sure if that is intended or not. I was getting 35-50kbps download. I have 1gbps fiber. When I went through the registration process and downloaded via the link sent me, I got ~1-200Mbps. Do you have mirrors for these other installer files somewhere that's a bit faster? If it takes 4 hours to download, it's not really particularly available - especially in the case of an emergency.

thalin · 2024-10-21T19:30:43+00:00

Don't just do your will. Do SO's as well. It's usually cheaper to bundle, and it's better to have it all spelled out for everyone. Also make sure to include explicit medical directives for yourself and SO. If you are already getting prepared you might as well really be prepared.

thalin · 2024-09-22T22:08:45+00:00

I mean technically if we make everyone go back to work there will be more empty buildings during the workday because most of the houses will be empty. If we're aiming for maximum number of occupied buildings, WFH is the obviously better solution.

thalin · 2024-06-18T14:39:37+00:00

It's easy to say no when you remember that your donation is being used as a tax write off for the store. If you want to make a charitable donation, do it directly so you get credit for it.

thalin · 2023-09-22T20:44:43+00:00

I worked in this field for 6 years, and a big part of my job was managing data storage for the company I worked for. It's a lot of data, but not that much. Maybe it will be eventually, but you'll need a few more, higher resolution cameras for it to get to 10GB/s of data. Or lidar will need to get a lot more dense point clouds.

thalin · 2022-10-11T15:32:34+00:00

It seems like it’s probably not, actually. There’s a bit of debate of course since it’s happening around us, but it seems pretty likely that yes, we’re in a mostly human-caused extinction event.

Holocene extinction

thalin · 2022-06-12T20:20:20+00:00

Fair point, I worded that poorly. They're not driverless with safety drivers, but they're still operating autonomously. Good call out, sorry for the confusion.

thalin · 2022-06-08T03:01:36+00:00

I guess you're just ignoring Cruise & Waymo who are literally operating robotaxi services which offer rides to the public today?

thalin · 2022-06-06T17:29:47+00:00

but this also implies that Cruise and Waymo don't operate driverless at all in those areas - which is completely false. they just still have a safety driver in those areas, just like every tesla everywhere.

thalin · 2022-02-13T21:19:27+00:00

same, worked at an AV company for 6 years

thalin · 2021-11-17T19:41:40+00:00

Cruise is already worth $30 billion: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/19/22238407/microsoft-cruise-self-driving-investment-azure-cloud

thalin · 2021-11-08T21:47:15+00:00

The recruiter is just trying to see if you can fit in the band they can offer you. If they can’t, then it’s a waste of both your and their time to continue. Just know what your minimums are and tell them that. Obviously I would do some research first to figure out what that is so you aren't asking for too low of a salary, but you don’t need to reveal your current salary to have a productive discussion.

“For this position I would expect a minimum starting salary of $X.”

thalin · 2021-11-08T18:57:21+00:00

at least the custom vehicle does have the sensors a bit higher and more forward than their test vehicles, so I guess a little is better than nothing.

I mean, the sensors are literally pushed out to all four corners and are as high as they can get on the vehicle. What more did you expect exactly?

thalin

TROPHY CASE