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Former GM Executive: BYD cars are good in terms of design, features, price, quality. If we let BYD into the U.S. market, it could end up destroying american manufacturers

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  • Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we've put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it's parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

    As for performance, it moves well enough. It's a mini-van, so you're not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I'll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I've been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I'd also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

    We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I'd take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

    So ya, we've been happy with it and I'd give it a recommendation.

    Thanks for the review; I'm glad it's working out well for you. Time for me to meander out for a test drive.

  • Sienna's are great! I've owned 4 of them (because I tend to total cars), and been happy with all of them. Gets decent mileage for a van, and they hold value better than just about any other mini van. Never felt safer when ramming into the back of a semi while going 70mph! The van was totaled, but me and the kids were perfectly fine.

    That is a surprisingly strong recommendation. I'm glad everyone was safe, keep it shiny side up.

  • Sucks to suck, our car companies suck and they absolutely should loose and be forced to fire people if they can't compete. Give me my cheap and decent Chinese cars please. I live in a capitalist country so lets act like it instead of being fucking pussys

    It the country wasn't so hostile, also pretty racist when talking about Chinese (99% of the time people say Chinese not CCP as an insult to anything about creativity, invention, culture, whatever), to Chinese consumer big ticket goods, I'd imagine BYD and other would build manufacturing plants in the US. If things weren't so hostile, the Chinese battery companies like CATL may be willing to build batteries in the US without major concern of a hostile nation stealing their battery tech

    It isn't even a truly political idealism conflict that causes the split. Americans were fine with South Korean and Taiwanese products when those countries were military dictatorships. Vietnam has the company VinFast selling cars in the US and it's political structure is a lot closer to China than the US. Americans have never shown appetite for reigning in how American companies treat labor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Really not even domestically like in makeshift housing that American farmers pack migrant workers into or meatpacking plants. So it's really just rich/powerful people not liking to see non-European descendants take the leading role in global trade of high margin goods and services that are often cutting edge technology

    If China was still primarily a labor country, damn near no one would care about Chinese domestic issues like famines. In my mind the inevitability will be another wave of xenophobia that will eventually target India and the Indian diaspora as their military and domestic military and technology companies develop

  • That is a surprisingly strong recommendation. I'm glad everyone was safe, keep it shiny side up.

    I'm not sure your location, but I highly advise spending the extra money on AWD. If you have hills plus rain or snow, it's the difference between peeling out from a stop and just going.

    My first Sienna was FWD. We live on the side of a hill - steep enough that a family pass time is watching cars struggle in the winter. Had to park at the bottom several times with the FWD. Never had a problem with the AWDs.

  • China is performing a new colonialism. Exploiting poor countries for their cheap resources.

    While the rest of the world is trying to steer away from it because it is so horrible. So please, don't praise China for it.

    You don't understand colonialism much. They aren't taking anything by force like the rest of the west did for centuries.

    They are doing business, there is a difference.

  • Yes, there may not be child labor. But in places we cannot see, there are still black industry chains. A brick factory was exposed some time ago. They let some people with low IQ or disabilities work. They were not given masks, and the air was full of dust. They may work more than ten hours a day or even more. What is the difference between this and slavery? I just want to give this example to illustrate that there are still many black-hearted factories in society, and there is also the possibility of employing child labor. In China, young people who have not studied will choose to work in factories, but they must be at least 16 years old. If they are younger, they will not be hired. Back to the issue of BYD, although we are proud that it can be recognized by the world as a Chinese brand, and many people in China also buy it. But recently there have been some news that they blindly work overtime within the company, and have meetings after get off work, etc. Someone exposed the chat records within the company. We are all ordinary people. We just want to fight for our rights. Even if it is a big company, as long as it exploits people, we must oppose it.

    Yes but they are trying to better themselves, it's a slow process, but there is progress. And they came a long way since the 70's.

    Countries like America are going backwards. At this rate the USA is a worse country for the working class than China in 20 years, if not already.

  • ....we removed both parties comments because you both were going

    you: no your a troll

    them: no your a troll

    you: no your a troll

    them: no your a troll

    Not because we took sides.

    Calling eachother trolls is not being excellent to eachother (rule 3), if you want to talk about disagreements do it like adults.

    I asked sources for his claims, like an adult, he posted a link to an article debunking his own nonsense.
    So this guy starts calling me a troll while he was demonstrably lying,
    These are the facts.

  • I asked sources for his claims, like an adult, he posted a link to an article debunking his own nonsense.
    So this guy starts calling me a troll while he was demonstrably lying,
    These are the facts.

    Well it unfolded into what I described, so we removed the comments.

  • Buying what you prefer itself isn't an issue, but that should be the reason instead of "I need it because X, Y, Z." Most truck/SUV owners don't need a truck/SUV, they just want one.

    My issue with trucks and SUVs are that they make the road more dangerous, since there's only so much a car manufacturer can do to protect against a vehicle more than twice as massive. That, and they're artificially cheap here in the US because of stupid regulations intended for farmers that got applied to them to reduce emissions standards.

    Some people don't need a car but will buy one anyway, not sure what point you're making there. I see no problem in people buying what they want over what they need. Choice is good and if you want to spend more on a vehicle for
    any reason, that's OK.

    Buses, dump trucks, ambulances, 18 wheelers, tow trucks etc. are all heavy and dangerous. The focus should be on better designed roads and better driver training, not limiting what people can drive.

  • Some people don't need a car but will buy one anyway, not sure what point you're making there. I see no problem in people buying what they want over what they need. Choice is good and if you want to spend more on a vehicle for
    any reason, that's OK.

    Buses, dump trucks, ambulances, 18 wheelers, tow trucks etc. are all heavy and dangerous. The focus should be on better designed roads and better driver training, not limiting what people can drive.

    I see no problem in people buying what they want over what they need.

    Neither do I, I just don't like it when people excuse their choices by using terms like "need." People make a lot of silly choices because they claim to "need" something.

    I just want people to be more honest with themselves and others about needs vs wants. If we classify things properly, I think people will naturally be more efficient with their resources and we'd have less consumer debt and whatnot.

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    Ooo added the book to my list, thanks! Also, Robert Sapolsky's book Determined explores whether we're conscious or not based on his work in neuroscience and primatology. It's like a book length version of the quote you posted
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    What's the difference? They all look the same. Let's call him the boy with the golden spoon in his mouth who got offended.
  • We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

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    dsilverz@friendica.worldD
    @technocrit While I agree with the main point that "AI/LLMs has/have no agency", I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren't intelligent... we aren't so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no "exclusivity" of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there's no such thing as non-deterministic "intelligence". We're just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we're the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it's below. If you don't, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.-----First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they're not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it's all "made of star stuff", it's all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves...Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).It's bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we're essentially no different than our fancy "tools", be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as "Markov Chains" and "Artificial Neural Networks".Then, there's also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we're exclusive in that regard, but we're not, we're just fooling ourselves!IMHO, every time we try to argue "there's no intelligence beyond humans", it's highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as "Homo sapiens"). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of "deities" or "extraterrestrials" among a "primitive, wild life".Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of "senses" ("Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, ..." "my senses deceive me" is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte's conclusion, "Cogito ergo sum", is highly anthropocentric, it's often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly "exclusive" nature of human intelligence on the ability to "feel".Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of "evil" (both the Hobbesian line regarding "human evilness" and the Epicurean paradox regarding "metaphysical evilness"), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly "soul-bearing beings") are no different from a "souless" machine, because we're both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don't care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn't dare to gaze into the abyss yet.I'm someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as "biological organism", one of which "managed" to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We're biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to "fear Death", even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we're are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards "cosmic chaos" (entropy, as defined, "as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly").
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    Yes. I can't use lynx for most of the sites I am used to go with it. They are all protecting themselves with captcha and other form of javascript computation. The net is dying. Fucking thank you AI-bullshitery...
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    It's one of those things where periodically someone gets sanctioned and a few others get scared and stop doing it (or tone it down) for a while. I guess SHEIN are either overdoing it or they crossed the popularity threshold where companies become more scrutinized
  • lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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    vopyr@lemmy.worldV
    If I know correctly, it is not possible to export posts, comments, replies.
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    The self hosted model has hard coded censored content.
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    This is what I want to know also. "AI textbooks" is a great clickbait/ragebait term, but could mean a great variety of things.