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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.

  • AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study

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    This is you https://youtu.be/mkcKQmr7kRc
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    Yeah, I agree. It's a great starting place. Recently I needed a piece of information that I couldn't find anywhere through a regular search. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all gave a similar answers, but it was only confirmed when I contacted the company directly which took about 3 business days to reply.
  • No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites

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    Gemini is just a web replacement protocol. With basic things we remember from olden days Web, but with everything non-essential removed, for a client to be doable in a couple of days. I have my own Gemini viewer, LOL. This for me seems a completely different application from torrents. I was dreaming for a thing similar to torrent trackers for aggregating storage and computation and indexing and search, with search and aggregation and other services' responses being structured and standardized, and cryptographic identities, and some kind of market services to sell and buy storage and computation in unified and pooled, but transparent way (scripted by buyer\seller), similar to MMORPG markets, with the representation (what is a siloed service in modern web) being on the client native application, and those services allowing to build any kind of client-server huge system on them, that being global. But that's more of a global Facebook\Usenet\whatever, a killer of platforms. Their infrastructure is internal, while their representation is public on the Internet. I want to make infrastructure public on the Internet, and representation client-side, sharing it for many kinds of applications. Adding another layer to the OSI model, so to say, between transport and application layer. For this application: I think you could have some kind of Kademlia-based p2p with groups voluntarily joined (involving very huge groups) where nodes store replicas of partitions of group common data based on their pseudo-random identifiers and/or some kind of ring built from those identifiers, to balance storage and resilience. If a group has a creator, then you can have replication factor propagated signed by them, and membership too signed by them. But if having a creator (even with cryptographically delegated decisions) and propagating changes by them is not ok, then maybe just using whole data hash, or it's bittorrent-like info tree hash, as namespace with peers freely joining it can do. Then it may be better to partition not by parts of the whole piece, but by info tree? I guess making it exactly bittorrent-like is not a good idea, rather some kind of block tree, like for a filesystem, and a separate piece of information to lookup which file is in which blocks. If we are doing directory structure. Then, with freely joining it, there's no need in any owners or replication factors, I guess just pseudorandom distribution of hashes will do, and each node storing first partitions closest to its hash. Now thinking about it, such a system would be not that different from bittorrent and can even be interoperable with it. There's the issue of updates, yes, hence I've started with groups having hierarchy of creators, who can make or accept those updates. Having that and the ability to gradually store one group's data to another group, it should be possible to do forks of a certain state. But that line of thought makes reusing bittorrent only possible for part of the system. The whole database is guaranteed to be more than a normal HDD (1 TB? I dunno). Absolutely guaranteed, no doubt at all. 1 TB (for example) would be someone's collection of favorite stuff, and not too rich one.
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    professorchodimaccunt@sh.itjust.worksP
    GOOD lets chance of spAIyware on there
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    A fairer comparison would be Eliza vs ChatGPT.
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    It was very boring.
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    Okay, I'd be interested to hear what you think is wrong with this, because I'm pretty sure it's more or less correct. Some sources for you to help you understand these concepts a bit better: What DLSS is and how it works as a starter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_Super_Sampling Issues with modern "optimization", including DLSS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4 TAA comparisons (yes, biased, but accurate): https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1e7ozv0/rfucktaa_resource/
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    sfxrlz@lemmy.dbzer0.comS
    As a Star Wars yellowtext: „In the final days of the senate, senator organa…“