Technology -- autonomous vehicles, EVs and vibe-coding

[toprob]

This morning on the Kindy run (mostly stuck in rush hour traffic on the highway) there was a cute little car in the left lane, and when it pulled beside us I took a look to see who would drive something like that -- turns out, nobody. I do think that autonomous cars should have something like the 'Airplane' autopilot, which inflates in the seat, so that oldies like me don't freak out when they go past.

We do the kindy run in an old Nissan Leaf, which has a rubbish battery, but is really just used for this one job. Fully charged, it can only do 100km, and it normally returns home with about 70% charge, so it goes back on the charger for the afternoon run. There's solar panels here, so this is quite economical during the day. Then at night it goes on a timer for a couple of hours of night rates. The family also has a much newer Leaf for normal use. I do like the electric cars, although on a cold morning the old leaf can lose power quickly, and reports under 30%, although it normally bounces back by the time we get home.

I have been looking at electric, as my ICE Hyundai is getting near 90,000 kms on the clock. Maybe later next year, but I'm aware that once my car hits 100,000 the trade-in value drops. Might drop anyway with the uptake of electric. If I do go electric, it'll be second-hand, as it doesn't make sense to buy new these days -- a new Chinese EV will probably be obsolete by the time it arrives in NZ, they tend to improve them on a monthly basis.

AI is getting better, and worse, so some changes lately. I've decided to cancel my Tripo 3D AI subscription, I do love it but recent changes have made it a lot more expensive. Well, I still pay the same amount, but I can only make 24 models a month now, whereas it used to be 60. Oh, well.

Another subscription that could be on the way out is Photoshop. I learnt PS back in 1990, at tech, and when I worked at the print centre it was installed on our Apple print server/scanner, but I preferred the Windows PC so I used something different. However for Godzone I eventually gave in and subscribed, and have kept it even after retirement. It costs me $29.10 a month, which used to be my most expensive subscription until Tripo, at $35.50ish.

This week, though, there's a lot of news about Artcraft, who have released a bunch of vibe-coded apps which do much of what Adobe apps do (and MS office apps). These are free, although still in alpha, so worth a look. I am trying out Photocraft, which is a Photoshop-type app, and it is certainly an impressive tool. Still too early to know if it will eventually do everything, or even if it can survive the wrath of Adobe. There's a couple of things which it would need to do better, it won't properly open the huge aerial image TIFF files I use, and it lacks Photoshop's handy tool to straighten edges of objects in my photos so that I can pop them into a texture sheet. Well, it can do this, but not quite the same way as PS, and I'm lazy, and I use this feature often.

Apparently one of the artcraft folk was annoyed at Adobe's cancellation fees, so he used Claude AI to build these, apparently it took a month to get them all to a usable stage, without reverse-engineering, just having Claude figure out how to implement all the included tools.

Should you try one of these apps? Or maybe the question is, should I cancel my Adobe subscription? Adobe have a bad rep since moving to subscription-only, but this has never really affected me. Before the subscriptions I couldn't have afforded photoshop, so it suited me in the Godzone days. I think they shifted into the 'evil' category when they changed their terms to use all user's files to train their AI, without an opt-out. Again, it didn't affect me, as they don't have any of my files. However I'm 70 years old now and survive solely on superannuation, so anything I can do to reduce costs would be worth considering.

Similar thing with Tripo, the product is good and has become better quickly, but the increase in credit-costs almost falls into the 'enshittification' category, where success breeds greed.

I do have a goal of reducing my subscriptions over the next month or two, so Artcraft could be quite serendipitous. At the moment I pay $157.50 a month on various subs, although that includes Tripo which I'm quitting. I have three video streaming subs, but these are quite cheap. One is the $9.99 Disney with ads, but their ads are particularly frightful, and my streams don't always resume after ad breaks, so that'll go first. Amazon Prime with ads costs me $10.99, but for the moment that's still a bargain, and the ads are not that intrusive. Apple TV costs me $17.99, no ads, but they have great TV, so I'll keep that. (Next year they'll have Neuromancer, which I really want to watch.) There's also Spotify, at $20.99, but they'll need to pry that out of my cold dead hands.

I'd almost forgotten about Xbox Gamepass at $32.95, quite expensive but I get about 4 months a year free from using various vouchers. I could drop down a level to save a bit, I guess, I don't use the Xbox as much as I should, anyway.

I do a bit of sub switching from time to time, at the moment I want to save some money and also go back to Youtube Premium, which removes ads. They've just started a 'lite' version, which is cheaper than the normal plan. Maybe Adobe will do something similar with Photoshop if their bottom line takes a hit -- cut the price for 'lite' accounts, to retain business. Although more likely they'll go full-on evil corporation to shut down any vibe-coding.

[Charl]

Intrigued by your "cute little autonomous car" - what might that have been, far as I know only Tesla has anything remotely approaching autonimity in NZ, and they ain't cute!
EV is a no-brainer in the times we live in, solar too.
Everything except the sun will get more expensive.
Four hours ago we had a power cut, and here I still am, pulling 8kW off the roof. (It's actually raining sporadically)
There is not a drop of fossil fuel to be found on this property, it is quite liberating.

I simply stopped paying Adobe when they went Dark on me.
They tried the cancellation fee BS for a while but maybe the responsible one died.
It is soo ironic that Claude came up with a way to defeat that Big Ugly Capitalist cadre.
Autocad should also get the Treatment...

[toprob]

Autocad should also get the Treatment...

It's part of the suite, take a look at the full list here.

Yes, a couple of weeks ago we lost power to part of the house, checked all the breakers and it looked fine. Couldn't figure out what had happened, then an hour later it came back on. Turns out there's been a major neighborhood outage here, but the solar kept most of it going. My son explained why only part of it is connected to solar, but I wasn't really listening.

EDIT:
The car was a 'Smart' brand, I think, kind of the size of a Waymo but four seats. Can't for the life of me find anything like it online.

[Charl]

I drove one of the new Smarts recently, quait nice.
Designed in Germany, built in China, they are not autonomous.
They do have lane assist and smart cruise control, maybe the driver was just taking a little recline in the commute.
It happens, apparently.

[cowpatz]

We are not quite ready to go the EV route just yet. I'm waiting for the solid state batteries to become mainstream before making the change.