Taking delivery of a new vehicle from a dealership is an emotional mixed bag. On the one hand, you’ve had to endure the sales rep’s hunger to close the deal, the tedious negotiations with the classic “Let me run that by my manager,” and the closer who tries to tack on ridiculous extras like paint sealer and ashtray protection. On the other hand, you’re finally at the end of the process, and now you get to play with the Shiny New Thing in your life while pretending it hasn’t caused your financial ruin. Wouldn’t it be nice to skip all those steps in the run-up and just cut right to the delivery? That’s been Tesla’s pitch for a while now, and they finally made good on the promise with their first self-driving delivery.

The Model Y sedan drove itself from its birthplace at the Texas Gigafactory to its new owner, a 30-minute trip that covered a variety of driving situations. The fully autonomous EV did quite well over its journey, except for at the very end, where it blatantly ignored the fire lane outside its destination and parked against the red-painted curb. While some are trying to make hay of Tesla openly flaunting the law, we strongly suspect this was a “closed course” deal, at least for that last bit of the trip. So the production team probably had permission to park there, but it’s not a good look, especially with a parking lot just a few meters to the left. But it’s pretty cool that the vehicle was on the assembly line just a half-hour before. Betcha the owner still had to pay for dealer prep and delivery, though.

How much space does a million dollars take up? According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, a million one-dollar bills will fit into a cube about 50 inches (1.27 m) on a side, and they even built one as a display for their museum. Putting aside for the moment the fact that the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago feels that they have enough public appeal to support a museum — we’d love to see the gift shop — would a million bucks really fit into a little more than a cubic meter? Not according to Calvin Liang, who took it upon himself to determine the real number of semolians on display. To do so, he built an app called Dot Counter, which lets users count items in an image by clicking on them. It turns out that the cube holds more like $1.55 million, at least assuming there are no voids inside. He also works through the math on what it would take to make an actual million-dollar cube; turns out that the 2.53:1 aspect ratio of a dollar bill makes it tough to manage anything other than a cuboid slightly smaller than the display cube holding $1.008 million. All of that really doesn’t matter, though, since Dot Counter is sure to help us win every “Guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” contest we see.

Even for the smallest of jobs, driving a truck is a hard job. And the job just keeps getting harder as the load gets bigger, as a driver in Maryland can attest to after a bizarre accident last week during the transport of a wind turbine blade. It’s a little hard to tell exactly what happened from the published stories, and the stills from the traffic-potato aren’t much help either. But it looks like the steerable rear wheels on the mega-long trailer used to move the blade, which looks to be at least 50 meters long, decided to take the eastbound lane of I-70 while the rest of the truck was going west. The pucker factor for the driver must have been off the charts as the blade crossed the highway median. Luckily, traffic was light at 5:00 AM when the accident happened, but even still, one injury was reported, and the ensuing mayhem as the blade remained lodged across both lanes as the Monday rush started must have been one for the books.

A couple of weeks ago, we featured a story on a great collection of Telnet games and demos, some of which are so accomplished that it really blows the mind. One that didn’t make that list is this fantastic ASCII moon-phase tracker. It uses ASCII art to depict the current phase of the moon visually, and yes, you can copy and paste the characters. True, it’s web-based, which probably accounts for it not appearing on the Telnet games list, but the source code is available, so making it work over Telnet might be a fun project for someone.

And finally, we’ve heard about “Netflix and chill,” but is “NASA and chill” about to be a thing? Apparently so, since NASA+, the US space agency’s media outlet, made a deal with Netflix to offer its live programming on the streaming service. This is fantastic news for Netflix subscribers, who instead of watching live launches and such for free on YouTube can pay be the privilege of watching the same content on Netflix, complete with extra ads thrown in. That’s one giant leap for mankind right there.

In today’s episode of “AI Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” we feature the Hertz Corporation and its new AI-powered rental car damage scanners. Gone are the days when an overworked human in a snappy windbreaker would give your rental return a once-over with the old Mark Ones to make sure you hadn’t messed the car up too badly. Instead, Hertz is fielding up to 100 of these “MRI scanners for cars.” The “damage discovery tool” uses cameras to capture images of the car and compares them to a model that’s apparently been trained on nothing but showroom cars. Redditors who’ve had the displeasure of being subjected to this thing report being charged egregiously high damage fees for non-existent damage. To add insult to injury, if renters want to appeal those charges, they have to argue with a chatbot first, one that offers no path to speaking with a human. While this is likely to be quite a tidy profit center for Hertz, their customers still have a vote here, and backlash will likely lead the company to adjust the model to be a bit more lenient, if not outright scrapping the system.

Have you ever picked up a flashlight and tried to shine it through your hand? You probably have; it’s just a thing you do, like the “double tap” every time you pick up a power drill. We’ve yet to find a flashlight bright enough to sufficiently outline the bones in our palm, although we’ve had some luck looking through the flesh of our fingers. While that’s pretty cool, it’s quite a bit different from shining a light directly through a human head, which was recently accomplished for the first time at the University of Glasgow. The researchers blasted a powerful pulsed laser against the skull of a volunteer with “fair skin and no hair” and managed to pick up a few photons on the other side, despite an attenuation factor of about 10¹⁸. We haven’t read the paper yet, so it’s unclear if the researchers controlled for the possibility of the flesh on the volunteer’s skull acting like a light pipe and conducting the light around the skull rather than through it, but if the laser did indeed penetrate the skull and everything within it, it’s pretty cool. Why would you do this, especially when we already have powerful light sources that can easily penetrate the skull and create exquisitely detailed images of the internal structures? Why the hell wouldn’t you?!

TIG welding aluminum is a tough process to master, and just getting to the point where you’ve got a weld you’re not too embarrassed of would be so much easier if you could just watch someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s a tall order, though, as the work area is literally a tiny pool of molten metal no more than a centimeter in diameter that’s bathed in an ultra-bright arc that’s throwing off cornea-destroying UV light. Luckily, Aaron over at 6061.com on YouTube has a fantastic new video featuring up-close and personal shots of him welding up some aluminum coupons. He captured them with a Helios high-speed welding camera, and the detail is fantastic. You can watch the weld pool forming and see the cleaning action of the AC waveform clearly. The shots make it clear exactly where and when you should dip your filler rod into the pool, the effect of moving the torch smoothly and evenly, and how contaminants can find their way into your welds. The shots make it clear what a dynamic environment the weld pool is, and why it’s so hard to control.

And finally, the title may be provocative, but “The Sensual Wrench” is a must-see video for anyone even remotely interested in tools. It’s from the New Mind channel on YouTube, and it covers the complete history of wrenches. Our biggest surprise was learning how relatively recent an invention the wrench is; it didn’t really make an appearance in anything like its modern form until the 1800s. The video covers everything from the first adjustable wrenches, including the classic “monkey” and “Crescent” patterns, through socket wrenches with all their various elaborations, right through to impact wrenches. Check it out and get you ugga-dugga on.

Hold onto your hats, everyone — there’s stunning news afoot. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like over-reliance on chatbots to do your homework can turn your brain into pudding. At least that seems to be the conclusion of a preprint paper out of the MIT Media Lab, which looked at 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39, who were tasked with writing a series of essays. They divided participants into three groups — one that used ChatGPT to help write the essays, one that was limited to using only Google search, and one that had to do everything the old-fashioned way. They recorded the brain activity of writers using EEG, in order to get an idea of brain engagement with the task. The brain-only group had the greatest engagement, which stayed consistently high throughout the series, while the ChatGPT group had the least. More alarmingly, the engagement for the chatbot group went down even further with each essay written. The ChatGPT group produced essays that were very similar between writers and were judged “soulless” by two English teachers. Go figure.

The most interesting finding, though, was when 18 participants from the chatbot and brain-only groups were asked to rewrite one of their earlier essays, with the added twist that the chatbot group had to do it all by themselves, while the brainiacs got to use ChatGPT. The EEGs showed that the first group struggled with the task, presumably because they failed to form any deep memory of their previous work thanks to over-reliance on ChatGPT. The brain-only folks, however, did well at the task and showed signs of activity across all EEG bands. That fits well with our experience with chatbots, which we use to help retrieve specific facts and figures while writing articles, especially ones we know we’ve seen during our initial scan of the literature but can’t find later.

Does anyone remember Elektro? We sure do, although not from personal experience, since the seven-foot-tall automaton built by Westinghouse for the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939 significantly predates our appearance on the planet. But still, the golden-skinned robot that made its living by walking around, smoking, and cracking wise at the audience thanks to a 78-rpm record player in its capacious chest, really made an impression, enough that it toured the country for the better part of 30 years and made the unforgettable Sex Kittens Go to College in 1960 before fading into obscurity. At some point, the one-of-a-kind robot was rescued from a scrap heap and restored to its former glory, and now resides in the North Central Ohio Industrial Museum in Mansfield, very close to the Westinghouse facility that built it. If you need an excuse to visit North Central Ohio, you could do worse than a visit to see Elektro.

It was with some alarm that we learned this week from Al Williams that mtrek.com 1701 appeared to be down. For those not in the know, mtrek is a Telnet space combat game inspired by the Star Trek franchise, which explains why Al was in such a tizzy about not being able to connect; huge Trek nerd, our Al. Anyway, it appears Al’s worst fears were unfounded, as we were able to connect to mtrek just fine. But in the process of doing so, we stumbled across this collection of Telnet games and demos that’s worth checking out. The mtrek, of course, as well as Telnet versions of chess and backgammon, and an interactive world map that always blows our mind. The site also lists the Telnet GOAT, the Star Wars Asciimation; sadly, that one does seem to be down, at least for us. Sure, you can see it in a web browser, but it’s not the same as watching it in a terminal over Telnet, is it?

And finally, if you’ve got 90 minutes or so to spare, you could do worse than to spend it with our friend Hash as he reverse engineers an automotive ECU. We have to admit that we haven’t indulged yet — it’s on our playlist for this weekend, because we know how to party. But from what Hash tells us, this is the tortured tale of a job that took far, far longer to complete than expected. We have to admit that while we’ll gladly undertake almost any mechanical repair on most vehicles, automotive ECUs and other electronic modules are almost a bridge too far for us, at least in terms of cracking them open to make even simple repairs. Getting access to them for firmware extraction and parameter fiddling sounds like a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to hearing what Hash has to say about the subject.

Are robotaxis poised to be the Next Big Thing in North America? It seems so, at least according to Goldman Sachs, which issued a report this week stating that robotaxis have officially entered the commercialization phase of the hype cycle. That assessment appears to be based on an analysis of the total ride-sharing market, which encompasses services that are currently almost 100% reliant on meat-based drivers, such as Lyft and Uber, and is valued at $58 billion. Autonomous ride-hailing services like Waymo, which has a fleet of 1,500 robotaxis operating in several cities across the US, are included in that market but account for less than 1% of the total right now. But, Goldman projects that the market will burgeon to over $336 billion in the next five years, driven in large part by “hyperscaling” of autonomous vehicles.

We suspect the upcoming launch of Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin, Texas, accounts for some of this enthusiasm for the near-term, but we have our doubts that a market based on such new and complex technologies can scale that quickly. A little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that the robotaxi fleet will need to grow to about 9,000 cars in the next five years, assuming the same proportion of autonomous cars in the total ride-sharing fleet as exists today. A look inside the Waymo robotaxi plant outside of Phoenix reveals that it can currently only convert “several” Jaguar electric SUVs per day, meaning they’ve got a lot of work to do to meet the needed numbers. Other manufacturers will no doubt pitch in, especially Tesla, and factory automation always seems to pull off miracles under difficult circumstances, but it still seems like a stretch to think there’ll be that many robotaxis on the road in only five years. Also, it currently costs more to hail a robotaxi than an Uber or Lyft, and we just don’t see why anyone would prefer to call a robotaxi, unless it’s for the novelty of the experience.

On the other hand, if the autonomous ride-sharing market does experience explosive growth, there could be knock-on benefits even for Luddite naysayers such as we. A report, again from Goldman Sachs — hey, they probably have a lot of skin in the game — predicts that auto insurance rates could fall by 50% as more autonomous cars hit the streets. This is based on markedly lower liability for self-driving cars, which have 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% lower property damage claims than human-driven cars. Granted, those numbers have to be based on a very limited population, and we guarantee that self-drivers will find new and interesting ways to screw up on the road. But if our insurance rates fall even a little because of self-driving cars, we’ll take it as a win.

Speaking of robotics, if you want to see just how far we’ve come in terms of robot dexterity, look no further than the package-sorting abilities of Figure’s Helix robot. The video in the article is an hour long, but you don’t need to watch more than a few minutes to be thoroughly impressed. The robot is standing at a sorting table with an infeed conveyor loaded with just about the worst parcels possible, a mix of soft, floppy, poly-bagged packages, flat envelopes, and traditional boxes. The robot was tasked with placing the parcels on an outfeed conveyor, barcode-side down, and with proper separation between packages. It also treats the soft poly-bag parcels to a bit of extra attention, pressing them down a bit to flatten them before flicking them onto the belt. Actually, it’s that flicking action that seems the most human, since it’s accompanied by a head-swivel to the infeed belt to select its next package. Assuming this is legit autonomous and not covertly teleoperated, which we have no reason to believe, the manual dexterity on display here is next-level; we’re especially charmed by the carefree little package flip about a minute in. The way it handles mistakenly grabbing two packages at once is pretty amazing, too.

And finally, our friend Leo Fernekes dropped a new video that’ll hit close to home for a lot of you out there. Leo is a bit of a techno-hoarder, you see, and with the need to make some room at home and maintain his domestic tranquility, he had to tackle the difficult process of getting rid of old projects, some of which date back 40 or more years. Aside from the fun look through his back-catalog of projects, the video is also an examination of the emotional attachments we hackers tend to develop to our projects. We touched on that a bit in our article on tech anthropomorphization, but we see how going through these projects is not only a snapshot of the state of the technology available at the time, but also a slice of life. Each of the projects is not just a collection of parts, they’re collections of memories of where Leo was in life at the time. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of things that are so strongly symbolic of a time that’s never coming back, and we applaud Leo for having the strength to pitch that stuff. Although seeing a clock filled with 80s TTL chips and a vintage 8085 microprocessor go into the bin was a little tough to watch.