Wednesday ORT: Hello No, Jalop Pumps BYD, Hackers In Heels, The End Of 200TW

All readers welcome

yes there is, but maybe not in the way you think

Any sane writer with zero self-sabotaging tendencies would follow up on a debut in The Free Press with an Open Thread focused on broad social issues, current politics, and quirky feel-good items. Since I do nothing in this world except spit into the wind, both metaphorically and while riding motorcycles, today’s OT will instead be 50% weird tech stuff and 50% weird car stuff. As always, thank you for reading.

No-hello, is it me for whom you’re looking

Just fifteen days from now, I’ll finish my current work contract and re-enter the exciting world of unemployment. It’s been an interesting year, after a fashion, although not one that would raise anyone’s estimation of our current American-Indian corporate tech culture. I’ll miss certain parts of it, like the part where they let me work from home four days a week. What I will not miss: the multiple “GM Jack” and “Hi Jack” and “Hello Jack” messages in Microsoft Teams from my developers and overseas resources. Under no circumstances will I respond to messages like that, ever, because they have absolutely zero value to me. If you want something, ask for it. If you want to have a conversation about the morning and the weather, talk to your family or your friends; I fall into neither category.

Thankfully, someone has come up with a few websites to which I can send the “GM crowd”: nohello.net and nohello.com. The former is for non-technical people, a category in which I include 93% of overseas developers, 62% of onshore developers, and all managers who haven’t shipped code in the past 60 months. The latter is for programmers and actual computer people.

Those of you who are personality hires and/or normal people with normal jobs might wonder what the big deal is about starting with “good morning” or “hello”. Isn’t that how people act in real life? Yes, it is — but messaging programs are not real life. This goes double for messaging programs at work. When you start with “GM”, I have to stop what I am doing and have a meaningless, perfunctory interaction with you before I can get to the actual work. It wastes between 90 seconds and five minutes of my time. Multiply that by the 20 or more “GM” messages I get per day… it adds up.

It bewilders me that I have to explain this to programmers, who once upon a time did stuff like use a mechanical drum rotation cycle to save 16 bytes of wait code but who now, if the past year is any guide, need to load 23 MB worth of libraries to draw a text input box on a webpage. Yet I do, and also every year the programmers on these hippo-ass, API-cluttered projects get even worse. Every year I have to spend more time in lengthy explanations that always boil down to one of two core concepts:

0. Your rough understanding of the analogy is not equal to a proper understanding of the thing itself.

1. Computers are not people, animals, or any other entity with the capacity for additional, surprising, un-programmed actions.

The arrival of “AI” is going to make this worse, much worse, suicidal-ideation worse. Currently, the mouth-breathers of social media are getting very excited about the idea that ChatGPT is answering questions using a language other than the one in which the question was asked, or using a mixture of languages. “Is the AI choosing the most effective language for each part of the response?” they ask. “Is this the future of language?”

No, you idiots. It’s not a wonder that ChatGPT uses multiple languages without seeming to be “conscious” of it. In fact, it’s a wonder when it doesn’t do that, because ChatGPT is, after you pull off all the spoilers and decals, nothing but a Chinese Room:

If you don’t immediately understand the above picture, I recommend you read the link above it until you do understand it. Few things will affect you more in the years to come than the average idiot’s failure to understand “AI”. Don’t be an average idiot. And don’t message me “Good morning”, because:

Let Us Now Praise Chinese EVs (That We Didn’t Drive)

to be fair, it’s the best he’s ever looked

Anything Autoblog can do, Jalopnik can do worse — so is it any surprise that, hot on the heels of a deliberately mysterious pro-Chinese-car article in the former, Brad Brownell is now singing the praises of a BYD Seal, based on nothing more than being a passenger on a mildly-paced racetrack lap?

To FB’s credit, he at least tells you where and how the ride-along took place: as an additional freebie in a weekend of Mexican Formula E freebies. “The whole experience lasted maybe ten minutes from getting in the car to stepping out,” he notes, before going on to explain how the BYD Seal is totally ready for the American market and is pretty much just like an Audi on the inside. He then notes that the Mexican-assembled, Chinese-sourced BYD Seal costs about the same as a Tesla Model 3 Performance, which he feels to be a point in the BYD’s favor. I’m glad he doesn’t review men’s shoes:

“The Stacey Adams Pimp Hand Crocodile Stamped Pleather Lace-Ups are made in Vietnam exclusively by children under the age of eight — but get this, they don’t cost any more than a set of cordovan Alden Long Wings!”

Allow me to offer a fearless prediction that is far more likely to come true than Brad’s dreams of BYD-in-America domination: in much the same way that robust press-pampering budgets led much of the automotive media to exaggerate Hyundai/Kia’s virtues between 2015 and 2023, you can expect an increasing amount of positively giddy Chinese-car coverage in the next few years as BYD and other automakers out-spend the legacy automakers in the critical areas of press pampering and international air miles. Everyone else is cutting back on media spend, which will further exaggerate the impact of Chinese generosity. I will continue to track, and mock, the outlets and writers who are willing participants in this stupidity. Depend on it.

For God’s sake, lady, he’s a naval officer, just like Thomas Magnum

i was gonna do a photo like this for *my* linkedin but I wanted to show more thigh

Social media had a minor convulsion a few days ago when “Hackers In Heels” founder Stacey Champagne decided to put her own husband “on blast”, as the kids say, via LinkedIn:

I had multiple clear-cut career accomplishments in 2024. My husband? Zero. No certifications. No college courses completed. No documentary features. No awards. “How do you *do* that?!” I asked from across the dining table, “how are you able to go through a whole year without doing any of these sort of things and be OK?” He didn’t have a response. There is so much to unpack and learn from an exchange like this. Specifically—what’s standing in the way of MY ability to be content without conventional markers of accomplishment? My gut says that this is a question that many people, namely high-performing women, grapple with too. I don’t have an answer, but I’m curious what your thoughts are: Could you go a year without a single new certification, interview, award, promotion and be OK with yourself for it? Would you think of a colleague, direct report, manager, friend, or spouse differently for not doing so?

Naturally, this caused everyone to look up what Stacey’s underachieving loser of a husband, Jesse Sciuto, was up to. Turns out he’s an O-3 (Lieutenant) in the US Navy who is trained both as a surface-ship leader and a cybersecurity leader. Then the poor fellow had to jump on LinkedIn and defend his wife, who despite having just 700-some followers was getting generally pummeled in the comments:

One of the best parts of the Navy is that they have told me exactly what they value and what they want me to achieve, so I already did all of that. I'm dual warfare qualified, have a STEM Master's, and I've completed all qualifications and requirements for my current rank and the next rank… I do all of our grocery shopping and cook all of our meals (because I love to cook) which has freed up time for Stacey so she could continue to be the amazing badass she is. I'm the most content I have ever been.

Blink twice if you need help, Jesse. I don’t think Seal Team Six is gonna borrow this guy for any tunnel-rat missions, but neither do I think he deserves to be used as what programmers call an “anti-pattern”, either. Especially not when his wife’s list of “accomplishments” is this:

Half of this stuff can be best described as Awards For Having A Vagina. Another quarter of it falls under the Degrees That Are Probably Taught Better At DeVry, with the last quarter being Certs You Can Get Online While Using Another Monitor Out Of The View Of Your Zoom Camera. I don’t see that she’s ever actually accomplished or built or programmed anything. Her business model is nothing more than “ask for donations to help female hackers”. I don’t know why she calls herself a “CEO”. Does her non-deductible charitable donation sole proprietorship have a board? Are there any other Chief Anythings?

Sadly, the ten percent of American tech work that hasn’t yet been sent to India is absolutely infested with this cooking-grade level of grifter-dreamer wannabe. We could leave it there, except: one commenter on X suggested that the big difference between Stacey Champagne and Lieutenant Sciuto is that, as a woman, Stacey needs continual “head pats” to validate her existence and give her an identity in her social milieu, while her husband is content to just, uh, defend the country on the land and on the sea.

Is that fair to say? Most of the women I have valued in my life are utterly immune to that sort of thing, but there might be some selection bias there. Similarly, I know a few men who just love recognition and taking selfies and all that stuff, but they’re not the majority of my acquaintance. Especially in tech. Most of the men I know who work with computers follow what I call “Jim Wildman rules”.

That’s not a nickname. It was his real name. The late Jim Wildman was a Unix admin’s Unix admin. An utter professional who knew things down to kernel level and always could be relied upon to think like a computer. As a young sysadmin I all but worshiped him. One day Jim and I were fussing with a Hewlett-Packard “Superdome” when his pimp, er, recruiter called him. “Jim, we notice you didn’t sign up to attend our annual dinner. Don’t you want to come? Don’t you want a chance to win free gifts?” Jim frowned in my direction then delivered the following lecture via wired phone, because it was the year 2001:

I don’t want to go to your dinner. I don’t want company-branded clothing. I don’t want gift cards. I don’t want training, travel, or continuing education. I want to be paid. That is it. All I want out of this job is to be paid. If you have budget to give me something to increase my job satisfaction, I request instead that you take that budget and pay me directly, in cash. I don’t want to be socially or emotionally involved with you or your company or my fellow consultants. I have a home and I have a family and that is what I value. All I want from you is the highest rate of pay available. Do you have any questions? No? Then pay me. Thanks.

Things worked better when men like Jim were in charge of important infrastructure. As far as I know, he never received a certification. What was his problem, anyway?

The bell tolls for a deceptive and ridiculous idea

Last week, ChampCar drivers got an email from the series leadership that included the following:

ChampCar’s 180TW tire rule was designed to be simple – simple to understand and simple to police. In this regard I would say it has been successful. But endurance auto racing grew tremendously in the past 15 years, with thousands of cars running on tracks all across the country, and those cars needed tires. Tire manufacturers have stepped up and provided a large variety of choices – all claiming to be rule compliant 200TW tires, but somehow so different from each other. What began to happen is that some teams would run the stickier versions of these 200TW tires and change them more often. Many teams used to run one set of tires per day, or even per weekend. Now we see some teams running one set of tires per stint. It’s not that teams are running cheater tires, or that they are running expensive tires, it’s that some teams with deep pockets are just swapping on new tires far more often than a budget team could ever afford to. This is a competitive advantage gained with money. Not driving talent, not engineering skill, just money.

All tires must be DOT rated

All tires must be of a treadwear of 180 or higher

All tires must have a minimum tread depth of 7/32” or greater when new

Any tire with a treadwear of 250 or greater is allowed

Only the following tires rated at 200TW are allowed:

The “Vitour” isn’t in that list, nor are there any Nankang tires. With the exception of “X Comp” and “Valino”, the ChampCar list is all major-manufacturer stuff that does not have a reputation for being ultra-fast. There’s no RE-71RS, for example, and I can tell you why: my laptimes in my RE-71RS-shod Neon at Nelson Ledges this past November were four seconds a lap ahead of the best ChampCar Neons on Falkens, and just half a second behind a divisional champion Neon on Hoosier R7s.

Why is the ChampCar ruling important? Simple. It marks the beginning of the end for “200TW lyfe” and all the cheater tires that take advantage of DOT rules regarding treadwear rating. (Short version of the rules: you can pretty much make the number up yourself, as long as you aren’t too blatant about it.)

This change is overdue, for exactly the reasons laid out by ChampCar leadership. It’s time for the other sanctions to follow suit. Yes, it’s frustrating to have a smaller selection of tires, and yes there’s some possibility for bribery and mayhem in what the courts like to call “bills of attainder”, but it’s better than just specifying a mostly imaginary treadwear number then watching your affordable-enduro series turn into one where people swap “Hong Kong Hoosiers” every two hours.

While we are at it, let’s get rid of some other much-abused rules and regs:

• Classing cars via dyno testing;

• Allowing turbocharged cars to run with anything less than a 1980s F1 level of displacement-level punishment vs. their normally-aspirated competition;

• Moronic “points” systems designed by people who aren’t nearly as smart or dedicated as the racers who build special cars to game those points systems;

• Kirkey seats and any other seat made by folding soda-can-thin aluminum into wedges aimed at the driver’s vital organs.

Alright, the last one isn’t exactly about competitive balance, but take it from me: to win the race, you have to live through the race. How did ChampCar come to their logical conclusion before pretty much every other sanction in the game? Maybe they’re just the smartest people in this particular room.