Month: November 2023

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Pity the poor car dealers. After making record profits in the wake of the pandemic and the collapse of just-in-time inventory chains, they're now complaining that selling electric vehicles is too hard. Almost 4,000 dealers from around the United States have sent an open letter to President Joe Biden calling for the government to slow down its plan to increase EV adoption between now and 2032.

Despite our robust economy, the US trails both Europe and China in terms of EV adoption. More and more car buyers are opting to go fully electric each year, although even a record 2023 will fail to see EV uptake reach double-digit percentages.

Mindful of the fact that transportation accounts for the largest segment of US carbon emissions and that our car-centric society encourages driving, the US Department of Energy published a proposed rule in April that would alter the way the government calculates each automaker's corporate average fuel efficiency. If adopted, the new rule would require OEMs to sell many more EVs to avoid large fines. This is in addition to an earlier goal from the White House that calls for one in two new cars sold in 2030 to be EVs.

Enlarge / Amazon boxes sit at a United States Postal Service facility in Fairfax, Virginia, on Tuesday, May 19, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Amazon packages are overwhelming mail carriers in Minnesota, causing delays of other mail, according to news reports and complaints from a US senator. Amazon packages are being prioritized ahead of non-Amazon mail, postal workers have said.

Similar complaints have been made elsewhere, but reports suggest the problems are particularly severe in Bemidji, Minnesota, where carriers recently held early morning protests before their shifts began. A Bemidji Pioneer article on November 15 said that "rural mail carriers stood outside of the Bemidji Post Office before sunrise Monday and Tuesday carrying signs and protesting what they describe as unsustainable working conditions and the prioritization of Amazon deliveries over actual mail."

The US Postal Service has been delivering Amazon packages for years, but this month's protest reportedly came in response to local implementation of a new agreement with Amazon at the beginning of November.

Enlarge (credit: Google Drive)

Did Google Drive lose some people's data? That's the question swirling around the Internet right now as Google announces it's investigating "sync issues" for Google Drive for desktop. On Monday The Register spotted a trending post on the Google Drive forums where a user claimed that months of Drive data suddenly disappeared, and their files went back to a state from May 2023. A few other users chimed in with the same issue, the worst of which says: "This is going to cause me major issues if I cannot get the files back. It's all my work for the last 1-2 years. All my business work, all my personal files. Everything, just vanished. It must be 100's of files suddenly gone."

Google has a post up on the Google Drive help forums more or less acknowledging the issue. The post, titled "Drive for desktop (v84.0.0.0 - 84.0.4.0) Sync Issue," says, "We’re investigating reports of an issue impacting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users and will follow up with more updates." Google adds an ominous list of things to not do in the meantime like:

• Do not click “Disconnect account” within Drive for desktop
• Do not delete or move the app data folder:
  • Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS 
• Optional: If you have room on your hard drive, we recommend making a copy of the app data folder.

Those instructions sound like they are aimed at preserving whatever possible file cache would exist on your computer. The description of this being a "sync" issue doesn't really make a ton of sense, since no matter what, the Drive web interface should show all your files and let you download them. If the problem is uploading, you should still have your local files.

Enlarge / Conscience do cost, as a certain fictional denizen of Baltimore's East Side once said. (credit: Larian Studios)

One of the best things about playing Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) is the way that it simulates the feeling of having an actual Dungeon Master overseeing your session. The second-person narration, the dice rolls, and even the willingness to say "Yes" to your quirkiest ideas all add to the impression that there's some conscious intelligence on the other side.

But consciousness can sometimes be a curse, and a recent patch to BG3 introduce burdensome complexity into the game's thinking. Essentially, the game was suffering from lag and slowdowns as players progressed because the game's decision engine couldn't stop assessing previous instances where a party member had gotten away with theft, murder, or other nefarious deeds.

The performance issues have affected some players ever since Patch 4, released on Nov. 2 with more than 1,000 changes. One of those changes was a seemingly small-scope, situational bit: "Scrying Eyes in Moonrise Towers will now only react to theft and vandalism if they see the crime being committed." The floating orbs in that area were, apparently, ignoring players' best attempts at sneaking, invisibility, or other cover-ups.