Samuel Rees

Freelance Audio Engineer. Software Developer at @helicoptersofDC for the CopterSpotter. 703-967-2230 on Signal.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

We've been heads-down building for a while: dark mode, heatmaps, circling helicopter detection, installable as an app, and more. Here's a catch-up on what's new on https://t.co/1U7BOWSrpj 🧵

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@thsottiaux Native rewrite

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@thsottiaux is this true?

[Lentils @Lentils80]

🚨 GPT-5.6 Sol's juice values (thinking budgets) have been severely degraded compared to release day

If Sol now feels faster and more "efficient", this is probably why

Terra and Luna juice values aren't affected, so their thinking budgets are now higher than Sol's

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs All of the people I’m talking about drive Teslas, that is the population we’re looking for. I love my model 3, but I think there is more agreement amongst Tesla drivers that the auto wipers suck than on any other. This is a nearly universal take.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs The sub par nature of the auto wipers has got to be the most widely agreed upon complaint about these cars. I’ve never met a person outside of Twitter who doesn’t think the auto wipers are sub par.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs I’m sympathetic to the problem, but they should have conceded to being wrong years ago. The ideology is supposed to be ‘fail fast’ not ‘fail forever’.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs ‘The team is working on solutions’ is missing the point. It’s been 8 years of working on solutions — it’s time to admit the premise was wrong. The sensor was the better input to this problem.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs The dry wipes are obviously almost entirely accidental, I’m not sure how you could think otherwise. So often I have seen dry wipes triggered by the same mistaken external stimuli, and have had to do fluid wipe afterwards because the dry wipe itself smudged the glass.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs At-glass cameras just are not the best tool for this problem. I get why they thought they might be, but it’s 8 years later and turns out they were wrong.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs Talking in terms of sacrifice is strange. They should have kept the rain sensor. It’s only tolerable now, not excellent. Phantom wipes, often too fast or too slow speed, lots of issues remain.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs Have you never driven your car manually in the rain? You can do manual settings, but it’s clunky to access while driving. Tons of cars have auto windshield wipers that work very well for the driver - Tesla doesn’t. They’re tolerable, but not great, and were awful for years.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rajuvamsi007 @SnazzyLabs That is not the context though. The auto windshield wiper feature is meant to be the primary control even for cars without FSD at all, and while FSD is not engaged on cars with it. It’s tolerable, but obviously sub par for that.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@CyberTruckApoc @SnazzyLabs Unfortunately, they had a bad assumption: the frequency of wiping that would be good for a camera looking out a small aperture pressed up against the glass would also be good for a human viewing through the whole width from well behind the glass. Turns out, this is not true.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@sama Absolutely for chatGPT. In codex, where tasks can be very well defined and narrowly scoped, probably access to both trade offs would be good.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

U.S. Park Police helicopter N11PP has been circling over the Washington Hilton area after reports of shots or loud bangs during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. POTUS was evacuated and reported uninjured. We’re tracking the flight activity on https://t.co/1U7BOWSrpj

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@WmBrackbill @DrTeslaFSD Fair enough, though it doesn’t seem super useful to think in terms of fuel stops, rather than just stops.

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@jntsrgn @DrTeslaFSD Curiously, how many stops would you want to make on a 946 mile, roughly 12-15 hour drive?

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@WmBrackbill @DrTeslaFSD I know some people are making different road trip life choices than me, but I would stop *many* times in a 946 mile journey, no matter what I was driving. Just one stop would mean driving for ~7 hours straight!

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@thsottiaux ‘Slow mode’!

[Samuel Rees @samuelcrees]

@rohanvarma I’d use it often. I frequently kick something off where the exact return time doesn’t have an impact.