letitbeirie

> nothing indicates we've hit a peak

Opus 5 is arguably a regression but GPT 5.6 is pretty strong evidence that we haven't hit a peak. I think I actually prefer Sol to Fable at this point.

> back seats included

I ended up buying loose seat belt buckles for my wife's car from a pull and pay to stop this. Evidently nobody at Toyota has a dog.

The irony there being the "cars are evil" politicians are typically the strongest advocates for EVs, but EVs (being new) are the cars most likely to be affected by these annoyances.

I would love to replace my 2007 GTI with something cleaner and quieter but I genuinely don't see anything new as that big of an upgrade - my car has physical buttons for every feature, it doesn't (intentionally) make any stupid noises, and it's a stick shift in the US so it's essentially theft-proof.

Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?

I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.

> Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists

But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.

I wear my seat belt anytime I leave the driveway but I still want one of these things.

My car can't tell the difference between a person and my backpack on the passenger seat, but it dings regardless.

> actually do more harm than good

I've wondered about this too.

I have a common enough name that about 2/3 of the info data brokers have on me is garbage.

If every data broker could be relied on to faithfully delete my info I would sign up for Optery or Incogni today. I don't, because if even one of those 2/3 is a bad actor I'm just expending effort to clean up their data.

Specifically, the data I don't want them to have.

> Therefore the difference between the horn being readily accessible and being hidden away could be the difference between life and death.

Being readily accessible is a must. The point I was trying to make (poorly; it was late) was that having the horn button in the middle of the wheel is about the worst place imaginable if you lay on the horn to avoid a crash and it happens anyway, because some portion of your arm is probably going to be broken when it gets crushed between an exploding airbag and your rapidly-decelerating body.

It's weird that Tesla is being called out over the horn.

In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers - only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash.

But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.

...

I'm not sure Tesla improved the situation, but it definitely seems like the situation has room for improvement.

Devs who haven't worked in industrial controls won't believe it, but the overwhelming majority of critical OT software still doesn't.

Visual Basic as a language is just C# for people who want to type more to do the same thing.

Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.

Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.

> solar electricity is already cheaper than natural gas

Does that include transmission? Most population centers already have the pipeline network needed to bring them gas but the getting power from giant solar projects in the desert (where it's sunny) to the eastern interconnection (where most people live) is still an unmet need.

> as battery storage prices drop

Eventually, but at present our grid-scale storage has a capacity of ~30GW on a grid of ~1200GW; it's going to take something like a trillion dollars and a generation to build out grid-scale storage to the point where we can even support a 100% renewable grid.

We'll get there eventually but until grid-scale storage is installed and ready, the gas plants (with their fast start/stop ability) are what's enabling the renewables to come online and replace our older coal and nuke plants.

We're probably going to have to lean even more on gas since the first ~500GW of renewables are replacing existing coal/nuclear we're losing, but once the grid storage tech catches up we can start installing that in lieu of new gas plants and replacing the ones we've already built.

Tl;dr: we'll get there but not in the lifetime of a furnace

Depends where you are.

In the US natural gas is a byproduct of shale oil extraction and we have a limited capacity to move or export it so it's almost priced as a waste product.

It's unlikely that electricity will be any cheaper than gas soon either, since that's where 40% (and growing, as our coal and nuclear fleet are retired) of our electricity comes from.

I managed to collect a rather massive digital music collection when p2p was en vogue.

I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.