qdog

IMHO, the value of the protest is to demonstrate a portion of the electorate does not agree with whatever they are protesting. There are a lot of people in a bubble that seem to think the majority always views things exactly the same as they do. Maybe you will always default do doubling down on the status quo, but some people will eventually inquire as to why someone is willing to inconvenience themselves to protest. Once someone starts to be curious about other people's motivations and reasoning, it often does impact their own opinions, for good or bad.

I don't think so, not like it was once upon a time. I had a manual 6-cylinder I bought in about 2002 for around $14000, no leather, 2wd extended cab. That's like $25k in today's dollars according to Google. If they made a basic truck for even $40k as EV it might sell a lot better, but I am pretty sure they are all about selling 60k+ trucks for profit.

There was a dip on the first chart in the article, it also sbows something like 9% of companies using it.

What I wonder is beyond "using" AI, is what value the companies are actually seeing. Revenue growth at both OpenAI and Anthropic are increasing rapidly at the moment, but it's not clear if individual companies are really growing their useage, or if it is everyone starting to try it out.

Personally, I have used it sparingly at work, as the lack of memory seems to make it quite difficult to use for most of my coding tasks. I see other people spending hours or even days trying to craft sub-agents and prompts, but not delivering much, if any, output above average. Any output that looks correct, but really isn't cause a number of headaches.

For the VC's, one issue is constant increase in compute. Currently it looks to me like every new release is only slightly better, but the compute and training costs increase at the same rate. The AI companies need the end users to need their product so much they can significantly increase the price to the end users. I think this is what they want to see in "adoption", such a high demand that they can see the future of increasing prices.

Yeah, it's pretty clear Tesla is still the best EV experience. I'm just waiting till the next gen of EVs to have proper connectors before I will consider another one. Our model Y is fine, but I don't want to buy another vehicle from them with Musk at the helm, and they don't plan to have a regular pickup anyways.

Says they are installing them at their gas stations. Probably a lot of money to be made from getting people to stop to charge and buy sodas etc.

Intel basically hit the clock speed limit and diverged to multiple cores. However, they still make x86 based chips, not ARM. They owned an ARM license for a while and got rid of it. For whatever reason, Intel felt like putting all there money on x86 was their only option. For a while they were making Atom chips for mobile, but at some point that design was hobbled because Intel has always been about the 60%+ margins on server chips. You cannot sell the cheaper chips at the same margins. It's not that Intel couldn't technically figure stuff out, it's that they couldn't see past those 60% margins.

For a while Intel's process knowledge was supposed to be better, even if the design was less efficient, but that turned out to be a mirage around 10nm or so. Intel now without a process advantage is probably never going to regain it's monopoly, and so far hasn't really transformed itself to do anything other than build those high-margin chips.

Once upon a time, I wanted to use one of the chips from a company they bought in networking, but Intel's model is to make the chip and let other companies make a product to take it to market. Intel doesn't want to make a market, just sell into it. You can see that with their attempt at TV where they stopped when they didn't want to spend money on content. So the chip I was interested in didn't get much R&D or a product and it more or less disappeared, another wasted investment.

I've worked with several types of people. For me, the best mentors were the ones who would answer questions I had with the full answer, often with details. Then they got on with what they were doing while I went back to my desk and tried to understand/retain some of what they told me.

I'd personally find someone shadowing me and asking questions super annoying.

I don't think this would work with all teams, the takeaway I got from the article is about artificial metrics.

The Mini Electric is down there. Weighs more than gas, and one of the reasons it isn't long range, would push up the weight too much.

The current generation of battery tech is just a little heavier than would be competitive to ICE on weight. Gasoline holds a lot more energy than a battery can, but the engine is heavier. If/when battery density is able to double (and this solid state tech is 2x-3x current battery, so it would be a game-changer), you would have very similar car weights. This seems to be one of the reasons the big trucks are first, adding a thousand pounds to a 6000 lb. truck isn't as bad as adding that to a car half the weight. I expect we will eventually see vehicles that weight less than the ICE counterpart that get a reasonable range, but hard to say when battery tech advances that much.

The Hummer in any form seems like a ridiculous vehicle. The Rav4 Prime weighs more than the Model Y, so depends on what version. The 4runner, Tacoma, Tundra, Sequoia etc. are all same or heavier, the big difference is that in the future, battery technology is expected to get better, so EVs should become lighter.

Model Y RWD weighs 4065 pounds, but pretty sure my Tundra is a lot less safe for pedestrians, as it sits higher and weight about 1800 pounds more without fuel.

Yeah, smaller cars are better for pedestrian safety, but North American drivers in general want bigger cars. Ford stopped making passenger cars for NA, even. Although you could argue some of their small 'SUV's are really hatchbacks at this point.

Not sure how you get people to want to buy smaller cars other than taxes.

lifepo4 doesn't require any fancy materials but lithium, less energy dense at the moment, but also doesn't degrade as fast. Panasonic is currently producing ~260Wh/kg batteries for Tesla, so much of the mass market EVs will likely end up with those types of batteries. Looks like lithium production needs to go about 3x at current demand growth, but if cell density goes up, maybe less? Unfortunately this article does seem to be about the li-ion battery tech, but at leas you will need less materials for the same energy.

Not in CA, but where I live there is continuous work on covering canals. A lot of canals were dug a century or more ago and are just ditches, something like 60% of water is lost to evaporation and seepage. The issue is still the cost, the price of water delivery is not generating the revenue to do it all at once. If they can also do solar, they can recoup those costs faster.

The places I looked at had some EV dedicated parking spaces and then shared EV charging. Just like gas cars you don't need to charge every day, they will probably add more chargers as more people get EV cars.

But yeah, it is pretty inconvenient for a lot of people at the moment, I have a home charger in my garage, but traveling to a city is more challenging. Range has been no problem, super chargers are fast, but then you have to find a charger in a garage or something where it usually charges money to park and if it's not a Tesla charger usually doesn't charge very fast, it gets expensive quickly. Reminder we are constantly moving in the 'better EV support' direction, whereas I have seen a gas station removed recently and a neighborhood protest about building a new one.

On the other hand, I have now stayed at hotels where the valet tops off the car, so I didn't even have to stop to charge at all on trips < max range.

There are a lot of custom EV conversions if you really want to control everything, probably no modern new vehicle is going to meet what you describe.

You can already buy lifepo4 cells, I've thought about making a boat, but time and money etc.

But this is about the masses, the Toyota Camry sells well, and I'm sure those same people will eat up the Toyota Camry EV when it comes out.

New apartment buildings are adding EV spaces, but on-street parkers either have to find a charger and take time, or regularly park somewhere with a charger (like at work). The city could start adding chargers pretty easily at like street lamps, but haven't seen any indication of that so far. I've found that the big city is not particularly friendly for either gas or electric if you don't have a fixed place to park, the chargers are generally slow and Tesla has great coverage outside the city (at least where I've been), but poor support inside the city. There is going to have to be some infrastructure upgrade at some point.