jj4211

Yes, I'm just unsure when the volumes hit. Evidently they do seem to indicate a battery intake rate consistent with about 250,000 EV batteries a year. Globally about 30 million cars are junked a year, so as EV adoption raises then they could reasonably get 8 fold more batteries even while splitting with other companies. But they have a chokepoint that means they can only use a fraction of the batteries they get already, so more batteries won't help them right now.

One thing to keep in mind is that the car may outlast the battery, by a fair amount. If you look at Prius, there's been a fair amount of battery replacement there. I vaguely recall seeing that first gen Nissan Leaf batteries degraded enough to need replacement fairly quickly. On the flip side, seems the more carefully managed solutions with liquid cooling and maintaining buffers have been more robust than expected. Still, I ultimately agree with the assessment that the volumes aren't going to be there for a long time, just that batteries coming out can happen before the car is scrapped. But in terms of volumes, prior to 2019 there just weren't enough batteries going to be expecting much either way yet.

Problem is that broadly most GenAI users don't take that risk seriously. So far no one can point to a court case where a rights holder successfully sued someone over LLM infringement. The biggest chance is getty and their case, with very blatantly obvious infringement. They lost in the UK, so that's not a good sign.

I suspect the answer will be that such large requested as you frequently see with LLM codegen will just be rejected. Already I see changes broken up and suggested bit by bit, so I presume the same best practice applies.

Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn't. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn't. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn't. Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn't break and forget all the stuff that *did* break.

Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more. E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking. So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it's just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.

"At least he's not a Democrat" is a phrase I have seen when a right winger gets vaguely unhappy with him. Team sports mentality to the end

It said right in your quote that people do work that "no one volunteers to do". If they aren't volunteering, then *something* is providing the impetus. Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of *how* the community gets unplesant work to be "shared" when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another. At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.

allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?

So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.

Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”

This is unfortunately a bit naive, that for every problem no one *wants* to do there's a solution that people both want and can create. If you want to dismiss excessive waste as a failing of society, we can speak of work like line men who repair power infrastructure. It's not super engaging work.

Problem being the jobs that don't inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.

Alternative motivation may be viable and in fact drive better results when feasible. You find the right person with the right passion who *wants* to do the job. Problem is not every sort of job can pull that off. You aren't going to find enough sewage treatment enthusiasts to handle that demand. You aren't going to have enough line men to keep the grid going reliably and safely.

Now let's discuss all the people eager to volunteer to work sewage treatment plants. The proportion of people with more innate motivation versus need for a job to be done varies wildly between jobs. But when someone approaches work with innate motivation, amazingly better stuff happens compared to people in it just for the paycheck.

He had the persosctive that once you hop between source code files that constitutes a security boundary. If you had intake.c and user data.c that got linked together, well data.c needed its own sanitation… Just in case… I suspect he used a tool that checked files and noted the risky pattern and the tool didn’t understand the relationship and be was so invested that he tortured it a bit to have any finding. I think he was hired by a client and in my experience a security consultant always has a finding, no matter how clean in practice the system was. Another finding by another security consultant was that an open source dependency hasn’t had any commits in a year. No vulnerabilities, but since no one had changed anything, he was concerned that if a vulnerability were ever found, the lack of activity means no one would fix it. It’s wild how very good security work tends to share the stage with very shoddy work with equal deference by the broader tech industry.

In this case, there was file a, which is the backend file responsible for intake and sanitation. Depending on what’s next, it might go on to file b or file c. He modified file a. His rationale was that every single backend file should do sanitation, because at some future point someone might make a different project and take file b and pair it with some other intake code that didn’t sanitize. I know all about client side being useless for meaningful security enforcement.

Yes, recently we got a security “finding” from a security researcher. His vulnerability required first for someone to remove or comment out calls to sanitize data and then said we had a vulnerability due to lack of sanitation… Throughout my career, most security findings are like this, useless or even a bit deceitful. Some are really important, but most are garbage.

I think you are on to something, but I'd say it actually largely deflates the 'people didn't vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different' narrative. "Did not vote" rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn't vote in california *not* because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know "their" candidate has carried the state for sure. So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you'd probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you'd also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse... etc... I'm not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario...

I think the missing part in that is the "Miata"-ness. A fun little car with a bit of oomph to it and being ok with short range for the sake of a more fun/light drive. That has the light and affordable down, but doesn't really approach the 'fun' part of the miata appeal.

Another facet I hope the H shaped battery would mitigate is the weight. Might have to further wait for viable solid state batteries to match the ICE for cornering. Yes the reving and shifting fun is lost, unless you go like the Ioniq N and just give the driver the toys to feel like they have revving and shifting... I too would probably be fine with 100 miles for a 'fun' car or even commuter car. Though that's a luxury many households can not afford, a designated car for 'road tripping', so I'm not going to expect too much attention to this scenario...

The thing is they do make the parts, but it's a custom job and generally changing from a mass-manufactured EV to a hand-crafted car. The savings in reusing the reusable portions of the car are more than offset by the labor associated with putting them in. So it's only really reserved for 'classics' with some iconic design, and even then the person risks enraging fans of the car who find it heretical to rip out their engines.

Problem with the theory is that people believe in LLM strongly enough that whatever pressure there is within a market to be vaguely similar evaporates. SQL certainly has dialects, but at least the basics are vaguely similar, as an example. Working with a vendor that is oddly different from every other vendor in the space and we applied pressure to implement more typical interfaces. Their answer was “just have an LLM translate for you and use our different and frankly much weirder interface”. When we did cave and use it and demonstrated the biggest LLMs failed, they said at least they give you the idea. Zero interest in consistent API with LLM as an excuse. On the write your code for you, it has to be kept on a short leash and can be nightly a nightmare if not overseen, though it can accelerate some chore work. But I just spent a lot of time last week trying to fix up someone’s vibe coded migration, because it looked right and it passed the test cases, but it was actually a gigantic failure. Another vibe coded thing took 3 minutes to run and it was supposed to be an interactive process. The vibe coded said that’s just how long it takes, if it could be faster, the AI would have done it and none of the AI suggestions are viable in the use case. So I spent a day reworking their code to do exactly the same thing, but do it in under a second. For the jira ticket scenario, I had already written a command line utility to take care of that for me. Same ease of use instead of using jira GUI and my works torturous workflows, but with a very predictable result. So LLM codegen a few lines at a time with competent human oversight, ok and useful, depending on context. But we have the similar downside as AI video/image/text creative content: People without something substantial to contribute flood the field with low quality slop, bugs and slow performance and the most painful stuff to try to fix since not even the person that had it generated understood it.

Just a small correction, 120v. But charging at home is a game changer compared to gas, cost and convenience both. If you can't charge at home though, it's rough as the commercial charging stations are pretty pricey, before Iran or was generally more expensive to fast charge than gas per mile. Home charging for me is like getting 1.25 a gallon gas. Except without the oil changes, the belts...

Yeah, my personal experience and watching mechanics online... The turbo engine with a cvt is going to be as big a nightmare down the road as an EV battery. EV motors with a single gear is so much easier to make reliable except the trickiness of battery chemistry.. AWD by having independent motors front and back....

Don't forget the obsession with having any way to open a door except a boring normal way. I'm really really hoping EVs get over the Tesla envy and just make sensible cars with EV drivetrains. It's probably a wildly unpopular idea, but I personally would love a Miata with an H shaped battery pack to let the passengers ride low in the car at the expense of some range, with the traditional driveshaft tunnel becoming battery. But failing that, straightforward door opening, actual buttons and knobs for HVAC and volume, and a reasonable expectation of serviceable battery pack over time and I'm totally there for it.

Fun fact, while shopping for a car in 2022, we looked at a used 2021 bmw x5. I wondered what they replaced it with and the salesman said “oh, he traded it in for a 2022 x5 of the exact same trim”. They know him well because every year he comes in and trades in to make sure he is never driving “last year’s model”. Particularly stupid because that was the year of shortages where they actually made the new model worse by removing features they couldn’t get supply for, other than removing features, the new car was unchanged from prior year.

You know it’s bad when the last message is essentially “we are just going to stop talking publicly about it”

On the FAANG/MAAMA, he said explicitly some winners but a whole lot of losers, so you are agreeing with him. Of those titans, only Amazon and Google were arguably dot com darlings. Apple was pretty much left out of it and in bad shape, Microsoft did "ok" but was not really a darling of that bubble. Facebook, Netflix didn't exist. The data center explosion has *everything* to do with the AI boom. That's the only change around the recent inflection point of growth. They were certainly prolific, but this is beyond. They are now demanding incredibly more power and cooling density than before. OpenAI by itself made purchasing commitments to the tune of 40 percent of the entire supply of ram production across all industries. Probably 75 to 80 percent of the recent plans would not have happened if not for the LLM craze.

I find it interesting that, as you point out, his comment makes zero sense but still gets upvotes, and then as he clarifies he's saying it's racist against chatbots, then people are unambiguously "oh hell no" Some people upvote at a baseless accusation of racism without actually actually seeing racism or getting clarification that they may have missed... That's a bit sad...

Well, it looks like they state three options:

• Passkeys. This won’t work over a medium term, period. It’s tantamount to saying that SSH keys prove someone is human. If there’s enough interest, they’ll just make a software passkey solution that can work. Passkey being “human interactive” is purely a client-side construct.

• Biometric services. Strictly speaking, not an ID but it’s not hard to imagine leveraging capturing biometrics to an ID like scenario.

• Government IDs. Well that’s self explanatory.

They do state distancing themselves from the ID by trusting a third party service, but 3rd party ID service is still a thing.

Of course, this seems to be only after someone accuses you of being a bot and Reddit bothering to pay attention. Which may be almost no one.

Sounds like a statement to *say* they have a hard-on-bots policy, but in practice it seems they won't care unless there's significant outcry against a particular account.

LLMs are not people, they do not possess will, they do not possess sapience. Not wanting to deal with LLM output is in no way like excluding a group of people based on arbitrary characteristics.

Meanwhile, I’d be “welcome to the team, you’d do fine here”. Don’t get the white-knighting for Windows of all things. If you need Windows, ok, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs windows.

refuse to work on Toyotas. Nah, the analogy that would be closer would be if the shop said you must use some overpriced but notoriously fragile tools and you’ll be on the hook for any tool that breaks and any delay you incur will be your fault while they go buy a new tool. Plus the tools tend to have sharp edges on the handles for some reason and are just painful to use. Now if the job is “you need to administrate the group policy of the company systems”, then “I refuse to run Windows” is a pretty stupid take. But frequently the job is rooted entirely in Linux based infrastructure for internet facing stuff, and Windows on the entry point is just horribly awkward for that job. You can kind of/sort of get there but I haven’t found a single decent ‘Terminal’ even compared to that being pretty trivial with Mac and Linux. WSL starts to provide something useful, but it is kind of fragile and WSLg sucks with the worst window management possible, even by the standards of Windows broadly. Meanwhile, starting from a Linux system you can use a desktop shell that is probably better for your productivity than anything Windows allows. There’s not really a whole lot of logic for a lot of “Windows required” jobs in tech. Office365 is mostly fine through a Linux browser. Onedrive works with Linux. If you have some applications that are Windows only, again, sure, but a lot of tech folks don’t need any Windows only tools. Recent example from my real world, someone was around my desk and asking questions about stuff that required me to hop between a few contexts. They were shocked how quickly I could navigate a bunch of the windows in the discussion, and asked how in the world I got Windows to do that. Of course, I couldn’t. Besides, the general tone of the conversation could have been just full of redflags about how tortuous the company was going to be. One company blocked SSH between anything saying SSH was insecure, and said that, somehow, we had to do everything through the graphical console of the Linux instances. Which meant no rsync, no scp, having to create some file serving facility to upload files to and then download from. If my daily workflow depended on such draconian crap, I’d be out of there too.

This is the fascinating thing about this bubble. Usually people are suspecting a bubble/perceiving it, and are afraid of when it pops, but no one really wants it to pop, they just don’t like the fragility it causes knowing it could pop any minute. So many people actively want the AI bubble to pop. I can’t recall a bubble so odious that everyone was rooting for it to hurry up and fail before.

The users aren’t the customers. The customers are the users’ bosses.

keeppassxc for local password manager. More secure and more helpful UI for that very purpose, also can hold your top and let you ctrl-t the current number into to clipboard.

Fax machines, fine, certain organizations still require those mostly because people fall to understand that a fax machine is just a scanner and printer and this some bearaucracy failed to keep pace. Same story for checkbooks. AOL is still a thing and you can even sign up for it today, email address wise. Record players are in use, though more people own records than record players, more popular as display pieces than actual music medium. I would say everything else on the list is pretty much dead unless you go out of your way to do them, and nothing else on the list has so much nostalgia appeal compared to the problems and difficulty with them.

Lost count due to the dementia

He just have died while typing…

Going by inflation adjusted market cap values, it certainly looks like the financial facet of the AI companies alone are bigger than both those events… This is going to be beyond messy…

The issue is that as dumb as it is, SATA ssds are still a big part of the consumer market. Even though nvme isn’t appreciably more expensive to make, it’s still used as a “premium” product., and SATA is a product tier to capture budget market whole protecting their more premium market. This move is a clear symptom of the real issue. Manufacturers shifting as much capacity as possible towards big datacenter buildouts at the expense of starving every other market for these products. Trillions of dollars that will pay whatever it takes competing with a more rational market

So our utility came out and said they have to raise residential rates by a rather large amount, largely because so many data centers are demanding so much power they need to upgrade, so residential rates have to fund that…

I haven’t seen the ads to have any idea about this person, but I will but from the stores. GameStop very rarely, because a game console store price is dumb and getting a used copy of a popular game is cheap, but overwhelmingly will get/wait for PC editions of games, so it comes up very rarely. Best buy I’ll buy something because they frequently are competitive with buying online, and I like the ability to just pick something up now without waiting. Also when a controller has an issue or was similarly instant to exchange. Didn’t wait a few days just to get a botched one and then wait a few days for a replacement, got it, find out of was not working, and exchanged it all in the same day.

So assuming 10 lbs of force, as measured 1 meter away from the hinge, you have about 44.5 Nm of torque. Assuming each door opening was about 90 degrees, then you have about 70 Joules per door operating event. Each door opening would have a physical theoretical max of 0.02 watt-hours. Assuming you spent 8 hours opening a door every 10 seconds constantly, then you have 58 watt-hours of energy at the end of the day if you had 100% efficient generators. One typical solar panel would hit that in under 15 minutes in real-world energy collection, not theoretical.

So yes, the law says there is some unavoidable, unusable waste heat, the question is how much of that heat is really unusable? For example, you have lava at around 1,000 degrees. You certainly can harvest energy from that, hit some water with it and spin a turbine. For the most part, once we get under 100C we run out of ideas on how to realistically harvest energy out of it, but there’s still a pretty good delta between that an ambient. The claim of this article is he has an approach to harvest energy at an even lower temperature delta. If it got to harvesting all of the temperature delta of a system, then we can say “not at all possible based on current understanding of physics”, but if the process leaves some waste heat unharvested, then it’s not yet violating that law. The law just says it gets less and less likely as the amount of heat in question diminishes.

Well then you need to handle backfeeding all sorts of circuits, which is generally a pain to the extent it works. But it also would barely do anything.

It is scalding hot, but I think the key takeaway is that it’s not hot enough to boil into steam, which is our current go-to for harvesting energy from heat. So after you do your steam turbine and you are left with not-quite boiling water, by today’s standards it is useless for further harvesting for electricity. If this article is as-advertised (a big if), then we can harvest more, adding efficiency to any process that boils water to turn a turbine.

Hypothetically, any energy harvested from a zero-emission strategy might at least displace combusting some hydrocarbons.

Dunno, she might be very much ready to “give a fuck”

The type of problem in my experience is the biggest change in problem. Ask for something that is consistent with very well trodden territory, and it has a good shot. However if you go off the beaten path, and it really can’t credibly generate code, it generates anyway, making up function names, file paths, rest urls and attributes, and whatever else that would sound good and consistent with the prompt, but no connection to real stuff. It’s usually not that that it does the wrong thing because it “misunderstood”, it is usually that it producea very appropriate looking code consistent with the request that does not have a link to reality, and there’s no recognition of when it invented non existent thing. If it’s a fairly milquetoast web UI manipulating a SQL backend, it tends to chew through that more reasonably (though in various results that I’ve tried it screwed up a fundamental security principle, like once I saw it suggest a weird custom certificate validation and disable default validation while transmitting sensitive data before trying to meaningfully execute the custom valiidation.