BeautifulMind ♾️

Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

Is there a possible way that both the NYT and OpenAI could lose?

Ok, that’s fair. The point I wanted to make upthread was that these sorts of impossible things are regularly made to work when making it work is worthwhile. Most of the ‘but this is a limitation of the technology’ talk here (about how EVs can’t work in the cold, etc) is defeatist bullshit that ignores that really if you want it to work it can be made to work

The main thing is that electric is the same way,

No, the larger point is that it’s a struggle to make diesel work at +20F if you don’t do the things to make it work, and yet these things can be made to work reliably at -50F. The obstacle isn’t the limitations of the technology, it’s whether or not the cost curve makes sense. Electric can be made to work cheaply, if it’s important to you that it work- just like it’s possible to make that diesel turn over at -50F

I grew up and rode the bus to school in Iowa.

I rode the bus in Alaska. The buses ran well below -50f. It turns out that it’s not that hard to keep your batteries and oilpans heated if you bother putting plug-in heaters (literally, electric blankets for the purpose) in your fleet vehicles, winterize your vehicles, and plug them in when it’s cold.

I get that it’s uncommon to be that cold-prepared in places that don’t expect to see temperatures below -20 for more than a few days in a given calendar year- at some point, it makes sense to just call it off when it’s that cold. After all, do all (or even most of) the kids have proper clothes to deal with real cold?

Really cold weather can be adapted to, it’s just that when you don’t need it that often it makes sense not to spend the resources doing it.

For those of you who haven’t been in a school bus in years, do you remember how loud they are? Reducing diesel pollution is a win, but being in a less-noisy environment for however long each day is also a win.

As a cyclist and occasional user of public transit, I really like the idea of most buses eventually being at least plug-in hybrid-electric if not entirely battery electric. I’m curious about the mass difference between a diesel, diesel-electric, and battery-electric bus (after all, the heavier the vehicle, the harder it is on the road). I expect some of the fuel-and-maintenance-cost-savings from the bus fleet will have to go to road maintenance in the end, but I’d rather spend money that way (locally) than spend it on pumping fresh hot carbon out of foreign wellheads

What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack

That means its working

Ehhh. For the range-anxious until charging infra catches up, there can be PHEVs.

I’ve been excited to have my next vehicle be a BEV for a while now, but having rented a Tesla while on vacation in Michigan (where the infra wasn’t exactly good for it) I understand why people might have reservations about jumping in with both feet. Also now that I’ve interacted with the vehicles and got a better idea of Tesla as a company, I won’t be buying one.

For the moment, given my use cases (I periodically have to drive between western WA and central UT) my next vehicle will likely be a PHEV unless there are real breakthroughs in EVs (fuel cells? swappable battery standards?) or charging infra where I need it.

almost nobody is making Plug-in Hybrids and they cost an absolute fuck ton of money.

The 2024 Prius prime starts at $33k, is a PHEV https://www.kbb.com/phev/best-phev-cars/2024/

BMW, Volvo, Mercedes are also making PHEVs for 2024 model year So are Chrysler, Mazda, Hyundai, Kia, Porsche, Land Rover https://www.autoweek.com/rankings/g45455983/best-plug-in-hybrids/

There are some really expensive ones on that list, but a half-dozen under $45k

Look at the new “Ram Charger” that works like you describe

Yeah a lot of the hybrid offerings in the truck market are really not targeting the budget market at all- some of them seem to reflect automaker bets that truck buyers want more power and don’t want to compromise on towing or range. Other hybrid trucks (looking at you, Toyota) aren’t using their hybrid systems to improve fuel economy, they’re using them to juice performance.

LOL I just remembered that some folks in the anti-covid-vax/maga category have been referring to the mRNA covid vaccines as ‘the cancer vaccines’ based on disinformation that they would ‘interact with your genes’ and ‘give you cancer in 2 years’

Seeing this headline [Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought] I had to look to see if it was the cancer-targeting vaccine or some mouth-breathers talking about the covid ones 😅

I was pretty happy with EverNote until it started to feel like they were ransoming my content against sudden price hikes and enshittifying reductions in basic function Fk those guys

The opportunity, of course, is that it might become feasible to mine the air for carbon (and fold it with added electricity from transient sources like wind/wave/tide/solar) and compete with the folks pumping sequestered carbon fuels from the ground.

Of course, this wouldn’t compete with the use cases for petroleum that arise in refining the polymers in oil (think of all the plastics and other compounds that come out of the oil industry that aren’t refined fuels). Selling those products is so profitable that for years oil companies have been flaring off excess natural gas at the wellhead to be rid of it instead of spending the money to capture, contain, and ship it to market. On the one hand, if this tech to mine CO2 from the air becomes a competitor, 1 of 2 things happens:

• 1. Refined fuels become cheap, so cheap that they’ll be flared off as waste instead of captured
• 2. Petro-based polymers will become more expensive as their subsidy by the sale of refined fuels is undercut by competition

It’s probably #2, really refined fuels can be considered a waste product of extracting the petrochemicals

Goodbye substack.

The couple of seconds’ worth of video I saw told me a few things:

• the truck had been spinning out for a long time there

• that situation was going to be tough for most trucks

• it had terrible traction, possibly a matter of not having all-season or snow-specific tires

• it appeared to be driving all wheels, can’t say whether or not they were distributing traction or slip intelligently

• couldn’t tell if anything was high-centering anywhere but it didn’t look it

• driving in situations like that are why I leave tire chains in my truck

• the tree sticking out of the back was comical

The cybertruck is a pavement princess

With any luck pretty soon they’ll look at alfalfa farming in the desert too

Hahahaha yesterday during the pie preparations my daughter and I passed each other as I was heading back to the kitchen and she said, apropos of nothing, “I didn’t just steal any whipped cream, shut up!”

LOL I didn’t know they’d been looting the whipped cream before that point but bless their hearts it was cute

Oh no, they’re uncomfortable?

All the more reason for them to comply, really

I’ve seen youtube content on piped I know full well to be 4k video be blurred so badly as to be nearly unwatchable- they honestly decided to spend money to make their content worse as a lever to get you to watch ads or to submit to tracking etc

I wrote test automation for Microsoft for years. My team turned a process that took 6 weeks of a hundred people working full time to produce manual test results into one that could complete in an hour on a couple hundred computers in a lab somewhere. It was a massive breakthrough in productivity on our part. Of course, 90% of the team was laid off when the code they’d written could be maintained by a couple of people.

So yeah, the difference “went to the shareholders”, certainly not to the people that did the work