stetrain

The only billionaires that align with my political ideology are the ones that agree that there shouldn’t be billionaires.

Musk collects investment money for those dreams, but the dreams change every round. Now it’s AI data centers in space, Mars is old news.

Does it count if your warlord was Dolly Parton, who could have easily been a billionaire if she wasn’t so busy investing back into her community?

Dropping 150kWh+ of battery weight needed to perform the job is not slightly smaller. The Silverado EV in max spec gets 500 miles of range, 250 when towing, and the battery pack weighs more than a Honda Civic.

Total stop time is not just time spent standing at the gas pump but includes things like going to the bathroom and getting snacks or drinks from the convenience store.

The great thing with an EV is you don’t have to stay there while it charges, so you can do those things in parallel.

Yes, towing is a big potential case for EREV. A 600 mile EV truck (300 when towing) would need a 250kWh+ battery pack.

An EREV version could get by with 50-100kWh, which is also a lot less weight to carry. And would give plenty of power for driving EV-only for shorter trips when not towing.

I have absolutely experienced the “run on the bank” effect on gas in areas under hurricane warning, as well as weeks afterwards.

If there's a charging station with power within 200 miles then you're fine. That's a pretty big radius.

If power is out in that large of a radius you would also likely have trouble getting gas.

And you don't need the expensive equipment to just run an extension cord from the EV to power critical appliances.

EVs are actually great during power outages. Many have power outlets so you can run your fridge, charge devices, etc. while the power is out. Any gas station without its own backup generator will be unable to pump gas during an outage.

If you have home charging, it's more likely that you'll have a mostly full battery than that the power outage will occur when you have a mostly full tank of gas.

It's a bit more work and expense but some EVs can even act as automatic or manual whole-home power backups.

Unless you live somewhere that regularly loses power for a week+, an EV might actually be a net benefit.

That's a factor, but as you say many hybrids are actually very reliable and actually simplify many parts of the drivetrain over a conventional ICE.

Cost is a huge factor, and now that hybrids are a small cost increase, or even the default option on some models, sales have increased substantially. Basically half the cars that Toyota sells are hybrid or EV at this point.

There are potentially options that could work for you, including:

1) Just charge from an existing 120V outlet. If you average under 50 miles of driving per day this might work just fine.

2) Reshuffle existing circuits to get even a 20A 240V circuit for charging. This provides more than double the charging you can get from a 15A 120V outlet and may be possible by combining some existing circuits with tandem breakers. A lot of electricians will just quote you on going straight to a 50A or 60A circuit, but most chargers are configurable to lower levels and it can save you a lot of money to stick to a smaller circuit.

3) Share a circuit with a dryer using a device that automatically switches power off to the car while the dryer is running, there are a few brands of these.

4) Get an EV charger that supports load management, using a current sensor on your main breaker. These can dynamically adjust how much current the car draws to avoid exceeding the max current of your panel.

5) Electric meter socket adapter, these connect between your utility's electric meter and its socket and provides an EV charging port that doesn't go through your household panel at all.

Yep, I find that a lot of EV-hesitants in the US have no idea how much the travel charging network has grown.

https://dcfctracker.com/map

Hybrids make a lot of sense, they just have a lot of the same costs as building EVs and most buyers in the US weren't willing to pay an extra $5k to increase gas mileage by 15%.

Toyota is currently seeing record sales of their hybrid models and has made multiple models hybrid-only as costs have fallen.

Plug-in hybrids with larger battery packs are a harder market fit. They cost more because of the larger battery (often more than full EV equivalents) and are not saving you any extra money unless you can plug it in daily. If you have that extra money to spend and a place to plug an, an EV will probably work fine for you and save you more money over time.

Part of that is that we are reaching the point where a plug-in hybrid is actually more expensive to produce than an EV.

Go to Toyota's website today and you'll see that a Rav4 Plug-in Hybrid is more expensive than the bZ which is the equivalent full EV.

Going to an EREV layout (a series plug-in hybrid where the gas engine cannot drive the wheels mechanically) doesn't really save any costs directly, but allows sharing the platform between EV and EREV models.

I think the US is still pretty far from saturating the potential market of garage-owning car buyers with EVs, but that is a major hurdle for people who rent or street park and might be interested in saving gas money.

> For example, VW, Ford, GM, and others have been axing electric vehicles that they started selling a few years ago. They discovered that most people who wanted EVs had already purchased them, and the rest of the market wasn't interested enough to pay the price premium.

I don't think that's a fair assessment of the EV market, which continues to grow, albeit slowly, in the US and much faster elsewhere. At best it is constrained to the US car market where the government has been yanking incentives, tariffs, and emissions requirements back and forth recently, providing an unstable market for manufacturers to invest in.

Some brands put together EV models that were inherently unprofitable, and hoped that incentives and scale would save them, mainly Ford. Ford is currently investing a lot into building their next-gen EV platforms which should be both more affordable and profitable. GM has not cancelled any EV models that I'm aware of, except the Bolt which is planned to be replaced by a new affordable EV model in a similar market slot.

VW is introducing a lot of new EV models in Europe and other markets, but not so much in the US where policy has us a less favorable market for them.

Toyota + Subaru have introduced multiple refreshed or brand new EV-only models over the last year including in the US.

And of course China is going crazy for EVs with many competing domestic manufacturers, a full battery supply chain, and many affordable models to pick from.

"just get some capital"

Are these unaffordable housing units sitting empty?

If not, then high prices generally comes back to supply and demand, which is driven a lot more by zoning and building restrictions than by small differences in rental law.

Generally cities are expensive because people want to live there, and there is limited space for housing. The US especially has been very restrictive on density in urban and suburban areas compared to counterparts found elsewhere around the world. People wanting to live somewhere and a lack of dense housing for them increases prices.

A lot of arguments against "big, progressive cities" seem to boil down to some form of "See, nobody wants to live in these cities because it's so crowded and expensive!" which doesn't make basic economic sense.

I don’t see how this comment is “against all LLM-aided apps.”

> But... I get a "buy merch" popup the moment I open the page, and there seems to be a pro option for what seems to be a very much LLM-aided app? ...IDK, rubs off a bit wrong IMO. Just my personal opinion.”

Again, if the user of the app comes away with the impression that the app “seems to be a very much LLM-aided” then the LLM usage has affected the end product.

The longer people see issues that are not being solved via peaceful means, the more accepting they become of non-peaceful means.

I'm not advocating for those means, but I understand how people are feeling more helpless than ever to just "let the system work it out" when the system appears to be bought and paid for by a small concentration of corporations and people with an increasingly disproportionate share of wealth.

> My point was that you can have very well designed and thoughted apps with LLMs.

If that were the case here, then a user of the app probably would not come away with the impression that it was a "very much LLM-aided app."

You're talking about how LLMs can be used in such a way that they help production of an app but remain invisible to the end user. But the beginning of this thread was someone using the app and coming away with the impression that it was heavily LLM influenced, which suggests that it was not done thoughtfully and did not remain invisible to the user.

I get the idea. If email links are secure enough to use for password resets, just do that every time. Then you eliminate a whole category of password attacks.

But it’s definitely annoying for a frequently used service.

What I have seen is that the site gives you a QR code to scan with your phone. People are already used to needing their phone to sign in via an Authenticator app or SMS code.

I think they're referring to sites where that is the only way to sign in, which I have seen a few of. Basically you can never register a password or passkey, every sign in requires going to your email and waiting for the link to arrive.

You can in fact both have an interesting bird-based art display in your home and also go outside and watch birds yourself. Neither precludes the other.

From the link: "Half the point of this project is showing off some amazing public-domain natural-history illustrations. Over 800 cut-outs covering more than 400 species, every one taken from a real plate and hand-curated for this project (no art is AI-generated, though some has been retouched with AI)."

There’s a difference between Apple being able to swap out the model in code and Apple letting end users choose which model to use.

I can sell my copy of the book to a third person without interfering with your copy. And I can do so without the involvement or permission of the publisher or book store.

Ah, you could not have purchased a bag of Lays potato chips from the store on February 25th because I myself purchased a bag of Lays potato chips from that very same store the day previously!

That does diminish the sleep tracking benefits. It's still doable, but now it becomes "remember to charge your watch at least an hour before bedtime" which isn't as simple of a routine.