I wouldn't say it soared. I would say that it recovered a bit, because the market had previously overcorrected. It is still below its highest March 2024 close, and barely half of its peak price.

As I understand it, most ARM devices don't have anything like BIOS/EFI/UEFI/Open Firmware to provide information about what hardware is present, so you configure the OS with a custom device tree file that provides that info instead. Some server hardware actually does have UEFI (SBBR), so presumably could support a truly generic boot image, I think, but someone more familiar with it may correct me on that point.

Sure they do. Ampere Altra Max has 128 cores of ARM goodness. The benchmarks show it mostly running about half the speed of recent AMD and Intel offerings, and actually beating the Xeon in some tests, but using significantly less power to do it (resulting in better performance per watt).

And with more and more server workloads depending on outboard GPUs and TPUs for most of the interesting workload, raw server CPU performance is likely to take a back seat to power consumption anyway at some point.

They *are* making them. The dealers are not *selling* them. And if the dealers aren't selling them, they're not going to make larger quantities of them. And as I said, the dealers have every reason to *not* want to sell them. They don't make nearly as much money off of EVs on an ongoing basis, because they require far less service (fewer major malfunctions, no oil changes, fewer brake jobs, etc.).

Also, unionized car companies are under heavy pressure from the unions to drag their heels on EVs because there are fewer parts to put together, and the cars require less human labor to build, which means fewer workers. (Pedantically, they don't require significantly less human labor, but a big chunk of the labor shifts to the battery manufacturers.)

No conspiracy is needed. The car manufacturers have unions pushing them on one side to not make EVs and their dealer network pushing them on the other side to not make EVs. What possible incentive, other than being compelled to do so by law, could possibly get them to build more EVs that cost more (and by extension, will sell fewer units even in an ideal world) under those circumstances?

Depends on the vehicle. Some cars stop doing that after a period of time, and some use a power threshold. There might even be some cars that don't do it at all, but I'm not sure.

For Tesla, as I understand it, the HV battery is used to periodically recharge the 12V battery as long as the HV battery is above 20% SoC. So for most EVs, the answer is yes, just because Teslas are... well, most EVs. :-D

To understand why, you need only look at what Tesla does with the 12V battery. When sentry mode is active, both the self-driving computer and the MCU are active (with the screen off), drawing as much as O(300) watts continuously. The 12V battery in a Tesla is a 33AH battery (around half the size of a typical ICE car's battery), which means that at 300 watts, it would completely deplete the battery in about 79 minutes.

There are, of course, various intermediate levels of consumption between deep sleep and sentry mode that have various levels of power consumption, resulting in the battery charging anywhere from frequently to rarely.

And of course, sentry mode is automatically disabled below 20% state of charge so that it won't kill your 12V battery. :-)

To be fair, half a percent is actually only slightly below the average for tech-sector stocks right now. AAPL is paying 24 cents quarterly on $170 (.565%), and the Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Fund (FNCMX) has a forward dividend yield of 0.64% annually.

Very little of an EV's weight comes from anything that's particularly rare.

The main components in a modern Tesla battery are lithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. Lithium is the rarest, at about .002% of the Earth's crust. There's "only" about a third as much of that as there is copper. Now think about how much we use copper. Iron makes up 6.3% of the Earth's crust, making it the fourth most abundant element behind only oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. Phosphorus makes up about .1% of the Earth's crust (which is still 17x as common as copper, and only slightly behind hydrogen). And of course oxygen is the most common element in the Earth's crust.

The industry as a whole is built around a dealer network that depends on repairs and service charges to stay in business. Apart from stupid minor problems, EVs have far fewer major mechanical issues than ICE cars, so dealers don't really want to sell them. I would argue that there is every financial incentive for car dealers to ensure that EVs fail. Those dealers are the ones who help people decide what to buy, and if they're discouraging EV sales, you're not going to get any EV sales.

I believe that the word in all three cases is "won't" not "can't", for the reason stated above.

How do you figure? Tesla sold 1.8 million cars in 2023. And even in a really down quarter this year, they still made over a billion dollars in profit. That's not what I would call "struggling financially". Sales are down lately, but I think that's mostly the public's reaction to Tesla's really stupid and user-hostile design changes (e.g. no turn signal stalk, changing gears with the touchscreen, etc.) that they have made over the past few months, rather than because of anything specific to electric vehicles themselves. I love my 2017 Model X, but I wouldn't feel comfortable buying any car that Tesla is currently selling, and I doubt I'm in the minority here.

What efficiency problems? They're already vastly more efficient than ICE cars by any metric. Capacity problems? How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping? Endurance problems? Far fewer major mechanical problems than equivalent ICE cars also contradicts that theory.

EVs are already cost effective, and if Tesla would stop trying to be cute and f**king up their steering wheels in new and infuriating ways every year or two, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Also note that ICE cars also frequently fail to start when parked outside in cold temperatures. This isn't specific to EVs. If anything, EVs should be a lot less likely to fail to start, because they have a giant lithium ion battery pack with battery heaters to maintain its temperature, and that main pack periodically tops up the 12V battery when it gets low. Also, EVs tend to have active monitoring to warn you when the 12V battery is getting near the end of its life.

What's really sad is that it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, we went to Canada and Mexico all the time, and we never had passports. The passport requirement wasn't introduced for travel by land until 2009 for Canada and 2008 for Mexico (and previously, in 2007 for travel by air to Canada or Mexico). You still had to go through customs at the border, but it was nothing like what people have to deal with today.

Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

I have no confidence in their estimate, either. I think they overestimated it by $20 billion.

Think about it. In the Bay Area, people travel just 10 miles per day on average. I think the state average is somewhere closer to 20 or 30. Even if you assume 30 miles, that's only ~7.5 kWh of charging per day. Spread over 12 hours of being plugged in, that comes to just 2.6 amperes per vehicle on average.

My air conditioner can end up running very nearly continuously during the day in the hottest part of the summer, drawing O(30) amps. And you're telling me that the local grid can handle that, but somehow can't handle a measly 2.6 amps of car charging power overnight (when air temperatures are cool and the air conditioner mostly isn't running)? Is this a joke?

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that somewhere in Southern California, there might be some craptastic circuits that can't handle it, and maybe a few mobile home parks here and there, but... I suspect the number is a heck of a lot closer to zero than to 20 billion, much less 40.

The flip side is that when halfway through the development cycle, the dev decides to go a completely different direction and starts over with a radically different concept, now the people who bought in at the beginning don't have any ability to vote with their dollars and ask for a refund, which is problematic. So there are abusers on both sides.

More importantly, this change makes early access a whole lot less attractive and a whole lot riskier from the perspective of a potential buyer. As a result, I'd expect people to be a lot less likely to bite the bullet and give people money before something is complete or nearly complete. And I suspect that the people who do buy early access games won't be willing to spend as much money for that privilege because of the increased risk caused by this rule change. So creators are likely to get significantly less money by making something available in early access than they would have before this change to the rules — likely to the point where it doesn't even make sense to release something as early access until it is mostly finished, which completely defeats the purpose.

There's probably a middle ground somewhere, but my suspicion is that this will turn out to be a significant net negative for content creators, in spite of preventing a small number of freeloaders from taking advantage of it.

Also, if it becomes obvious that making things available for early access won't bring in a significant percentage of the final purchase price, I would expect most content creators to start making early access versions available through other vendors, either with a Patreon-like model or by making early versions free with the understanding that at some point, they'll charge for it, and only people who buy it will be able to upgrade past version 0.5 or whatever. And approximately none of those people will end up converting to paid ownership through Steam, so Steam will also end up making less money as a result.

So I'm having a hard time seeing how this is supposed to actually be a revenue-positive decision for anyone involved.

The funny thing is where they call this America's first true high-speed rail system, when it averages just 100 MPH, meanwhile parts of Acela express have been running 90 MPH for more than two decades, with peak speeds over 150 MPH. And over the course of this year, the equipment on that route is being replaced with new Avelia Liberty equipment that may actually make it average faster speeds than what Brightline is proposing.

To be pedantic, by 1985, Metroliner *barely* qualified as high-speed, because it could hit a maximum of 125 MPH, which is the absolute minimum for qualifying as high-speed rail. But in 1969, it was just 120 MPH, which isn't considered HSR.

The difference between Brightline and the California HSR is that the Brightline "high-speed" rail project involves only about 40 miles of new track, largely along an existing limited-access toll highway, with the remaining 195 miles using existing tracks, and as I understand it, exactly none of it is running at speeds that actually qualify for a high-speed rail designation (125 MPH for upgraded tracks, or 155 MPH for new tracks). In fact, it averages just 69 MPH, according to Wikipedia.

So sure, Brightline is a shining example of how to achieve "results", if by results, you mean spending as much money as California's high-speed rail system has spent so far, while only building 40 miles of track and setting up a new passenger train line that on average is within the margin of error of being the same speed as driving. If they get the speeds up, it might eventually be interesting, but right now, it just seems like a huge money pit to me.

At least California's HSR is designed for actual high speeds (max 220 MPH), rather than for half that speed, and when it eventually gets finished, will provide a very real benefit. And if Brightline had to deal with a decade of environmental reviews like the California HSR project did, they probably wouldn't have even bothered starting to build it. The delays in California have very little to do with government running the project and everything to do with other parts of the government getting in the way of the project.