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Comment Re:Should have brought them out sooner (Score 1) 114

Even being relatively more rare isn't an issue right now, or it might be, but only in a very few places. Most of the time, the chargers are empty. One presumes as EVs become more popular, there will be even more charging stations. One of the major gas stations in Canada (Petro Canada) even has its own chargers at some stations.

Also, I think PHEVs may be a good alternative right now, since something like 90% of people's driving is 50km per day, and most PHEVs can handle that on a charge. Then you plug in at night and you're gtg. They would represent a major reduction in fuel consumption if we just got that far.

Comment Re:If they can't figure out EV (Score 1) 114

Since I charge overnight (from an outdoor outlet, not even an L2 charger), I never have less than a 60% charge on my car at home. I spend less time overall at stops if you consider the totality of my life than when I had a petrol or diesel car. I recently drove 400km each way to another city, and I spent about 20 minutes at one L3 charger on the way there, and maybe 30 minutes total charging on the way back, and I needed to walk around and go to the washroom anyway. There's basically no difference in my road trip times from before. I used to be able to get about 1100km on a single tank of diesel with my VW wagon (my Ioniq 6 gets "only" 520km on a 90% charge), but I still had to stop every few hours to pee and stretch my legs and take on food. The human body is not meant to drive 6 hour stints. (I raced bikes and had a girlfriend in the USA in my 30s so I would drive 600km each way on a weekend on a fairly regular basis. No regrets, but I don't recommend that as a way to spend your time.)

Comment Re:If they can't figure out EV (Score 1) 114

I just drove 400km each way to visit family in another city. I'm Canadian, and the distances between cities here are considerably longer on average than in the USA. I had no problem charging in the middle of large mountain parks where there was otherwise no mobile phone reception. This is such a stunningly brain-dead take, I can only assume you've never actually driven anywhere with your eyes open. There are L2 and L3 charging stations everywhere even here. I live in a town of 30k people and I could go charge at some Mercedes 800v superchargers if I wanted to. I have a very hard time believing that Canada is ahead of the USA in infrastructure in this regard.

Also, while my townhouse has a driveway, I'm only using my outdoor outlet to charge right now. It's fine.

Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 1) 293

All of the chargers that I've stopped at in BC (in between cities) have been in big open areas or parks where you can walk your dog. The OnRoute stops also have green areas.

I greatly suspect that the thing you're asking for is actually not any sort of problem at all, you just haven't looked into it so you don't know. I'm not gonna do your homework for you (more than I already have) but you can actually just search for this stuff. Or, frankly, you can just set out and not worry about it, because a) your car isn't going to take 30 minutes to charge; and b) you're likely to end up near some green space anyway. Just pick up after your dog. That's what people walking their dogs in the city do when the dog doesn't wait for a park or a lawn.

Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 2) 293

Have you? We live in a society, my guy. Just because you lack planning skills doesn't mean that everyone else should have to choke on your exhaust. Electricity (even from coal plants) is cleaner and more efficient than burning petrol in an engine. It's also much cheaper than gasoline. But in all likelihood, your state has SOME mix of renewable power in there, which just makes it better.

Anyway, if you just plug your car in at home, you leave with a full charge every day. It's LESS time spent filling up.

Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 1) 293

I lived in an apartment in Montreal. I had street parking. The building had an outdoor socket. I would park near my building whenever I could because I actually drove my car so little that I needed to string a power cable to run a battery charger. I got around the sidewalk blocking by throwing it over the branch of a nearby tree, but I could've found a dozen other ways to do it.

But look, you're not wrong that it's stupid that I even had to do that much. People should have better access to charging. But frankly, the amount you need to charge an EV is surprisingly minimal. There are dozens of level 2 chargers in my city (of 30k--I moved away from Montreal) and many of them are even free; a perk of patronizing one of the businesses in town. The ones that aren't free are pretty cheap. Level 2 isn't fast, but it's enough to keep you on the road. Even a level 3 charger in the middle of nowhere (there's long stretches of nowhere in Canada, and in some of those nowheres, the government has built chargers) costs half as much per unit distance as petrol.

Cities should build more infrastructure for people that park on the street, 100%, no argument. But you really just don't need to care very much, it turns out. Small sips of power here and there will keep you going for a long time.

Comment Love how they asked it 'why' (Score 2) 110

Listen, ding-dongs, the 'explanation' is ALSO just generated pseudo-random text. It's still just telling you what it thinks you want to hear based on some training data and network weights. It can't introspect, it can't tell you why, it has no memory of doing anything, per se. It goes back and looks at the log maybe, or more likely it just reads that you want an explanation for something and just creates it based on that little bit of text.

I bet you could go to any LLM, tell it to pretend that this whole ordeal is that chatbot's backstory, and it would spin you the same yarn.

IT'S HALLUCINATIONS ALL THE WAY DOWN.

Can these things write some pretty okay code sometimes? Sure, yeah. Can you trust any 'reasoning'? NO. STOP TRYING TO MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.

Comment Re:X86 chips still run rings around arm processors (Score 1) 89

This is less and less true as time goes on, and only for either heavily parallelized processes, processes that require ENORMOUS amounts of memory, or processes that require extreme amounts of GPU. Even then, the GPU gap is getting smaller if you're not talking about gaming.

I compile Unreal Engine for my job. I do it a lot. My M1 Mac Mini, 5 years old, keeps up astonishingly well with my work-issued i9. I'm sure an M5 would blow it out of the water.

I'm sure there are workloads where what you're saying is true, but I don't think you can make this as a broad claim anymore. M-series chips aren't low-powered chips, they're higher efficiency chips. They do more with less. I don't look at benchmarks from Apple (or Intel), either--I only pay attention to benchmarks from 3rd parties, and they're still quite favourable. Aside from gaming--where we ABSOLUTELY optimize the hell out of things, and tune things specifically to hardware as best as we can--most general purpose software that runs on both runs within a totally acceptable margin either way.

Comment Spares, by Michael Marshall Smith (Score 1) 163

"Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s, but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities."

Anyway, we're all saying the same thing here. This is all Torment Nexus stuff. We know how this ends.

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