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Comment Passengers and cargo vary considerably. (Score 1) 178

What SPECIFICALLY do you haul that you presume to speak for all users who "haul things"?

Four door vehicles including Suburbans (whose "bed" is internal) are popular with businesses for many good reasons. They haul a three-person crew plus their personal items, have room for cargo (which a short bed crew cab equivalent does with extra clearance for outsize items) and make excellent towing vehicles.

There are many ways to roll one's own work truck besides single cab long beds. (I've one of those, too.) Short beds do not exclude long cargo else I'd not use mine for that (I've multiple trucks in various flavors). Accessories like lift gates work well on either (and on vans and box trucks) and in the case of liftgates extend the bed when travelling with the gate down.

Is it so terribly difficult to understand buyers who already have those choices buy what we do?

Comment Re:Maybe try making trucks people want? (Score 1) 178

BEV proponents don't care about people who use trucks as trucks or why that used market requires ICE.

They don't use liftgates (I find it odd more truck buyers don't install them but attribute that to ignorance of how very useful they are) so hauling the weight of same plus cargo and often towed loads is not their concern. I quite like mine which is a major back saver.

Their sole agenda is forcing you to obey them. That's typical and a major reason people who would not otherwise vote right wing consider they've no other way to defend themselves.

Selling new trucks requires sufficient demand from the USED market to make new trucks a wise economic choice.

Comment Used vehicles win on TCO over time. (Score 1) 178

Same here but I renovated my houses and built my workshops.

I can retain my paid-for gassers for another 50 years (in the case of my '75 F350) or another ~26 years (F150s and one 5.3 Silverado) at trivial cost because they are designed to be repairable and are not vendor locked by electronic feature bloat.

Early 2000 LS drivetrain trucks and vans already fetch high prices because later years are so intensely mechanic-hostile. (Mechanic of many decades here.)

Driving used trucks let me easily pay off my homes and acreage then retire early. Buying even one new truck would have delayed my financial freedom by years.

When Slashdot was a techie site more viewers understood such things.

Comment It's simply not a good TRUCK because it's electric (Score 1) 178

Function is the issue, not being a pickup. This may be painfully difficult to understand for BEV zealots but not everyone WANTS what leftists (it's political, you want social control by regulation) attempt to coerce people into buying. Build what customers want, not what someone who is not a customer wishes they should want.

Compete or be cast out.

I and millions of others would be delighted to buy a BEV truck that equals or surpasses gassers in EVERY way with zero sacrifice of functions WE (not you) care about. When one pays that much excuses won't do.

There is no current coldly pragmatic personal reason to buy a BEV pickup truck no matter how much frothers screech otherwise. They're not good enough at truck tasks yet. People who don't use trucks pretend they know what's best for people who do and vilify gasser pickups (though the same drivetrain in a van triggers no one).

Comment Range anxiety is legit. (Score 1) 178

One add a larger or additional fuel tank to any conventional truck, or plop a transfer tank with pump in the bed.

People buy trucks to serve their use case, not to serve anyone else's. Invent a form and fit gasser replacement and they'd sell, but paying for inferior performance is absurd.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

Comment Or deliberate editors... (Score 2) 35

They don't care for reasons they choose not acknowledge.
Their revenue appears unconnected to Slashdot importance, or is sufficient without the effort to restore quality. I find this interesting.

That's why they choose not to respond to (not the same as "ignore") valid criticism. The enshittification of Slashdot is deliberate. It's easy money for minimal effort.

Slashdot owners could easily replace editors with AI and arguably should since the threshold for acceptable "quality" has been so low for so long no one would notice.

Comment Re:"globally and in a coordinated way" (Score 3, Insightful) 41

We cannot even agree not to do wars that are essentially just stealing from others.

Nonsense. My people lived on that land centuries ago even though others were already there so it's my land by default. It's not stealing. I'm just taking back what is mine.

Comment Re:What if there is a breakthrough in sanity? (Score 1) 29

2007/8 was also the result of fraud and the interdependence of the banking and rating system. For a study on how this worked and what happened, you can read this paper.

Also, I distinctly remember banks giving a loan to anyone with a pulse despite the rules saying otherwise as well as double or even triple mortgaging the same property.to different people.

As for the banks, it did end badly, right up to the moment the taxpayers were once again held at gunpoint and told to hand over their money. That is why Bear Stearns is no longer around. Unfortunately, others involved weren't allowed to fail as well.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

And my point is that AI wouldn't just stop being used even if the bubble imploded so heavily that all of the major AI providers of today went under. It's just too easy to run today. The average person who wants something free would on average use a worse-quality model, but they're not going to just stop using models. And inference costs for higher-end models would crash if the big AI companies were no longer monopolozing the giant datacentres (which will not simply vanish just because their owners lose their shirts; power is only about a third the cost of a datacentre, and it gets even cheaper if you idle datacentres during their local electricity peak-demand times).

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