I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

At least it's not more Star Wars slop.

I've been driving EVs since I first got a used Tesla S (2014 P85D). I have a 2020 Chevy Bolt EV I use as my daily driver right now. I recently rented a 2025 Toyota Camry Hybrid, which seems to be in high demand and very highly rated/recommended out there.

My experience was ... disappointing. Now granted, it delivered on the fuel economy part. I drove it several hundred miles over a few days' time and when I went to refuel it before the rental return, it only needed 6 gallons of gas to fill it back up. But the whole driving experience felt like a big step back from any EV I'd driven. You had the constant sensation of a gas engine turning on and off at various times, and a constant reminder the battery pack in the vehicle was tiny and only a part of a more complicated system. (You could put the car in "EV mode" to make it drive only on battery, but it would only allow it at very low speeds, like driving around parking lots.) Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise. (Better interior than I'm used to seeing w/Toyota though.)

I'm kind of confused w/Honda. Their "EV strategy" seemed to me like it was basically about trying to sell that Prologue which was really a GM designed car getting rebranded as a Honda product + hand-waving that they'd do cooler stuff soon.

Truthfully? I think one of the big challenges with EVs across the board is trying to mask the high cost of the battery pack, motors and other electronics involved. You can "do it right" by not caring and slapping a high price tag on it. Then you get an EV that still maintains people's expectations for "fit and finish", a nice interior, and really good handling. The BMW i4 eDrive 40 is a great example here, or even the Porsche Taycan EV. But most people just want a cheap car that's reliable, avoids the need for gas fill-ups and oil changes, while still handling well and feeling like corners weren't cut on the build quality, interior and exterior. That doesn't really seem to be doable, yet? Tesla sure doesn't. They just design vehicles that few people think look great on the outside. but "wow" them with all the infotainment / computer capabilities on the inside. Keep the interior really bare-bones but put that big touch-screen front and center to distract them. Spend enough on the seats so they're really comfortable, but use a real basic "skateboard" suspension and frame across the whole product line. It goes fast enough in a straight line so they'll ignore other handling issues.

Don't get me wrong. I like Tesla vehicles. I'm just being real about what one is and isn't. I don't think an established brand like Honda is comfortable making all those compromises, and they're just not seeing a profit margin in converting what they build now into a full EV?

Only if you say it's OK elsewhere.

To train an LLM during flight.

> "washington bureaucracy" just means "democrats"

Don't something like 80% of Federal employees vote Democrat?

If so, yeah, they would appear to be correct.

They're well aware that the Chinese aren't idiots and their worst nightmare is for China to start selling cheap AI chips which undercut those $50,000 GPUs and put them out of business.

Which is exactly what will happen if China can't buy Western chips and rely on them continuing to work if Trump decides he's going to bomb China next.

Yes. With companies declaring that they're going to replace most jobs with LLMs it seems weird that universities would be telling students they can't use them.

The entire university system is broken and they haven't yet come to terms with that.

But I'm sure Xi would much rather throw money at building up local AI chip design and chip manufacturing.

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

Amazon I.T. .... your ridiculous middle management and their obsession over metrics make stories like these pathetic, yet not unexpected at all.

> Along with the 8 hour day and the five-day work week (for those of you with a life other than work), vacations, benefits - every single thing came from unions.

All those things came from companies wanting to hire good employees and keep them. The more benefits they offered, the better employees they got.

Look at Henry Ford, who doubled his workers wages because had more than 100% annual employee turnover and doubling the wages meant he got the best people and they had nowhere else to go for a better-paid job in the auto business. Or the entire health insurance system in the US which largely came about because employers wanted to hire more and better people in WWII and couldn't raise wages so gave them more benefits instead.

My girlfriend is in a union. A few years ago a new employee was such an asshole that a couple of existing employees quit over it. They tried to sack the new employee because she was still in her probation anyway and could be let go for any reason, but the union blocked it... even though other union members had quit their jobs to get away from that person.

I've rarely seen a union anyone I know belongs to do anything worthwhile.

I.T. is going down a spiral where management treats you like a "digital janitor". I'm old enough to remember this being a fairly respected career path. People in most offices had a combination of fear and awe of the "I.T. guys" because ultimately, there was a realization the entire business relied on the technology to survive. If the server or network went down, everything ground to a halt. You simply didn't treat the team poorly who held the keys to the kingdom.

It's a very different atmosphere today. Now, everyone's worried about how to cut costs and achieve the maximum return. I.T. may be critically important to a business's success, but nobody cares. There's the constant suggestion that AI is about to replace half of them anyway, and the trick is to wring every bit of productivity out of the existing staff until they quit. Then you just replace them and repeat.

If you're reading this and thinking, "It's not like that at all where I work!", congratulations! You're part of a diminishing bit of sanity out there. The last place I worked like that, though? The owner passed away and the company was sold, and it's no longer an exception to the rule.

The idea someone needs to micro manage their "knowledge workers" to the extent they keep tabs on how many feet their mouse has rolled each day? Well, that's plain insulting they'd even think it's sensible!

We tried the whole "if you don't like it, leave!" Boomer thing but then it turned out that many companies are run by sociopaths with no concept of normal human behaviour. So no, they don't get to say Muh Private Company any more.