There was a Sonnax fix for my ZF5HP42A valve body problems too. It didn't work.

Security is not a boolean.

Of all the things I wish I had gotten when my father died, his 1962 Chevy C10 with the 292 and 4 speed is at the absolute top. I would have updated from points to electronic ignition, though.

The ZF 8 has a 150k km planned lifespan and is known for valve body problems causing it to drop into limp mode.

I had enough fun with ZF when I had a ZF5. I don't need 3 more problems than I had with that one.

I never got myself into the whole "masculinity" obsession, even back in the 70s and 80s.

There is and was no wider obscession with masculinity. This is what so many people - women and men - get wrong about masculinity. There is very little in masculinity - even less that with femininity - that is _objectively_ masculine. Most of what constitutes masculinity is in the eye of the beholder. There are guys who think reckless driving, drinking and soccer are "masculine". I for one don't see it.

The narrative also is that men can't express their feelings. Which is complete and utter non-sense. The vast majority of significant art and poetry is done by men. Romanticism was invented by men. We are the romantic sex trying to be rational. And a significant part of being a man is tapping into the inner flame of poetry in whatever the man does and gaining an emotional resonance and depth that is independent of the whims of hetero-dynamic relationships. Escapism is a good fallback if society around you limits everything else. Which it tends to do.

Bottom line: You did the right thing. And masculinity-wise too.

They have been for decades really, it's just least common in OTR hauling because in that application the manual gearbox still has an efficiency advantage. They are probably most common for construction equipment because the automatic gearbox offers tangible advantages there. There's a promotional video from Allison which is pretty easy to find whose tagline is something like "continuous power" about how the benefits of their transmissions which are able to make shifts under full power, which is true; the heavy ones are full planetary gear designs and they are as convenient and reliable as the day is long. These gearboxes also don't conveniently feature more than six speeds, but on the plus side, Allison tends to give two overdrives on highway use transmissions.

The problem with consumer-level automatic transmissions continues to be reliability. A lot of the modern many-speed automatic transmissions have only a single-gear limp mode which is only suitable for getting them onto a trailer, where older transmissions often used to have two-speed limp mode, and some of the new transmissions cannot limp at all without a functioning TCM. I see that as a big drawback. Belt-driven CVTs are also infamously fragile, yet also dominant in low-end vehicles.

Those time frames are sufficiently different that you really cannot draw any conclusions from them alone, but the writing is clearly on the wall for manual transmissions in Europe as well, they're just a bit behind the curve. ICEVs themselves are going away, and are likely to stop being sold sooner in Europe than the USA, so they may well catch up.

Well, it isn't for a whole lot of reasons. Zeroth, "utopia" means nowhere and it's a thought experiment. First and foremost though, the "I" in "I'm" — utopia is supposed to be a type of society and not just a state of being for a single person. It's working for you now so you are happy now. But you being able to replace all those people now somehow hasn't made you wonder if you are going to be replaced.

Another reason which is (now that I make the comparison) actually equally important is that AI is based on unsustainable resource consumption, which means that it's fundamentally not post-scarcity.

Maybe you should ask an AI what some of these words you're using mean. It seems to be making you dumber already, though, so it would probably be healthier to look them up for yourself instead of asking a LLM and having it tell you that you are a very smart boy.

That's a particularly sad little straw man even for Slashdot.

What we know for sure already is that AI use is correlated with impaired knowledge accumulation and transfer. It's poisoning its own well.

It's not treason unless you do it for the purpose of harming your country or aiding an adversary. This is "only" sharing confidential and potentially classified material out of scope, which is also serious but doesn't call for anyone to be hung by the neck until dead.

You're correctly describing a phenomenon. However, that has nothing to do with ADHD and everything to do with gyno-centric social dynamics that - by sheer evo-psych - looks for ways to exploit men. This is how cultures grow and develop. There's quite a bit of research on that (neatly sidelined by contemporary mainstream femnoise).

Bottom line: The problem you describe is a fundamental one that exists for ADHD males as it does for "regular" males. It's only that ADHD males are perhaps more sensitive to these dynamics. That's why there is a solid amount of evidence that male ADHD in particular actually is an advantage for populations, because it forces those men to leave the beaten path and explore new ground. The 'rebel' gene of ADHD is a useful vector for discovering new paths for a given population/society.

Disclaimer: ADHD candidate here.

I could write an entire set of essays on what we currently know about ADHD here but it basically boils down to this:

ADHDlers have a hightened sensitivity towards their value for people around them. So we go about our day constantly scanning for dopamine spikes or true connection. I need my medication the least when I'm in love with a cute lady (and she is with me). Given that through evolution men are more disposable than women the sense of self-worth is challenged way more often in boys and men that it is with women. Especially in a time where robots are doing more and more of the heavy lifting and masculinity is considered "toxic". Hence excessive male escapism, especially with male teens and those with perpetual creative impulses (aka ADHD types). If we didn't have this sort of escapism, fascism would've long since taken over way harder than it's doing right now.

I'm either dancing, moving around, escaping at one of my computer devices or doing some (somewhat) exotic activity thing like kitesurfing, paragliding, motorbike riding, scating, bikepacking, etc. This is SOP for an ADHD man like me.

The whole trick is not to feel guilt or toxic shame when you do escapism. You're actually doing very little damage to anybody else, it's cheap and it's a perfect fit for a society that has an abundance of stimulation just an internet connection away. Overcoming that involves actively working on your attachment style, abandonment terror and any shame-based identity that many people have. Once that happens, going out, roaming the countryside or travelling the world suddenly becomes way more interesting. Which is precisely for what the ADHD disposition brings some advantages along.

That ADHDlers are more prone to this or it's mental fallback alternative called escapism than people with a stronger frontal lobe should be obvious.

That's why my code is better that ever but I get to close up shop at 5 in the afternoon. For me 10x _is_ realized. For my company it's closer to 5x. Which is no problem for me because it's actually my private AI metasubscription taking care of all this.

This is my initial point: I get to take it easy because at least half of AIs productivity gains benefit me directly. As of know I'm basically being paid to tell robots what to do. And that's pretty much the definition of a post-scarcity utopia if you ask me.

If Google provides 100x value to users why wouldn't this translate to a measurable increase in labor productivity?

Because those productivity gains are getting absorbed by our culture. That is my entire point.

A bushmans productivity in scavenging does not show up in the stock market because he doesn't even know (or care) what a stock market is. Likewise that you and I can read and write and do math and know enough about germ and pathogen theory to wash our hands with soap and eat with cutlery does not show up on the stock market either. It's basically a given that we know these things in our civilisation.

The exact same thing is happening with AI. AI is so universal, I'd go so far as to say that tracking it's value gain in some stock market borders on the silly. Especially if you expect it to bring the gains we all hope for. If AI puts me out of a job, that's tough luck for me but for humanity it's a huge plus.

That's why I'm going to replace my coding work with doing Yoga, exercising, doing Art, travelling and eating healthy. That's by and large the best retirement plan for a Senior Software dev being made obsolete in my position.

Clean fresh Codebase. Angular frontend, Deno backend, PostgreSQL DB, no bloat, carefully selected dependencies. Single DB record class. Clean state management (NgRX), TDD The only thing I have to look out for is when the AI loses context and forgets to use a specific state store or API. And reinvents the wheel within a new class or component. One "reminder" usually fixes that. That's why I review so code. Other than that it's basically perfect. Way better than and human team I've worked with in the past.

Another point in case: I've started making music using AI. I already have an album of 23 songs, half of which are really good. All done with AI, on the side, within less than three weeks. This would be 3 months of work of professional musicians, composers and producers and thousands of euros without AI. With it's a laptop and an 8 Euro monthly subscription.

Bottom line: Check out AI. You want to be prepared for what's coming.