The ingredients are listed on the wrapper!

A company powered by institutional employee burnout with the main product being enshittification. Truly a business miracle indicative of the ages.

Of course, but my point is that instead of one giant leap, the general direction of electrifying the trailer means you can incrementally inch towards it without trying to make a level 5 death bricks all at once.

Yeah, it's a single unsteerable axle right now, but if these becomes common, you might as well eventually add steering that'd help with manoeuvres in tight spaces. If that proliferates well, you might as well start tacking on some autonomy to use in enclosed industrial areas. Once you have em rolling around ports and hubs on their own on strictly predetermined lanes, you can start looking into autonomy on the roads.

I'm not saying it's super likely to happen, I'm saying that the current thing being tested is a step in an interesting direction where you have a lot of, at that point, "low hanging fruits" that may be both worthwhile as well as plausible. Meanwhile, a fully electric, fully autonomous 18 wheeler monstrosity is far more of a moonshot where you have to deal with all the issues with that at the same time.

There's no reason it wouldn't "work" for a truck in the immediate practical, it just doesn't offer any real advantage and isn't plausible for logistical reasons.

We do it with train locomotives because they operate at torque/power levels where a purely mechanical transmission is a major pain in the ass to engineer, manufacture and maintain, also because the one disadvantage of an electric transmission (mass), isn't really a disadvantage for a train locomotive. But semi-trucks are small enough that the materials and manufacturing at scale makes their purely mechanical transmissions perfectly reasonable to fabricate out of very reasonable materials. Trucks are also more concerned with the mass of the tug, due to the way roads wear (unlike railroads where the weight loading is far less of a cost factor in the economics of maintaining it).

The mechanical transmission from the engine to the truck wheels is one of the most efficient and least issue prone parts of the system. By doing what you're suggesting, you're still eating the whole inefficiency of ICE engine (whereas the battery allows you to store and use use cheap renewable energy which is becoming increasingly abundant in many places, as well as still much more efficiently converted energy from fossil fuel if it has to come from there) and all you get is saving on some cheap oil and steel to replace it with expensive copper.

Also, by removing the battery, you take away one of the biggest advantages of this system; regenerative braking. For large tow trucks operating in any non-flat terrain, braking is kinda a big deal and a non-trivial part of their cost and environmental impact. Slowing down or stopping a truck running down a hill can put massive stress on disc brakes, which is why they often instead "jake brake" using their engine, using it as essentially a massive pneumatic brake, but that's loud and often banned within city limits, which means your mechanical brakes have to be hella oversized, and it also means you pollute the air with your brake pad dust, put wear on literally consumable parts of the vehicle, yadda yadda. If you have some electric motors and a battery, not only do you have a new silent, dust-free, low-wear method of braking, but also, it produces a bit of free fuel for you! Win win! You really need the battery to make it work, though. Meanwhile, connecting the diesel motor to the electric motors just doesn't really get you much of anything at all.

In that movie, there's these container haulers that just look like a run-away trailer without the truck, self driving and electrically powered, completely autonomously (and rather inconsiderately of pedestrians) blasting down the roads.

Well, this development feels like something that could actually lead to that future, a little at a time. Once you electrify the trailer with "assist", it might as well be given the ability to move around "on its own", slowly, around enclosed cargo ports, to facilitate the loading and whatnot, and come meet their tow out front, saving the time of the driver and the truck. And as reliability of the guidance grows, the tow might end up ditching them at the periphery of whatever city is the final destination so they can slowly trudge through traffic without making the trucker wait through it and without polluting the air. And eventually, as the battery ranges grow and, again, hopefully, safety improves, they'll eventually start taking the shorter range routes on their own, then the longer ones.

Can't say I'm super stoked about the idea of playing chicken on the interstate between animated death prisms, but at least it feels like there's a plausible path for that technology to both be developed and to be deployed, unlike most of the hare brained "it wil magically become a thing, disrupt everything and make all the money in the world overnight" ideas that seem to be preferred by venture capital these days.

I haven't yet met a person of flesh and blood putting effort into a drawing, photography, or even putting together nice outfits, who'd appreciate the interaction of someone modifying that content in any way only to repost it themselves. The literally sole exception is memes, where creativity of a badly cropped rehash is usually the one thing making them funny. Meta is slaughtering one of their last reasonably well performing social media platforms in a desperate effort to show off that they're still present in the race (even with very evident last place). Extraordinary move.

People have been often fucking right. History agrees with me.

I am "empowered and amplified", I use LLM's for coding pretty much every day, and I very much post about how "AI = Bad" because the net effect of AI I can see on the society, statistically and culturally, is a fairly negative.

Imagine bulldozers as a tool you can use became a thing overnight, with little precedent of what they can do. I happen to have qualified into operating a bulldozer early, because I happened to work on the immediate predecessors of bulldozers and experimented with bulldozer prototypes for years. And then I watched as the moment bulldozers became available, many people started driving bulldozers to work at their office job, bulldozer industry is trying to use regulatory capture to make sure bulldozer-as-a-service is the only option available to people (even if they're to use it to create new value), while simultaneously cannibalizing vast majority of manufacturing of anything remotely capable of manufacturing bulldozers, or even being able to distantly approximate a bulldozer. Kids are being pressed to learn to drive a bulldozer rather than to learn to read or write properly, and rarely get to touch a shovel anymore.

I'll go and say; damn, that bulldozer biz overall is pretty fucked up. I love using my bulldozer, it sure is convenient to my needs in the actual code mine, but it feels like while my personal bulldozer experience is great, I understand that for overwhelming majority of people, it feels like bulldozers are wacky nonsense.