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?

How "bout those removable phone batteries?

Yeah, taxes are generally unavoidable for most people.

Hosting a blog on Substack is just a market choice among so many.

Apple and Google stores are a bit more grey; I'd allow it.

It's like those guys who find a Civil War chest with a hundred gold coins in it and call the FBI.

Clout is far too expensive.

This is the one where they investigate Office on Antitrust grounds and wind up settling for not bundling Edge.

I've seen it in reruns....

Ah, gotcha. You were referring to the comment from the summary, not mine. Yeah, it's fun to watch the young'uns realize that they are absolutely going to spend their whole lives realizing they forgot something they used to know. It's even more fun to watch them the first time they look at code they wrote two months ago and say "Who wrote this stupid shit? Oh....".

I said some kind words about Anthropic when they refused to do targeting foreign and domestic.

In retrospect that was myopic praise.

Really? Doesn't feel that way at all to me. What it feels like is that LLMs are a massive force multiplier for the skills I already have.

Why the scare quotes? Are you uncertain if she's a woman? Or do you not understand how to use quotation marks?

Did they steal stuff worth millions?

Though, of course, this raises the question of why someone would leave valuable masters in a suitcase in an unoccupied core.

I resd a story about someone with Bitcoin keys on a laptop which they lost access to.

It was put on a shelf waiting for an exploit like this.

blacklist: esp4 esp6 rxrpc

If you already did it for dirtyfrag you're good.

Dude, I've been writing code for 40 years. I've used so many different tools, stacks, libraries and APIs that at this point I don't remember any of them, and I haven't remembered them for years, and it doesn't matter at all. Sure, I have to look everything up, but that's fine, that doesn't matter. What matters is that I know when something looks wrong, or hard to maintain, or inefficient, or insecure, or... pick the axis. And I can dig in and find the problem. Anyone can tell if code works, that's easy. Understanding when and why it might break or otherwise impose additional costs, that's the real skill.

Which, as it happens, is exactly the skill you need to use an LLM effectively. Also the skill you need to understand legacy code, review colleagues' commits, etc., etc., etc. I used to say that the ability to read and understand code is an underrated skill, but an old friend corrected me at lunch a couple of weeks ago, saying that the ability to read and understand code is the most important software engineering skill, and always has been. Upon reflection, I agreed. And LLMs make this clearer than ever before.

I'm confused by all of these posters who've never heard of "the curve". I wonder if it's because they're all young'uns who went to school during an interval when progressive educators had decided to abandon it... with the inevitable grade inflation that was totally predicted.

When I was in college 40 years ago every class that had more than ~30 students in it was graded on the curve, and even some of the smaller ones (though in a smaller class it becomes statistically questionable). I used to love the groans when a buddy and I walked in the first day of class, because they knew we were going to "bend the curve". :D

Though in all seriousness, the whole point of using a curve is that in a sufficiently large class, it's statistically guaranteed (to very high probability) to be "unbendable". Inserting a couple of students at the top would mean that students who might be just above a cutoff might fall just below it, but it's not going to make a difference to many.

College isn't like tee-ball, where every player gets a participation trophy, and it shouldn't be. Especially not at elite schools. Part of the purpose of a university education is to act as a filter, and not just to filter out those who can't cut it at all, but to rank all of the students by performance, so graduate schools and potential employers can make use of that information.

Don't be so sure about the "shipped off". Google is heavily investing in on-device AI that runs in a trusted enclave (e.g. TrustZone on ARM). I left the company in August of last year but I doubt this has changed since it's been a major area of focus for quite some time.