Labor is also cheaper than AI.

Companies need to burn thousands of dollars in tokens to get agents to do even vaguely equivalent work. Sure, the agent works all night and doesn't need breaks, but it also costs money literally every second you use it, and the end result STILL needs to be checked to make sure nothing insane happened.

Humans--even if you pay them a fair wage--are remarkably efficient at turning food (and coffee) into code and systems. The so-called 10x or 100x programmers (guys like Carmack) really DO exist. And while they're a nightmare to work with, generally speaking, they'll code circles around any agent. If you want something that nobody likes working with that will also give you hard to maintain code, hire a 10x programmer. At least you'll get a working system at the end of the day, and he didn't use a swimming pool full of water an a small gas power plant worth of energy to get it done.

Interestingly, literally the only person in my friend group that still drives stick is a woman. It's a relatively modern Honda (like, new enough that it has a backup camera in it). She's also one of the smoothest drivers I've ever ridden with. Her shifts are impeccable.

we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Move further south, I guess. The rest of the country is much warmer, more livable, and doesn't freeze solid for three months out of the year. The fact that you have to change your clocks twice a year to cope with it isn't my problem.

Given your user ID # I think you know the reason(s)

It is like, $20 a month and far, far cheaper than cable or whatever. I don't like paying for services, but I don't like dealing with ads even more. If there's an option for an ad-free experience, I will always take that option.

Basically everyone who works in a regulated industry, or industry that should be does, yes.

I've been paying for Kagi ($10/mo?) now for over a year across both personal and work devices and I don't miss it at all. The only time I still use google is if I need to buy a product and want to see what is available besides what is on amazon, i'll seach "toaster oven" to get inundated with ads (and then 12-48 hours later see ads for toaster oven across all my social medias and youtube). Turning off the googs cold-turkey and then selectively using it, it's been very interesting to see what kind of targeted ads I see.

The oil from the tar sands isn't really good for petrol that you put in a car, and we let our refining capacity wane over the years as it is.

Everything we're doing here in Canada (I'm also Canadian) is such a boondoggle. The pipeline that Trudeau bought will never be profitable, and any other pipeline we pay for will be a similar money-loser. (If pipelines were as good investments as Danielle Smith claimed, oil companies would pay for them.)

I'd be willing to see EV subsidies go away if the government would also get rid of oil and gas subsidies, AND get rid of the tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Like, everything the government does right now is a tilt towards some ultra-profitable oil and gas donor, and we could save a lot of tax dollars just doing a reset and not subsidizing anything. On that basis, EVs would almost certainly win on their merits.

(I bought a used EV. It was still the most expensive car I've ever bought, inflation adjusted. But it costs $2/100km to drive for the electricity. The only other thing I need to maintain are the tyres. The running costs are ridiculously low.)

I think the global numbers are low, honestly, and that's mostly down to this misadventure in Iran. Countries that had to ration oil and gas are seeing people flee to solar panels and Chinese EVs.

I actually kinda think that's what's going on already, tbh. My Ioniq 6 gets 100% of the claimed range at 90% charge, as near as I can tell. They've definitely fudged it a little.

Used EVs are such a good buy. My Ioniq 6 came with 40k km on it, and that's basically brand new. Certainly the interior and exterior look pristine, and without many wearing parts, the thing rolled off the lot with 100% of the claimed range (actually, a bit more) and hasn't given me any trouble at all.

It costs me about $2/100km of driving. I've seen petrol and diesel up to $2/L here on bad days, and even in a very efficient car, you need 5L/100km.

(One hiccup: someone literally stole my charging cable while the car was charging in my driveway. My fault, though. I didn't see the setting to keep the cable locked to the car unless the doors are unlocked. They just disconnected the power and it unlocked itself. But L2 chargers are so cheap, I'm only paying a 30c premium over home charging.)

Actually, yeah. Their reputation is on the line, and they won't survive as a company if they're wrong. It's not anonymous, it's not a think-tank generating faux reports to bolster some politician's opinion. Their name is now attached to this information, and if they're lying, that's it for them. They're not big enough to eat that kind of bad press and come out okay on the other side.

Valid concern, though the reality is that'll just leave the door open for 3rd party battery swaps. I bought my EV used knowing that the battery would probably outlast the body of the car, but in the off-chance that it doesn't, I'm actually a bit hyped for the potential to put a better battery in, with either longer range or less weight (though I assume a lighter battery would mess with the driving dynamics the car was designed for).