This sounds like the video game version of the MadTV sketch Apple presents the iRack from a couple of decades ago, spoofing the war in Iraq.

"Bureaucratic slip-up allows facility under construction to delay paying for water bill for several months. Coincidentally, facility happens to be a data center."

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

In principle, I can send your phone arbitrary unlimited data using just SMS, subject only to rate-limiting and management of dropped, delayed, or out-of-order SMS messages.

If I have your public key, I can send it to you encrypted.

In practice, I don't know if such a thing exists.

I can print to my Bambu printer locally by using LAN only or an SD card, not sure why you think I need their cloud to print at all.

Also https://orca-slicer.com/ is not offline, some kind of a fork of it is offline.

Completely disagree. 100% disagree. If I need something that my printer from Bambu cannot do I will get another printer. For what I need it though it is great and keeps me from *wasting* time. My time is what is important to me more than money.

Back in the 20th century, you get student/teacher discounts through university/school channels and possibly from other authorized Apple resellers, but you had to show ID.

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

IF they decide to make it prohibitively expensive to operate their hardware, then I will go back to a less capable hardware kit.

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

It is effective at reducing staff cheaply, but it has a huge downside, shared with most attrition-based schemes for reducing payroll: The best employees are also the ones who find it the easiest to leave. The worst employees are also the ones who will grit their teeth and hold on to the bitter end.

It's harder and more costly (in the short term) to do targeted layoffs which allows the company to target low-performers, or those who are low performers relative to their cost. It's the better choice, though.

Lots of the top performers will.

I got an Idea. How about locating and deleting data centers that host these things? Deleting them from existance.

... for the low low price of a quarter peta-buck.

There IS a place for AI as a coding assistant. If used right by someone who COULD write good code from scratch AND who is well-versed in using his AI tools, it could actually save time.

In very limited problem domains, non-AI program-generators and LLM-"AI" program-generators can actually produce usable, correct, reasonably efficient code almost all of the time. But so could a reasonably competent programmer who was an expert in the problem domain.

In any case, using AI is likely to use a lot of electricity.

Old way for a small task an entry-level person could do in 2 weeks solo: a week to design, a few days to code, a few days to unit test

New way - "official/what you tell your boss": a few hours to design/decide what you want the output to look like and rough-draft your prompts a hours to "code"/prompt the AI, including iterations, and a few hours to test the results.

New way - "reality/what you actually do": design? what's that? a few hours to iteratively create prompts until you get output that "feels good," and testing the results - yeah, right, who has time for that?

Sigh.