"I would be stressed the whole time about the 2%"
Which is why I stopped and did the 10 minute charge along the way?

"because you always have to charge at some point"
Yes? There are chargers all over the place - even some in Wyoming. Even with our car which is outdated anymore from a range perspective - we have never found a gap bigger than our range other than maybe driving highway 50 in Nevada, which may even be remediated now anyway**. There are so many more chargers available than people think!

And vehicles are getting more and more range too - if you want to go that way. I personally, would save on cost and weight instead of going for massive range because I would rather be more efficient every day, and then charge a little more often on road trips - than take a weight and cost penalty that hurts all the time. But there are options for everyone.


**Looks like the biggest gap across highway 50 - "the loneliest road" - is 211 miles, from Austin NV to the Utah border - which with my range would make me a tad nervous, but would be doable. It would take longer at the charging stops because I would need to go to 100% which is the slow part (20 to 80 is fast). Most of the more common EV ranges are 300 to 400 miles - which I would not be worried about in that stretch. Now the bigger problem is the reliability of the charging networks - that is a real and legit problem that is improving, but still exists. In these "middle of nowhere" situations - they need to work 100% of the time.

I have travelled all over the mountain west on a ICE motorcycle which has a 150 mile range - that was nerve wracking, there are a *lot* of places with more than 150 miles between gas stations, and even some places with gas stations in remote areas - they close early in the evening.

The funny part about this is it seems like the people with the _most_ off street parking are the ones most angry about EVs.

Easily available info shows that New Orleans has over 50 public chargers. They are not hard to find and use.

And why do people keep saying "own" a home? Are renters not allowed to use electricity?

We frequent New Orleans regularly, the only "older city" part with a real lack of off-street parking is the French Quarter and the garden district. Most everywhere else there is suburban. That said, Louisiana does have the lowest number of chargers per-capita of all the states...

I have an EV with mediocre range. This weekend we took a 250 mile round-trip to a rural area with zero public chargers, and the trip calculator put us getting back at home with like 2% - and that wasn't accounting for losses from using the heater. So we stopped once, at an outlet mall, and used a Rivian network charger. We plugged in, went to the bathroom and looked at the "store map" for the mall, unplugged, and drove off. Total elapsed time - 10 minutes. Charging cost, $10. We made it home with 22% remaining charge. Three weeks ago we drove 200 mile loop through a wilderness area, up to the top of a mountain viewpoint and back. Only used electricity from my house - the total electricity cost for the whole loop was $9. No loss of freedom.

I think we need new expressions. You didn't write it, did you? I know I don't write code. I used to. But I sure make a lot of code happen.

What do we call that? I guess "I vibe coded a game mod"... A few months ago that meant something else. Mostly that something got shat out. Now.. not so much. Now it tends to be pretty good quality.

OK. I'm just blathering.

It gave me the numbers for the various trials. I don't have them handy and I didn't run them manually - so the AI could totally have made it all up. I did not keep the numbers so I have nothing to share.

Sure - it's just a hypothesis.

I do not recall the details! But I did watch as the damn AI did repeat wall clock and sample tests to see where the time was going and try 2-4 different approaches and clocked each one in detail. I felt embarrassed because I *could* do all that and certainly had done it in the past - but it would have taken me a *long* time to set up each tests and analyze the results and try over and over and track the results for each.
As you imply - none of this is particularly tricky - it's mostly just labor intensive and time consuming. And those are both things that AI has no trouble with.

Related - when I tell an agent to optimize for performance - especially if the request is well targeted - it does an *amazing* job. Doing performance work is so well defined and described that it can follow the patterns and do all the checks and get it really right. To do a good job it's really repetitive and there are often a lot of angles to check and .. it just does it really well.

This is like Trump promising $5K if republicans win the midterms. It's just a PR stunt.

Imagine trying to reason out the tax implications of something like this. The privacy implications. Everything.

Elon: "I really wanted to, but lawyers wouldn't let me!"

No way to see that coming.

I predict it could cost as much as $150 Billion!

Do I hear $200B? We're making shit up - go large!

Personally, on this matter, I defer to Phil Mason, Ph.D., who is a chemist specializing in nuclear chemistry. He put a video up on his thunderf00t channel when this thing came out in the news explaining why it's bullshit.

My day job is a (saas) app that's about 20 years old and has been worked on continuously by a team that has varied in size from about 5 to now about 15. It is complicated and connects to several external services. There are parts of the app that are too hairy for AI to reason about. But we have found, recently, that AI is surprisingly good at explaining how some rather complicated (but well written) parts of the app work.
The 2-3 really hairy parts of the app are written in an arbitrarily complicated way that I would never have used and long to rewrite - but they work. Nobody on the team is happy with it - and there is no corporate memory of anyone being happy working with these parts.
We have exceptional test coverage (>95% by lines), so it's just a matter of time before we decide to lay out an AI agent team to rewrite some of the horrible stuff in a way that is much more palatable to both human and agent. This is not something I would have suggested as possible 4-6 months ago.

I'm not sure how to answer that question. My flip answer is "the usual way." But nothing about software is the usual anymore.

100% of the code that .. makes up this project is code that I did not write. But I absolutely told AI what I wanted and in many cases *how* I wanted it. And any code that had "interesting" design elements is code that I reviewed and in some cases told AI to change. Where interesting refers to meaningful architectural decisions.

At this point it is a very light project - somewhat less that 10K lines of code. It is in its minimal viable product phase - and I imagine it will grow to be more than 15 or even 20K LOC. Eventually becoming projects on 3 distinct platforms and becoming substantially larger.

All of which is ridiculous. Fewer than 200 prompts so far, I'm sure. Maybe fewer than 100.

I've got a black swan for ya!
I just shipped software that AI wrote [practically] entirely that I would not have shipped otherwise. I don't think I'm the only one.

Those diamond batteries were bullshit. The problem is that as the carbon-14 decays, the structure stops being diamond, because it's no longer made of all carbon. After even a decade or two, the diamond structure will be practically gone and the remaining carbon will impure as balls and in mostly graphite form. Once the structure is damaged enough, it will no longer hold itself together. I suppose you could encase the diamond in something like resin but part of the point of using diamond was the electrical properties (diamond is a good insulator of electricity which makes for good capacitors, the effects of which were being used in the device in part to make it work.). Also, while carbon-14 is screamingly radioactive; it's way, way less so than the currently used tritium. This means you'd a ton more of it to get the same wattage output, although it's longer half-life would mean that it could, assuming it maintained it's structure, last longer than the tritium betavoltaics. But to get it to maintain it's structure long-term would require using proportionally less carbon-14 and more carbon-12 and carbon-13. This means you lose one of the advantages of tritium - size.