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Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 197

Yeah but I have to drive 1000 miles up hill (both ways) every day for work in temperatures where lithium itself freezes, and I only pee on Sundays.

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.

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 197

Oh, I think the Silverado EV's are adequate. 480+ mile range in best conditions still puts me way over my bladders ability to drive even in the absolute worst conditions of that tow + cold weather. That thing will still be 200'ish miles of towing in cold weather.

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.

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 197

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.

Comment Re:META is doing this to make them quit (Score 1) 91

That's actually a smart strategy.

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.

But I wonder how many employees will quit in today's job market.

Lots of the top performers will.

Comment Use Argon2id (Score 1) 106

Using a proper password hashing algorithm mostly addresses this concern... and standard cryptographic hashes like MD-5, SHA-1, SHA-256, etc. are not appropriate. They're designed to be as time and space-efficient as possible while still achieving their security goals. Password hashing functions (more precisely, password-based key derivation functions) are designed specifically to be time and space-hungry, efficient enough that you can execute them in half-second or so for user authentication, but slow enough that brute forcing even moderately-good passwords is intractible.

The best widely-available algorithm is Argon2id. The modern algorithms don't focus so much on requiring lots of CPU cycles because GPUs. Instead, they focus on requiring significant amounts of RAM, in ways that provably cannot be reduced. The most-recommended Argon2id configuration requires 2GB RAM. This makes it feasible for most servers to handle fairly easily, as long as they don't have to verify too many passwords in parallel, but it means that GPUs don't help the attacker, and it's also slow enough that while you can get some traction by using a large botnet, it's really not very much. If a PC requires 500ms per attempt, and you have a million-machine botnet, you can still only try 2M passwords per second. If user passwords have, say, 30 bits of entropy, your massive botnet can find one every five minutes on average. If they have 40 bits, your botnet can find a password every ~3 days, on average. That's not nothing, but if you have control of a million machines, you can definitely find better uses for them.

Of course, even better is to use passkeys or similar, but as a practical matter you probably have to have a password to fall back on.

Comment Re: If the asset tax passes, he'll owe 1.5B (Score 1) 167

Not necessarily true. Pattern day traders are forced to mark to market.

Cite? I'm not a CPA but AFAIK, being a PDT has no direct tax implications, it just invokes brokerage/margin rules.

As I understand it (and I skimmed the law), 475(f) elections are entirely optional. The tricky thing is that you have to make the decision of whether you're going to elect to mark to market by April 15 (e.g. you have to decide by April 15, 2026 if you'll mark to market on December 31, 2026), and you generally cannot change that decision. So if you think it's going to be a bad year, it's a good idea to elect, because it removes the cap on loss deductions. If you expect to make a lot of wash sales and don't want to bother tracking them, that's another reason to elect.

But as far as I can tell, it's purely voluntary. Can you point to evidence to the contrary? Ideally in the law, but a reputable investor information site would be fine. I checked several (e.g. https://www.optionstaxguy.com/...) and they all describe it as a choice. One that is binding once made, but still a choice.

Comment Re:Just... no. (Score 1) 162

You don't know if it's always on. Those details aren't present (that I saw), and it's likely that they would throttle when the grid was under heavy load. A reasonable inference from what the company (who make "smart" electric panels) is saying about power management.

As for cooling, "Span is incorporating technology from Nvidia into its system, including a liquid-cooled, fanless component inside the server. The design helps eliminate the noise typically associated with data centers—a frequent complaint in communities near large facilities."

It's also possible to pair it with a large residential roof solar installation. I installed solar recently (just in time to grab the 30% credit) and my system routinely generates 3X what my home uses in the course of a day (I typically use about 40 kWh per day, and often generate 130+kWh per day). I've been thinking I'd really like to find something to suck up that extra power, because the monthly net billing plan I have means that once I've zeroed out my bill for the month, I get no benefit from additional production.

As deployment of renewables continue, this "problem" of what do do with excess capacity will increase and spread.

However, if power for the mini-datacenter is only intermittently available, the cost of the hardware effectively increases on a per-token (or per FLOP or however you want to measure the system's work) basis... and hardware cost is already going to be a tough problem for this kind of deployment. Even if it could count on 100% utilization, it will struggle to compete with large datacenters for exactly the reason we build large datacenters: Economies of scale. Enclosures (buildings), cooling, maintenance... all of the overheads fall with scale.

Intermittent utilization just makes that problem worse.

On balance, I'm skeptical that this makes sense, unless the cost of the hardware falls significantly. It seems like that's a baseline requirement for a lot of the alternative datacenter ideas, though: orbital datacenters, floating datacenters, etc.

Comment Re:Precedent (Score 1) 76

I was thinking Bartz vs. Anthropic, but there are other rulings.

I think someone summarized them further down, but I recommend reading them for yourself.

Bartz v Anthropic is not a binding precedent. It could have been binding in the 9th circuit, but they settled before the appellate court could consider it. And, of course, it's always possible that the appellate could have reversed Alsup.

I think this question is still very much in undecided. It's trending against Meta's interests, but AFAIK isn't there yet.

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 107

I'd love to trash Edge, but it's hard to argue against Microsoft's analysis here

i think you don't get the irony. this is the company that campaigned furiously for the necessity of tpm for consumer devices ...

There's really no irony here. TPMs serve a different purpose, that of ensuring that the software you're running isn't maliciously modified.

decrypting an entire password list and leaving it around in memory for no reason is totally unacceptable practice

It's really no different from keeping the password database encryption key in RAM, or the capability which grants access to the database encryption key (however many layers of that you want to go down) which is what you have to do if you want to be able to use the passwords on-demand without an authentication step.

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 107

It shows that for Microsoft, security is an afterthought rather than a priority, with the obvious result that Microsoft software is not secure. RAM plaintext passwords mean that any programmer mistake could expose them to the world. If they don't exist in RAM (Chrome's way), they're impossible to expose.

If Chrome has access to them without user authentication, then so does any attacker who can dump Chrome's RAM.

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 107

If you have a process that provides a service that hands out passwords, it's irrelevant whether the passwords are plaintext or ciphertext. An attacker who compromises a rendering process can only query -- but can probably query a lot. An attacker to breaches the process separation, well...

Note that this is separate from whether the on-disk database needs to be encrypted. There are additional threat vectors there.

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 107

It'd be a lot harder to find a (probably hashed) master password sitting in RAM, since it would look just like random bytes, than plaintext passwords. And you could surround the hashed master password with lots of other random bytes to make it even harder to find.

Nah. You just try all the bytes. It's not that many.

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