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.

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.

The market IS white hot right now, but the Hormuz hit is just starting to land. Demand at the edges is what sets the price - if all southeast Asian gamers are spending the GPU money on gas, that cools the rush. And I have no confidence any of these datacenter announcements are going to lead to actual builds. Companies talked a great game, but the political heat is on, the electric and water constraints are real, and advances like TurboQuant, which conservatively speaking offers a 4x boost to existing GPUs ... now layer the U.S. economic hit from Hormuz, which will only be a little bit behind the Asian blowout.

The AI/datacenter/GPU self dealing circle looks more like the derivative traders of 2008 with each passing day. Just like CDOs, that "money" is all conditional, and when conditions change, it's all gone. Society got some nice frontier models and advances in manufacturing out of it, now if corporate America takes even half a step back on the rush ... the market won't just vanish, because there IS a lot of benefit to using LLMs, but the demand may only match what's already been built. We'll take the hit from it, then the economy will rebound from a bunch of startups pillaging the existing firms that are politically incapable of making the needed culture change.

I spend my days working on the system for my startup. Since I had a computer science education and a bunch of time in grade running ISP systems, I bring that distributed systems engineer vibe to my vibe coding. It'll need work once it's funded, but the MVP will be functional and secure.

I was using X tokens/week via Claude Code. They stumbled on the Opus 4.7 rollout and I got busy tuning my setup. I added LSP Enforcement Kit + Serena, CodeSight, and OptiVault. This made Claude more or less behave ... while cutting my usage about 80%.

Companies that are using token burn as a metric, if they are not providing top quality tooling for the people using it, are basing their performance reviews on who can tolerate some highly random LLM over an efficient, well thought out harness.

Meta foisted a digital cesspool on us and it would not hurt my feeling a bit to see it completely desiccated. I do feel badly for the legions of humans that are going to be forced to wade through the increasingly crusty muck while the company attempts to figure out what to do about AI. There are rumblings out there about what is happening to the advertising based internet we all know (and despise). Meta clearly can't execute with AI and they may well get bowled over by it.

GM needs to be made to disgorge every dime they made selling that data.

They need to disclose who purchased the data and what the price was.

Every victim of this privacy violation needs legal recourse and class action seems like it would be best for the masses.

Anyone who can show significant harm should aggressively pursue all parties involved.

The only way this behavior will stop is when engaging in it brings bitter pain.

There may well be a legit issue that Bambu is facing, there's a bunch of "think of the children" stuff in play right now, it's mostly about ghost guns from what I have seen. They are perhaps under pressure and maybe they will be compelled to do things in terms of identity of users and/or items being printed. This is another instance of gun nuts ruining things for the rest of us.

But the chickendroppings manner in which they approached this merits a vigorous walloping. If they HAVE to do it due to some government pressure, be upfront, tell all of us, and maybe we'll put a stop to it. What they did here just smacks of ... well ... besides being just plain stupid when dealing with FOSS developers, it smacks ... and they should receive some smacks in return.

That little uptick in IT sector unemployment is trailing reality where there's a larger acceleration of unemployment in IT due to cost cutting, recession like economy, uncertainty over AI augmentation of the IT labor force, and fear of the bubble popping whenever it does if ever.

The statistics are cooked since like an earlier poster said that when folks drop out of IT because they can't find good work anymore they aren't counted anymore in the unemployment statistics so it looks like a win for the numbers getting better, but the person is still unemployed or switched sectors or careers.

Middles six figure jobs for IT are very rare to see and all the job postings are for under six figures. It's work that is mostly the churn and burn type like hands on desktop, low-level analyst or QA, site monitoring, or low level admin jobs. Which burn people out and then replace them with more cheap labor locally or offshore.

Career Path Change

I've built a path and skills and certifications over the last decade to a completely different career and now I'm going for it after finishing a decade and a half long stint at a dead-end organization that did IT in the stone ages managed by sociopathic computer illiterate exploitive and manipulative management and technically myopic leadership criminally violating laws and regulations with massive cover-ups.

I'll probably dabble in IT work to enhance my new career and try my hand at a derivative business idea to bring IT to a non technical sector that needs to come to the modern age and there are only two other people doing serious IT in it.

But I'm one of those statistics now who's making those IT Unemployment numbers look good since I'm switching career paths midway in life, after seeing and predicting the IT job apocalypse that is now starting and looking into the future over the horizon of the corpses of IT workers like in Terminator 2 opening scene.

Opening (Future War) | Terminator 2: Judgment Day [Remastered] = AI Killing IT Jobs

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.

Yup 100%. I can pass among neurotypicals if I keep my mouth shut, but people quickly pick up on it if interacting with me.

I absolutely loved fitbit. Bought one for myself, one for my wife, one for each of my parents. Lots of "fitbit friends", always competing with each other. Usually had between 20K and 40K steps year round after the initial couple of months while getting in shape.

Then google nerfed it. They removed the social aspect. They removed the competition among fitbit friends. My interest utterly evaporated. Haven't used my fitbit since a week or so after google nerfed it. Haven't bought another Google product since. Haven't signed up for another Google service since. Always looking for how to get off Google.

And I used to WORK FOR google. I was a huge proponent of them, until they utterly mismanaged fitbit.

Now I'm using Garmin. I don't think I'll ever forget what they did to fitbit.

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.

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.