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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • For me in the us, it was the election. We finally had goal, funding and progress toward renewable energy. We had the government working for us, not against us. We were building momentum on the switch to EVs and residential electrification. Sure, it was too little too late, but it was progress and it was a huge change of “attitude “ and direction. No longer fighting the idea but actually responding.

    Then the pendulum of politics in the us swung the other way, all that slow painful progress undone, an administration actively working to make things worse. All those corporate resolutions to become good corporate citizens disappear under the slightest pressure.






  • The article seems needlessly negative. We see evidence of air pollution improvements: take the win.

    It’s also good to know where things get worse: sure, next step is to try to improve tire particle pollution. However, even assuming it is worse than for ice cars, that in itself is not reason to worry. People are concerned about the extra weight, but there’s every possibility the weight comes down as technology improves. We may not have to worry about that aspect. We’d do better to worry about tire particle pollution as a whole, and do something about that




  • As far as I know, pioneered by Tesla, but also in at least the Sienna and Rivian …

    A special mode to let you leave your dog in the car. Typically hvac on so the animal doesn’t freeze or overheat, possibly locked controls and internal alarm sensors so animal can’t get in trouble, soothing music if you want it, and a message lit up on the screen so any concerned citizens know the animal is ok. I believe the Tesla lets you use the internal camera on vehicles that have that, sto check on the animal

    Camp mode is somewhat similar idea but humans don’t need the lit up screen. Usually turns off interior lights so someone can go out to the bathroom in the middle of the night without the lights coming on while everyone is sleeping


  • Most commonly I use an aggregator. It runs a chat window in a browser and you can choose from a variety of models or let it pick. While it’s not integrated with anything, it does really well for general purpose writing. Every result comes with citations and a few suggestions for next steps.

    My company just gave up on copilot as useless, but we were explicitly using it for coding and it was just not effective. Sometimes “free” costs too much

    Currently management is really pushing Cursor/Claude for coding, which I really hate. While Claude is much better at coding than copilot and does cite sources, cursor is way too aggressive at spraying arbitrary changes across the code base. I’ve had to do way too much damage control from junior devs blindly accepting when it makes arbitrary changes across the code base. For example one of my guys used it to generate unit tests, which it is good at, but they generated an order of magnitude too many tests of dubious value, that now need to run in every build and be maintained forever …. And in all that slop just arbitrarily introduced a new mocking tool. The intelligence part is pretty good but it needs to get much better at keeping the human in the loop. For example, I really like it for code reviews, it makes good catches and suggestions, but is horrible at presenting them to the developer for individual approval. Current effort is trying to use the agent.md to establish a sensible base for useful code reviews

    Other than that, we’re spending a lot of time with mcp agents, which I’m still trying to decide on. All too often it’s just a more complex and dangerous way to do a text search, but it has a lot of potential to bring active data into the ai decision space



  • On the other hand

    • Volvo ex60 is coming out and looks outstanding
    • Toyota is releasing four new EVs in market segments where they are much needed
    • Rivian r2 is coming out, with r3x generating excitement
    • Slate truck coming soon, to lots of excitement
    • new vehicles are increasingly unaffordable
    • Hyundai/Kia is really upping their game, with frequent releases of exciting technology
    • while truck market is highly profitable, it’s generally older technology at excessive prices plus driven by fashion, which could collapse very quickly

    American car makers might only be selling in domestic markets soon.

    Those manufacturers could easily be not selling to anyone soon.



  • This is really not inevitable, and policy is a huge part of it. I do believe Biden is a poor example here, because that approach to rebuilding manufacturing was to actually invest in it. Especially investing in forward looking technologies. Especially trying to establish longer term consistent policies, especially trying to connect with reality and science

    Trying to force a return to “the good old days”, starting trade wars with every one, terrorizing large segments of workers, flip flopping policies for personal gain, isolationism, trying to protect old technologies/manufacturers from competition will never work. This is hugely more self-destructive than hands off