Car are always being bought and sold. Some people jump from car to car every few years; I’ve known people who always lease precisely because they trade what they have every year or two for something new.

I’ve been an EV driver for the last few years; my brother called today to tell me he had just bought a used Bolt for his wife. As things happened one of his grown children had their car completely fail on them this week, and so he and his wife decided to buy themselves a new car so they could sell the old one for cheap to their child. With gas prices as they are they found a gently used Bolt EUV. They pick it up this weekend.

So in their case they didn’t go out and buy a car just because gas prices were up — but the decision between gas and EV was triggered by the price of gasoline.

/r/all is gone if you’re on New Reddit. It redirects to your personal feed now.

/r/all is apparently still available on Old Reddit — at least for now. Who knows how long any of that will still be around.

The only “conservative” belief they adhere to imo is the want for smaller government … because they do in fact want a dictatorship.

Don’t believe it for a second. Conservative “smaller government” is always about getting rid of some long-term bureaucrats who know what they’re doing and government programmes conservatives don’t like, and then growing Government by massively increasing internal security apparatus (police, border control, military, prisons, etc.).

Every conservative government always want to go “tough on crime” or “expel (il)legal immigrants” — and that always winds up with a massive increase in government size and expenditures. You don’t get those things without a significant number of boots on the ground, and once you have those boots on the ground they’ll find every excuse to use them — just like how ICE is terrorizing blue cities in the US, or is being used to supplant airport security.

“Smaller government” is just conservative code for “wielding more control over citizens”. Every time.

I work across timezones — and the fact that I’ll no longer be changing my clocks in the fall (living in BC), but my employees in EDT will be changing back to EST will be a problem.

With the un-until-now changing of the clocks twice a year, I’ve always been 3 hours behind my Eastern Time employees. This was easy to keep track of, and meant that our 1100 team meetings were at 1400 for them year round. Clocks changed here, clocks changed there, everything stayed in sync.

But now that we won’t be changing the clock here in BC in the fall, that 1100 meeting I book in PT is going to suddenly become a 1300 meeting for them. That wouldn’t be a problem if this was everyone’s only meeting, but as we’re part of a big multinational corporation they have other scheduled meetings with various teams already scheduled for 1300, so they’re going to be in conflict. I can fix them by bumping the meeting back an hour after the fall time change — but that means my BC based employees are going to have to attend a meeting over lunch (something I am very loathe to do — I know there are a lot of shitty managers out there, but for my staff I work very hard to ensure they get all the time off they are owed, they get time off when they want/need it, that everyone gets time off and flexibility for medical issues, and that I don’t ask them to work after hours or during lunch breaks unless agreed upon beforehand, and even then only for emergency situations).

In essence, if I keep that meeting at the same time in PT it’s going to change in ET, and that change is going to cascade as other meetings suddenly overlap. Or I change it here, and have a similar issue for my staff in BC. And that’s not even saying anything about my one team member in California (where they’re still changing time twice a year). Now — this isn’t the worst thing in the world to happen; we’ll work our way around it — but if everyone stopped doing twice-yearly time changes it would certainly make the situation easier. Twice a year I’m going to have a scheduling PITA.

Still worth it to no longer have to change all the clocks twice a year!

Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).

AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?

Of course.

Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.

That’s a pretty reductive take, and doesn’t really account for how emissions are generated.

I don’t disagree that burning fossil fuels to generate electrical power doesn’t happen, nor that it’s not great for the environment (coal in particular is evil in that it contains radioactive particles that get concentrated in the waste ash — decommissioned coal plants are more radioactive than decommissioned nuclear plants).

However, your take misses these basic facts:

1. Power plants are giant buildings that can burn fuel at extremely high temperatures, and which can burn that fuel right at peak efficiency. They extract the maximum amount of energy from the fuel, and thus produce more energy per emission. You can’t do that in something the size of a passenger vehicle.
2. EVs are roughly 95% efficient. ICE vehicles are typically under 30% efficient (although HEVs can get up to 35% efficient). So for every kWh your fossil fuel power plant generates, EVs are going to be able to use it with very high efficiency. Coupled with #1 above you ultimately burn less fuel in your power plant to get the same amount of motive power than you would with an ICE vehicle.
3. While I’m not personally a “true believer” in the technology, a fossil fuel based power plant could theoretically implement carbon capture technology to reduce their pollution output. You can’t do this in an ICE vehicle.
4. And most importantly, when your power utility eventually phases out their fossil fuel based power plant, and ideally replaces it with green energy production, your EV gets that upgrade for free, whereas an ICE based vehicle will still need to burn fossil fuels.
5. Lastly — I can generate my own clean electricity at home. I can buy a pallet of solar panels that can generate 10kWh of power for around $5k. I can never make my own gasoline at home.

FWIW, I live in a jurisdiction where the electrical supply is 85 - 90% green already (primarily hydroelectric, with wind and solar) — so your concern doesn’t apply to me personally. However, even in jurisdictions that are burning 100% coal for their power, driving an EV is still overall better for the environment over driving an ICE vehicle.

One of the absolute best things I ever did for our household finances was to ditch virtually all of our gas-burning devices/vehicles. We’re down to one HEV (my wife’s car) as our only gas burner. My BEV replaced both our old ICE vehicle and our portable gas generator. Ensured our lawn mower and yard tools are all battery operated. That one HEV is the last gasoline albatross around our neck, and so we only use it for my wife’s commute.

We’re closer than ever, and I look forward to the day her car is paid off and we can replace it with another BEV, and get off the gasoline trampoline forever. If I never have to buy another litre of gasoline in my lifetime, it will still be too soon.

The problem with this analysis is that the “EV mandate” was never an “EV mandate”. It didn’t stipulate that only EVs could be sold after 2035 — it always also permitted other forms of Zero-Emissions Vehicles (and PHEVs with a minimum battery-only distance (80km IIRC?)) — including Hydrogen vehicles.

And Hyundai’s interest in hydrogen is just hedging its bets. They have one hydrogen model (the Nexxo), but multiple EV models. And if the number sold in Canada isn’t zero, it’s likely pretty close. They can be as interested as they want to be, but global sales are abysmal, hydrogen availability is low, the hydrogen is expensive, the hydrogen isn’t always green, and storage and transportation are significant challenges.

It doesn’t matter who is “interested” in hydrogen — it’s still not happening. But it was always allowed by the “EV mandate”, so it wouldn’t need to be cancelled for any MOUs.

Hydrogen isn’t going to happen. So stop holding your breath.

Beyond all of the other problems with hydrogen (production, transportation, storage, dispensing, etc.) the economic truth is that hydrogen vehicles are, at best, 60% efficient. And hydrogen production either relies on fossil fuel production (for “grey” hydrogen), or electrolysis (“green” hydrogen). Electrolysis itself is only about 66% efficient.

This efficiency matters in this comparison because when you put 100 units of energy to get 66 units of energy out, and then put that into a vehicle that can only transform that into around 40 units of motive power, you will always do better putting that energy into an EV which is 95% efficient (you put in 100 units of energy and get 95 units out). In terms of cars, you can charge more than twice as many cars with this input energy as you’d be able to with hydrogen. There is no world where that makes any sort of economic sense for anyone.

With hydrogen vehicles, you get a vehicle that needs a lot more energy to go less distance. It’s the worst of all worlds. And that’s just discussing the efficiency values — and not all the losses that occur during all the transfer stages. Hydrogen needs to be kept cryogenically cold (which also requires more energy to maintain) — in effect, there is no possible work in which hydrogen replaces a modern EV.

What the fuck is a guy living up in Nunavut supposed to do with an electric vehicle?

Nothing - which is why the existing mandate ALLOWS THE SALE OF PHEVs PAST 2035.

Your whole post just screams “tell me I didn’t read the mandate without telling me you didn’t read the mandate”.

But that’s true of virtually every dictator. You don’t get to be a dictator without a plethora of yes-men who are willing to implement the whims of the dictator without question. Dictators need True Believers to implement their plans, and oppress any opposition. That’s a basic facet of any dictatorship.

As someone who is a member of a National Sports Organization (NSO) here in Canada, I hope more follow Skate Canada’s lead.

NSOs in Canada that receive any funding from the Federal Government (read: all of them) are required to follow the Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport (UCCMS). Right now with Alberta’s laws in place, an NSO that is forced to discriminate against an athlete thanks to those laws could find themselves in violation of the UCCMS. The penalties for being in violation (beyond any Criminal Code violations) can be pretty severe — all the way up to being banned for life from participating in any sport anywhere in Canada.

As such, I suspect more NSOs are going to be looking at whether it’s worth the risk holding an event in Alberta. They don’t get a get-out-of-jail-free card from the UCCMS and its penalties just because an event is in Alberta. And most (all?) NSOs already have their own policies for trans athletes that are specific to their sport and the needs of their athletes^0. We don’t need governments making those rules when the NSOs can do so themselves in a manner more targeted to their individual sports.

As a Registered Coach in British Columbia, trans women and trans men are welcome in my tournaments competing under the gender class of their choosing, in alignment with basic human decency and my NSOs guidelines.

^0 — not all sports are made equal, and the impact of gender based development differs from sport to sport. In some circumstances^1 a trans woman might have an advantage in something like wrestling — but has virtually no advantage in something like shooting sports.
^1 — every trans person is different, just as every man (and every woman) is different. So I am somewhat pre-supposing the “worst-case” sort of scenario that right-wing nuts presume is always the case for the sake of argument.

I’m willing to bet you could convince a subset of those people that such an LLM is in fact the second coming of Christ. So not just some tool “approved” by God, but that the LLM is the God itself.

Then (to the “true believers” minds) whatever it says will be unquestionable. And then whomever is pulling the strings behind the scenes can commit whatever atrocities they desire.

I’m familiar with TempleOS — but it really doesn’t have any applicability here. It’s just something written by a guy with some mental illness who thought God was telling him what he wanted in an Operating System. But even for the faithful it’s just a tool — like how a temple itself may be an important holy place, but isn’t itself worshipped by the people who use it. Nobody considers a church to actually be their God.

That’s vastly different from an LLM that purports to be itself divine. We can setup an LLM that actually claims to be the second coming of Jesus, and there will be people will do whatever it tells them to because of belief. If you suck in enough people for enough years slowly enough to build up a cult following, and abuse them just enough to keep them in line, you’ll be able to tell them to do all sorts of truly atrocious things — and some subset will in fact go through with them.

And yes, people can do that already (see Jim Jones, David Koresh, or any other cult leader that convinced all their followers to kill themselves and their families) — but an LLM could have a vastly larger reach around the globe. We may not need for the LLM itself to become Skynet — one or two bad actors behind the scenes of a “divine” LLM might be enough to bring down humanity all by itself.

Mark my words — but we’re going to see a time (in our lifetimes) where a group of people is going to worship an AI as “divine”. And you won’t be able to convince them otherwise. An AI-centric cult is all but inevitable at this point. And it will be self-reinforcing.

TIL 20% of Americans live in a persistent vegetative state.

I have way too much self-respect to ever show my face on FOX 🤣.

I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.

On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?

That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.

Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.

This is why most apps that do use such services use more than one. Lots of modern sites have buttons for “Login with Google”, “Login with Facebook”, “Login with Apple”. None of them want to lose access to the user data and analytics they get from these services — so I doubt one is going to jump into cutting you off or requiring payment while the others are still free.

It would take all of these services to (illegally) coordinate to suddenly start charging — and of all of them I don’t see that being in the interest at all for Apple. Apple’s login service uses Touch and Face ID on their devices, and is part of the selling point for those devices (extremely easy logins with no password). They’re not making their money off Single Sign-On (SSO) login services — they make their money off selling devices, and they make the case for selling these devices in large part by selling “simplicity”.

So if you’re worried today about a login service yanking the rug out from under you, you just implement many/all of them. It’s not significantly more work — all of them are based off OAuth — so long as your website or app can authenticate via OAuth you just need to use the APIs each company provides to implement the authentication, and you’re done.

Nothing them stops you as you get bigger form implementing your own login/authentication service — and if you ever get big enough, you too can offer it as a service for other websites.