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

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  • Huh, that sounds very different from my experience. Everyone taped from TV, and traded tapes, even people who couldn’t set the time or schedule it. People were so desperate for time-shifting away from TV broadcast schedule and to share videos that they sat through entire shows to record them. There were frequent glitches from people trying to not record commercials, before commercial skipping technology became common. This was also the only reasonable way to have a movie collection, given the obscene prices of movies on tape. And of course child me thought I was clever to figure out how to schedule a recording, only to be frequently screwed up by sports and political events running long - I’d schedule an extra hour and sometimes that wasn’t enough



  • The problem is it’s very expensive. Solar installers charge tens of thousands of dollars and has a long history of scams. They take the place of the old trope about scammy used car salesmen. They’ve created leases and PPAs in an attempt to make the initial cost easier but only succeeded in being scammy

    It doesn’t help that we have tariffs and other barriers to low cost solar panel imports, yet insufficient support for domestic manufacturing to be competitive.

    The math is hard. Everyone wants to know the payback threshold from the huge install cost up front but it’s not straightforward.

    When I looked into solar I found

    • lots of scammers, poor service
    • I calculated a payback of 12 years from install cost given free energy, which is longer than I’m likely to own this house. But they claim 7?
    • I only have sufficient unshaded roof for half my usage
    • is it poor service or scamminess that it’s so difficult to get them to explain that?

  • A big part of it is being realistic about how often that would come up.

    Especially for those with their own house, charging overnight at home (like you do with your phone) is more convenient. It is so nice never having to go to a local gas station!

    Forget looking for discounts like Costco, charging from home is half (for me) the cost of gasoline. Everyone likes saving money

    The only time this doesn’t work is road trips, where I need to stop for 20 minutes every 4-5 hours of driving. If I’m eating a meal, it’s going to take longer than that anyway.

    So

    • 90+% of the time an EV is more convenient and much cheaper
    • on road trips where I would have stopped to eat, it’s equally convenient
    • on road trips where I’m stopping more than I would otherwise and for slightly longer ……. That’s actually very rare

    Edit: looking at my charging stats, it’s only been twice in the last year. One of those was a 1,200 mile road trip that did wonders to overcome my range anxiety


  • most Americans don’t want an EV with batteries at their current state.

    That’s a risky assumption given how driven by propaganda this is. The reality is current state of batteries is perfectly fine for most Americans. What if they realize that? It does partly depend on charger availability, which is being rapidly built out despite the efforts of the current administration to block that. What happens as Americans realize how many new chargers are near them?















  • So far my direct experience with ai is

    • minor efficiency improvements as another programming tool. It can help with syntax, boilerplate, scaling out unit tests BUT IS NEVER. A FINAL PRODUCT
    • MAJOR time sink from junior developers who let ai run amuck without putting in the effort to make it work
    • TECH DEBT from hundreds of excessive unit tests poorly written for maintainability and with no added value
    • INSTABILITY from junior developers letting ai commit slop to the default branch, wasting my time trying to back out thousands of lines of nonsense
    • MISMANAGEMENT where I felt forced to run my writeups through ai to “translate” into something recognizably generated so I could fulfill mandates to use ai