- > I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not.
I can easily churn through $100 in an 8 hour work day with API billing. $200/month seems like an incredibly good deal, even if they apply some throttling.
- So, like, why don’t people just use the better-than-Claude OpenCode CLI with these other just-as-good-as-Claude models?
- The limiting factor for most turbine engines isn’t really operating hours, but “cycles”, which is to say starts and stops. From a maintenance perspective it’s not terribly important whether you start the engine at the gate or the runway.
Also, as far as maintenance goes, engine hours are weighted by operating power. So, an hour at idle doesn’t count as much as an hour at cruise power. One of the reasons airlines started using not-full power on takeoff when conditions allow it is because of “power by the hour” maintenance contracts, which incentivize that.
- > (Since there's a bunch of discussion about how to reduce taxiing consumption, I'll point out that one tonne of aviation fuel is about $700, so there's not much money to be saved by creating battery-powered tugs or whatnot.)
Probably the biggest win in aviation emissions would be converting all the ground support vehicles to electric. They’re currently classified as off-road vehicles, so don’t have to adhere to the same emission standards and normal cars and trucks. Additionally, they already spend a lot of time parked at the gate, which makes charging convenient and means that workers are never “waiting” for the vehicle to charge.
- Yea, but only for speeds up to Mach 1.3… theoretically. Not Mach 2.0 flights. And they only demonstrated the effect up to Mach 1.1.
Saving only one hour on a transcontinental (US) flight doesn’t seem all that impressive.
- But if you actually, you know, read that NASA study, it mentions that the maximum practical speed (from theory) for “boomless” flights is less than Mach 1.3, and they only demonstrated “boomless” flights at Mach 1.1.
That would result in far, far less time savings that what is posited by the commentary on HN. Compared to Cessna Citation X, for example, that would reduce time in the air by just 15%.
Total travel time savings would be even less… so a private Citation X at M0.95 would still be beat a commercial M1.1 flight in door to door travel time.
- Do you have a source for that? Because everything I read says that they do not pay licensing fees to Apple and Google.
- Sure, in principle, but that takes effort and special equipment to set up. The point is that GPIB makes it easy (trivial, actually) with nothing more than the cables you normally use to connect instruments to get very low and predictable latency.
GPIB GET works by first configuring a subset of bus devices as listeners and then sending a single-byte message (it’s an 8 bit bus, so one bus cycle) with the ATN line asserted. It’s intrinsically low latency without any special effort.
Whether that makes it worthwhile to put GPIB on a new instrument in 2025 is a different question. I’m only addressing “what does GPIB give you”?
- > What am I missing?
Not much, but consider latency: You can use the Group Execute Trigger (GET) to simultaneously trigger multiple instruments with both very low latency and very low latency dispersion. Think, easy-to-use sub-microsecond synchronization.
Ethernet and USB 4 may have orders of magnitude more bandwidth, but can’t achieve the same multi-device synchronization capability without side channel signals.
Now, sure, you can add the same capability with a programmable pulse generator connected via coax to the trigger input of all your instruments, but GBIP lets you do that with just the data connection (and you don’t always have a spare trigger channel). The only other protocols I know of with similar capabilities are PXI and PXIe, which are “PCI(express) in an incompatible form-factor, plus some extra signals for real time synchronization”.
- Am I wrong in understanding that each physical device supports only a single GPIB device at a time? The enumeration and discovery scheme is certainly novel, but one device per hardware would seem to prevent using some of GPIB’s advanced features like parallel polling and low latency triggers.
- That includes government-run utilities, like LADWP, Silicon Valley Power, and SMUD, which have much lower rates than private utilities (And, no, the rate difference is not made up by taxpayer subsidies. They’re just run more efficiently).
- So PG&E already has something like this. It’s called either E-1 or TOU-C, depending on whether time-of-use billing applies. The price for the baseline tier is higher than you’d expect, though.
- > Doesn’t remove the need for nat - my wired IsP might be able to bgp with me, but my backup 5g won’t, and when I want to choose which to send my traffic through with PBR that means natting.
Yes, it does. You just have each of your routers (wired and 5G) advertise the /64 prefix delegated by each of your ISPs. Your hosts will self-assign a v6 address from each prefix.
To control which link the traffic uses, you just assign router priority in the router advertisement (these are all standard settings in radvd.conf).
> Things like SLACC make it harder to work out what devices are on the network
Again, not true. If you really don’t trust your devices, then DHCP isn’t going to save you. Malicious hosts absolutely can self assign an unused v4 address, and you’ll be none the wiser if you just look at your DHCP leases.
- In many states in the United States it is illegal to buy a car directly from the manufacturer or from a dealer owned by the manufacturer. In all states it is illegal for a manufacturer with an existing independent dealer network (which is to say, every manufacturer except the EV startups) to sell directly to the customer or to open a new factory-owned dealer.
So companies like Ford can only sell what independent dealers want to sell. You can go to the dealer and ask to buy a car sitting on the lot, and the dealer can just… not sell you the car. For any price. And it is also illegal for the manufacturer to force/coerce the dealer to sell it to you.
Of course the dealer can do softer things also, like talk down the car when you test drive or talk up the benefits of other cars. Or tell you that next year’s model will be much better than this one, so you should wait.
Additionally, most dealers do not actually pay for the car until it is sold to the customer (the manufacturer offers financing to the dealer, called “floor planning”).
Independent dealers do not want to sell EVs because of the perceived loss of service revenue. So they simply offer bad deals on the car that most customers would not take. The cars sit on the dealer’s lot, but that costs the dealer nothing (see above), even though Ford wants to sell an EV and customers want to buy EVs.
- Yea… you can actually fit two adult-sized road bicycles, without removing the wheels or disassembling them in any way, in the back of an F-150 cab!
And still have more room for stuff in the back of the cab before you even start talking about the bed.
I’m also confused how groceries in the bed would get wet in the rain… everyone around me has a tonneau on the bed. My guess is that some of these are not real anecdotes.
- Yes, but you have to go to the FordPro site to find it: https://www.fordpro.com/en-us/fleet-vehicles/all/?vehicle=F-... . Has vinyl manual seats, rubber floor, etc.
You can only get the Lightning from the factory as a super crew with a center console, but some people have converted theirs to a front bench and column shifter for a total of six seats.
- Pick your poison:
* no gas
* no oil changes
* no annual emissions testing (if they do that in Oz)
* more than 1 second faster 0-60/0-100
* twice the towing capacity
* semi-automated trailer connecting (maneuvering the truck to the trailer)
* longer bed and more rear seat leg room
- > Does the Democratic coalition work without pro-corporate liberals on board?
Maybe not, but, then again, it might not work with them on board, either. The problem is that the Hastings-Klein branch of the Democratic party is incompatible with the populist/anti-corporate branch. Either one could form the basis of a viable electoral strategy, but not both at the same time. At bare minimum, they need to adopt the Republican strategy of picking one and not saying the quiet part out loud about the other.
We are probably overdue for a realignment of the two parties on the major issues, like the Grainger Movement, New Deal or Southern Strategy.
> How many people would jump ship if you excommunicated Reed Hastings and Ezra Klein, and which are the Republican voters who would be swayed to replace (and hopefully more-than-replace) them? Without good answers to these questions, there's a very real risk of creating an energized, passionate, anti-corporate Democratic party which simply does not have any path to 270 electoral votes.
Some large fraction (enough to tip the election) voted mainly on "are prices higher today than 4 years ago?" and "are jobs harder to find than they were 4 years ago?". The current administration's campaign largely got the diagnosis right, even if its prescription is the political equivalent of bloodletting and leeches.
Those are easy pickings for an anti-corporate Democratic party with the right message. By contrast, voters economically aligned with Hastings-Klein make up probably only 10% (the most wealthy 10%) of the population. That seems like an obvious trade. The two problems are: the money spigot turns off if you make that trade; and to really pull off this strategy probably requires a tricky (without seeming heartless) policy realignment on certain parts of immigration policy.
OTOH, they could fully align with Hasting-Klein economically. But that requires a different set of policy realignment tradeoffs to remain viable: A significant rightward shift on most social issues (like LGBTQ rights, guns, religion in schools and police) to peel off some of those voters from the Republican party. Probably also pot legalization and assistance for drug-addicted rural voters.
- Have they sued Nintendo, Sony or XBox yet?
- LOL. Developer mode is side loading now.
For those who didn’t click the link, Xbox allows you to either load your own software or load software you buy from the Xbox store. Not both.
- There already exist purpose-built chargers for electric ships. See, for example, https://www.stemmann.com/en/products/charging_systems/ferryc...
To support a 48 hour recharge of the battery hypothesized upthread, you would only need to scale up this system by about 10x. Or attach 10 along the length of the ship. Or some combination of those options.
This is a non-problem.
Edit: Excuse me, but I misread the brochure. The existing system need be only scaled up by a factor of 2.5x to recharge a container ship in 48 hours.
- > I’ve only asked a small number of contractors, but every one I’ve asked wished they could buy a smaller, lower, practical work truck with decent capacity
And if you ask Reddit, everyone says they want to buy a brown NA station wagon with a manual... yet nobody actually buys those cars when dealers stock them. This is what economists call "stated" vs. "revealed" preference.
Nissan discontinued the last small long bed, small-cab compact pickup last year. Now you can only get it as a two row. They had a monopoly on this supposedly lucrative market segment that contractors claim to want... yet it was discontinued because nobody was actually purchasing that configuration.
Even for full-size pickups, GM revealed less than 10% of the product mix is single-row long bed.
It's not some conspiracy. People. Aren't. Buying. Them.
- I have no info on Tesla batteries. But, just as a point of reference, you can now buy knock-down 48V battery "kits" from China for under $90/kWh. They include everything you need: case, cells, BMS, circuit breaker/isolator, and fire suppression. Assembly takes about an hour. (The raw prismatic cells without the rest go for ~$50/kWh).
Shipping from China to the west coast runs an additional $30/kWh due to the weight of the cells and volume of the box (shipped in several boxes to reduce cost). So you can have a 300 lbs, 15 kWh 48V battery shipped to your door for about $120/kWh).
High voltage EV batteries need additional components (like HV contractors) due to stacking so many cells in series, but it seems entirely plausible that Tesla's economies of scale allow them to offer a 75 kWh battery for $10k (~$133/kWh) plus installation.
- The app notes and data sheets of related parts suggest that the target application is large conversion ratios, where the duty cycle in an inductive converter is close to 0 (or 1). That forces tradeoffs, like a lower switching frequency (lower efficiency), a larger inductor (more weight and/or cost) or very short T_on for one of the FETs (lower efficiency because transition times become important). So you can use the charge pump as the first stage of a hybrid converter to get a higher system efficiency.
- I expect less than 10. Once you drive an EV, every big noisy diesel feels impotent and gutless. Kind of like a small yappy dog that’s all bark and no bite. There’s just nothing like the zero-lag gut-punching acceleration of an EV.
- Slow moving traffic at one intersection and free flowing traffic at another could easily account for a 10x ratio of particulate pollution, especially in European capitals where diesels are prevalent.
But a 10x ratio on the same road is also plausible if the Google car is following a large truck on one pass and then driving by itself on the second.
- > And why is this a good thing?
Ok, well, I personally really like driving a car with zero tailpipe emissions, and the cleaner air that comes from it (Tesla).
I think it’s awesome having a little rectangle in my pocket that sends text messages from anywhere on earth and summons an encyclopedia (Apple, Google, Starlink, Intel).
I enjoy talking to (and seeing) my friends and family while they are thousands of miles away (Cisco, Apple, and many others).
I think it is fantastic that we continue to find new labor-saving methods of farming so that fewer people need toil in the fields (the current batch of ag-drone and ag-AI startups).
This is like asking “well, why do we need that science mumbo jumbo anyhow?”
- Meanwhile, back here in reality…
Failed startups don’t have value left at the end. They go until they run out of money. Then they liquidate the office furniture to make the last payroll. Sometimes they don’t wrap up early enough and the founder and board members are personally liable for it.
Nobody wants to buy the custom software needed to run “The pets.com for GenAI” because it would be cheaper to start from scratch than to understand the codebase and make it do what you want.
Companies like 23-and-me that accumulate valuable data while going bankrupt are the rare exception… but banks/VCs do not know a-priori which ones will be that exception! If they did, they just wouldn’t make the bad loans in the first place!
> Now wherever that's enough for anyone to be willing to take that risk
Well, but it clearly isn’t, right? So everything else you wrote is sort of irrelevant.
I mean, why don’t you lend a startup $1000 on the condition they pay you back $1500 in two years[1] if they succeed and nothing if they fail? Pass the hat around your neighborhood and I bet you could fund a few real startups!
Except that.. oh.. when it’s your money on the line, suddenly you realize those are very stupid terms. You lose the whole $1000 90% of the time, break even 5% of the time and make a +$500 profit 5% of the time. The math isn’t mathing here.
So you’ll want to very carefully vet the founders and their plan. Be very picky about who you fund. Maybe you’ll ask them to personally guarantee some fraction of the loan. Suddenly, your highly moral terms look exactly like the business loans that approximately 0% of startups use because VCs offer them a better deal.
[1] Any more than that would be usury, which is immoral, right?
- Yes, it did[1]! Because they rather quickly discovered that you can’t build complex things without it. Which brings us back round to the original point!
[1] But… they did make a go of it without property before discovering that it wouldn’t work. It turns out (shockingly!) that indentured serfs (who make the food) like the idea of land reform when it means they own the land. But they don’t like it so much when it means nobody owns the land. And when they are not happy then you have no food. And then those quotes about “x meals until y” start to have some salience. And then you start to think about the most effective way to use the number of bullets you have on hand (which is smaller than the number of mouths you need to feed).
I especially enjoyed reading the logical fallacy of drone companies that are so small/non-existent that DJI cannot be banned quickly, but those same companies mysteriously have enough money to bribe politicians for a ban (and the much bigger DJI can’t outbid them).
Also: You wrote in a previous comment that nobody can compete with Apple due to lack of antitrust regulation:
> > Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe?
> The same thing that stops anyone from starting a new Google or Microsoft or Apple in the US, probably.
But now you are saying that Huawei was about to unseat them and therefore needed to be banned. So… which is it?