Sure, those are premium things, but don’t actually drive the manufacturer’s cost as those come mostly for free.

So it drives bigger margin for them instead, but at the expense of people perceiving EV as somehow fundamentally too expensive.

You have a rough point, but a $20k delta is too much. Thankfully, the comparison is between a “special” car and a boring workhorse, so the price delta isn’t reflective of the practical choices. 7-passenger PV5 looks to be about $50k, so less than $10k delta between a Sienna and a comparable EV van. Still a pretty big gap, especially to take up front, but closer to reasonable given your reasons. We are seeing the gap close more aggressively in the 5-passenger segment, but 3-row still has been focused on EV only for ‘premium’ experience.

People talk about that topic all the time.

The drive train generally doesn’t need service. You don’t have to change oil, you don’t have to change transmission fluid, your transmission probably won’t grind itself into metallic dust because the transmission is a single speed and it’s certainly not a CVT. You don’t have a timing belt to change, or a serpentine belt to change, or an air filter to change. You don’t have to sweat an emissions problem, you don’t have to worry about error codes about running too rich or too lean. You don’t have to worry about your headgasket leaking. You don’t have a bay of stuff heated to around water’s boiling point for extended durations accelerating wear on various hoses. You aren’t going to have a belt tensioner go south, the DC/DC converter is less likely to lose it than an alternator. You won’t need to replace spark plugs, you aren’t going to have a turbo that screws you over.

Instead of all of that, you have a pretty bullet proof drive train except that the battery will chemically wear, but even that seems to be not as bad as believed with battery management systems babying the batteries. The car almost certainly weighs too much, which will manifest in handling and tire wear.

And of course, there’s gas v. electric. If (and sadly only if) you charge at home, an EV in my area is roughly like having a hybrid and $1.00/gallon gas. If you charge publicly… yeah that’s priced really high.

So at one point, there will likely be a huge single expense for the battery. However, that is instead of frequent oil and air filter changes, occasional belt replacement, and a host of likely repairs that a gas car generally incurs over that sime time. One very big expense at once instead of tons of little expenses and a few big expenses.

If the initial cost of the vehicle were competitive, hands down the EV is going to be the right choice if you can charge at home. Trickier question in an apartment or renter’s scenario.

It’s also because of the scrapers.

Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.

Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.

The paradox of a good company and product.

Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?

Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.

Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.

The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro’s need replacement, then they won’t have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can’t compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.

The USA has great data infrastructure and comparitively cheap power compared to anywhere else that has a vaguely credible grid.

Staff barely matters, the handful of folks they need is a rounding error in the scheme of things.

Real estate in rural America is pretty cheap too. Since they don’t care about proximity to anything day to day, they just need to make sure there’s credible access to power, data, and water.

Meanwhile, they have a government that varies through different degrees of support and pretty much never wavering toward the side of making life difficult so long as they stay at home, but will make things more complicated.

If they did build somewhere that was cheaper, it would be unreliable for their customer base due to network connectivity, and they’d probably have a problem keeping their datacenter suitably powered, and some the US would get pissy about exporting that much compute.

Because in this scenario, taxpayer money has been tied into the “winners” already. So that company eager to take his place? Well, that’s bad news because the taxpayer fund already picked his company to be the right answer. So we want to prop up Altman and discourage that upstart that might disrupt this theoretical fund.

Same reason why OpenAI was pushing for regulation that they get to shape. Easy for OpenAI to navigate, hard for newcomers to get going.

Because in the feeding frenzy, every company with a product/marketing budget is trying to make the customers pay by the token and companies are doing jack to help “mere mortal” companies get going with this stuff on premise.

You are right that the technical hurdles are not insane to get this going, but most companies don’t know where to begin and there’s no huge marketing blitz telling the business leaders this is realistically on the table and here’s the company you can call to make it happen for you.

Even if you overcame that and proposed really how to get going, you will still probably hit the aversion to capex that has persisted since Amazon told the industry that capex is toxic and you really want all your money to be spent on opex. Big companies like Amazon will take on that scary CapEx for you and you’re expenses will be nice and just OpEx. Coincidentally, the companies that spend the most on CapEx manage to pull in more revenue and profit than you will ever dream to, but still, remember CapEx is toxic.

Doesn’t really create symmetry for risk/reward, because, for example, the corporate leadership decides how much to pay out to investors versus how much they spend including a lot of their own compensation.

So they can carve out the reward as they see fit, but if things go bad they can lean on the public investment as leverage to get bailouts.

It is, but unintended consequences.

With this, then we couldn’t afford Sam Altman to experience failure because he will drag folks down with him. So the companies invested become too big to fall, and the still private leadership gets to run things however they wish knowing the government will cover for any mistakes.

It’s bad enough as the government will panic about retirement accounts when they falter, this exacerbates it.

It’s a risky form of private-public partnership, with a lot of ways the company can privatize rewards but socialize the risk.

Handguns kill cancer

The thing is ‘AI’ is a broad net…

So while you do have for example, utility in code generation, that ranges in usefulness to nearly the whole thing to mild completion, depending on the nature of the task. There’s not going to be a full “going back”, but maybe we can hope that people who are flooding with shit software they don’t understand will get over it.

Which highlights one of the major real problems. AI enables people that have shit ideas to make shit content with unprecedented volume. This applies to code, video, text, music. The people that use it to make quality content might be seeing less than 20% more productivity as they keep it on the rails, the people making shit are now able to spew out 1000% more stuff because they just don’t care.

Which in turn drives unreasonable infrastructure demands. So if the former “goes back”, so too does the infrastructure build out.

The misinformation angle though…

One, as many point out, insurance is about covering the extremes. Most people won’t use as much money as the premium, but others…

For example, a relative of mine got a rare cancer, that is pretty treatable, but the medicine alone would have cost 10k a month, ignoring the frequent oncologist appointments. No amount of savings would have covered that. Even a single visit to an ER could more than wipe out a couple of years of premiums.

The other thing is the discounts are no joke. Now if you are truly uninsured, many of the providers will upon negotiation give you some severe “break”, but you have to fight every time and your results are unpredictable. The insurance companies have lots of leverage, and the providers jack up prices to make the negotiated rates look good compared to their alleged list prices.

Note that malus.sh is a satire pointing out something that the companies are certainly very happy about, but the real AI companies haven’t been that forthcoming with the laundering of copying software through LLM.

“I used to feel guilty about not attributing open source maintainers. Then I remembered that guilt doesn’t show up on quarterly reports. Thank you, MalusCorp.”

Chad Stockholder Engineering Director, Profit First LLC

Which is crazy as they also made a big deal about how many users don’t want an AI result and how they are credibly the choice for those people.

I get offering the feature, but insisting upon it while also bragging about how they cater to the majority of respondents that didn’t like it is bizarre…

Google at least is consistent, they just plainly act as of the people who dislike it don’t exist.

Guy at work proposed AI workflow enhancements…

His whole idea was to take a workflow and just replace a few roles…

Developer becomes “AI developer agent” Reviewer becomes “AI reviewer agent” Tester becomes “AI code testing agent”

Rinse and repeat until the only block that was human was “Marketing Engineer”. Guess what department the guy worked in…

Yep, seen this.

Also, each iteration saying “ok, all problems are now addressed, the check should be fine, but running it just in case” (generates even more build errors than before). Rinse and repeat until my token quota is exhausted and I just code the good old fashioned way, no skin off my back. And I’m doing a ‘good job’ with utilization, despite having burned most of my quota on a failure that got thrown away.

Which is a stupid mindset.

“Go forth and burn tokens and your performance will be measured on that”

Looks like I’m going to make a for to ask for a for every word in /usr/share/dict/words. Look at all the tokens I burned.

It doesn’t reflect upon business value, performance, or education.

It’s even worse than the disastrous lines of code metric.

Their problem is they have no idea what to expect, so to signal affinity to hype, they just measure tokens.