Um, don't fill up at Brand X on the road? My millennial personal trainer said her dating prospects couldn't even change a tire let alone do an oil change, now I understand just how bad the situation was for her until she married a rocket engineer.
The Supercharger network is cool. But I can go 300ish miles in my class B RV before refueling as opposed to 120ish miles in my Mach E. It's 10 minutes to refuel my RV vs 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on the state of the charger (ElectrifyAmerica) or how long I have to wait. That was how I made the decision to wait for 400 mile range (likely a Silverado F-150 EV and yes I haul stuff, I build things, and my RV makes for a crap pickup truck but I get by) before returning to long range travel with an EV.
A friend circumnavigated the United States in a 300 mile Range Tesla so I don't doubt what's possible here.
I have a 200 mile range EV, which is to say a practical range of 120-160. It's great for running around the bay area. It's not so great for the monthly travel I do going 500-2000 miles in a stretch because stopping every 120-160 miles for anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours is mind-numbing, and that doesn't even account for the mercurial state of the national charging network. It's also not so great in places less friendly to EVs. I'm upgrading to a 400 mile range EV down the road and I hope the charging network upgrades itself as well because it still sucks.
I'll believe it when I see it. I lost a great deal of faith in EVs when the local dealer refused to service mine because I didn't buy it from them. On the bright side, Ford gave me a 5-year extended warranty to make up for their behavior, but WTF?
Lived that when I blew my Class B RV's transmission in Crescent City, CA on the 101 (Van life! Van life! #PortlandiaReference). I was going to be stuck there for a month waiting for parts until I galaxy brained my way out of it by getting my car towed to a dealer in Medford, OR and bought an EV there for below cost the same day, the first EV the dealer had ever sold hence the discount.
If they're close to the exit, it's clearly someone else's problem for those that aren't in our culture. If only they'd invested in their personal safety they wouldn't be burning to death and how else will they learn?
Otherwise I agree. I have no problem with Stallone or Schwarzenegger in the exit rows. But realistically, they fly private jets or in first class.
Edit: Ageism and sexism are good, anti-ageism and feminism are bad! That effective accelerationist mindset has no room for the womenfolk or the senile!
AI models have an amazing ability to approximately memorize any training data. It's just that that memorization is useless unless it memorizes something real as opposed to random (randomized ImageNet labels as a simple example).
So as much as I want there to be a fair use case here, the artists have a real point. If someone can break the memorization without losing significant validation/test set performance, that might go a long way.
But even then, artists don't want their style copied either, and that's problematic to me in that if a human does it, that's OK, but if an AI does it, it's not? Yes I get the ease of asking an AI to do it vs a 10K+ hours artist, but, well, more or less the same to me on a geological time scale.
In the next year, I'm hoping to Patreon/Kickstart project that offers two major funding tiers. Hitting the lowest tier means it will use AI to create assets, and hitting the higher tier will use humans instead. My response to this brouhaha is to throw the controversy right back at the people creating it in the first place and ask if they're willing to walk their fancy talk on this subject with their wallets.
It is true. Amazon was always brutal, but two-pizza team six-pager culture was a great place to rule in hell as opposed to serving in Heaven as a generalist at Google. Two-pizza team six-pager culture died sometime during the last decade. At a guess, when they imported so many AI academics and they brought all the toxic worst practices of academia to bear on it.
The Applied Scientist title at Amazon is the single worst thing they ever created: 15% higher comp and stock if any L10 or up decides you are one, a 100% political position that set everyone against each other just like separating the bonus for the success of Google+ from the rest of Google did in 2011 (was there for that idiocy myself).
Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
If you were L8 then the responsibility for setting the culture is 100% on you.
L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s.
If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture.
If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process.
If you don't like a process, kill it.
This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".
In pretty much any big enough company with enough people, the issue is that you have a general sense of direction at higher levels, and if you go against the grain, it makes other people criticize you because they want to be seen as going with the grain for their career paths. If you want to see the biggest example of effect in action, go work for the US government.
So at certain point, you just stop caring to do anything because the paychecks are worth more to you.
Nah, I hired specialists and caught no end of trouble for doing so. All of them that are still in tech make $1M+ annually these days because they stand out among the lovable but mostly ineffective fungibles that are the cannon fodder for rounds of layoffs there.
But advocating for my direct reports instead of happily figuring out which one to fire next is what made the experience so dreadful and career-limiting when the L8 and L10 herd's jobs depend on continually hiring and firing to look busy.
I'm not lecturing them for leaving. I'm lecturing them for complaining about things that it WAS IN THEIR CONTROL TO ADDRESS. More than that - it was their actual JOB to ensure.
And what makes you think one L8 against an entire hivemind of L8s and L10s whose high-end compensation depends on negating everything you're doing can move the needle? 80+% of my meetings, so very many meetings, were endless discussions of who the next "unregretted attrition" would be so as to appease the need to fire. Those are your leaders, and that's how they spend their time. Or maybe you're one of them and the truth hurts?
I chose to "disagree and commit" to "The Law of Two Feet" and left. One L8 claimed he would be blacklist me and my direct reports (who also left) from ever returning. He got a harassment claim later and I asked in return for my input that HR investigate that claim. Nope, not blacklisted, he was just a lying PoS.
In my 3 decades in tech, something happens around 10K employees and it's irreversible. Amazon was amazing in evading that for so long in exchange for a brutal cheapskate internal culture they slapped the label "FRUGALITY!" upon to make it seem legit. There's probably a doctoral thesis or two in analyzing how it was both broken and working at the same time.
Decentralized power generation is something we all need. Too bad so many politicians, especially Gavin Newsom FFS, are deep in the bockets of the utility companies who refuse to invest in it.
