seanmcdirmid

Next car I buy will support UWB Apple car key or whatever. A phone as a fob is just too convenient to pass up.

DeepSeekHarness is also an option. DeepSeek flash is a pretty competent as a model, and is open weight (although you are better off buying tokens from DeepSeek).

You can charge your EV at night. My washer is quiet enough that running it at 2AM isn't a big deal, but even then there are modern driers that use heat pumps to dry and don’t even require venting.

Natural gas is very convenient in many places, with sunk cost infrastructure and plenty to tap relatively nearby in the ground. But not in all places, I don’t get why countries like Japan are importing liquified natural gas. Or European, who gets much of it from Russia.

most states do that already, although many are looking at distance-based odometer readings instead (Washington state).

Maybe frequent tire service, but they actually need less brake service because you are relying on regen instead of braking most of the time. I still can't believe the anti-EV crowd still doesn't get that one simple thing, it makes them look very non-credible.

The parts that wear out the fastest and are the hardest/costliest to replace are not all of those though. EVs still have parts wear for sure, BUT it is just in a different league when compared to ICE repairs.

Chinese EVs are more eclectic than western EVs. But ya, suspension parts....are those things that automakers innovate on? Though I guess BYD is an exception, since they own their own parts maker.

Thankfully, EVs don't need as many spare parts as ICEs. It is less complicated machinery, and the batteries are the biggest component that are actually fairly standardized (well, at the cell level, there is a lot that goes on around that that is custom).

Ya, it was kind of a mess for me also, I had to get support to put my accounts in order after I subscribed.

You also get YouTube premium and home premium on the Google ultra plan. I didn’t realize how nice it was not to see ads on YouTube, and the home summary of who walked next to my home each day is bizarre. The grouping doesn’t make sense at all, since I would have bought it anyways, but it’s a nice bonus.

Google has a $99 plan that I’m using right now and I found flash to be reasonable for dev, but I spent my now past career at Google working around Gemini Flash limitations (when it was much worse than it is now) and leveraging subagents in antigravity. I want to dip my toes into anthropic or openAI models, but getting setup seems to require either another plan or expensive tokens, and I’ve found DeepSeek to be a reasonable back up/second model that I’m not eager to just go in and see what I can do over there.

It’s a majority of people who aren’t farmers and don't wake up at 6AM to feed the chickens in the dark (chickens would wake up with the sun anyways). They’ve done polls on this and it comes up to cities want permanent summer time, and farming communities don’t.

So you are going for a slippery slope or straw man rather than a spectrum right? Automation is useful is very different from we can lock old people in robot communities (well, to be fair, it’s not very far from how we treat the problem today with nursing homes).

Wait, you haven’t been reading the news for the last 3 decades? Chores for sure, but even componaionship has been on the table (Aibo was oriented at that very thing, and that was late 1990s, I think). Or are you just being very American centric?

I get the other things being out of touch, but Robot care for the elderly is something people have been looking at for awhile. I for one wouldn’t mind living independently into my 80s rather than being a burden on my only kid. I’m sure lots of people feel similar. Nursing homes and Elder care facilities also have huge labor problems, and throwing just money at the problem isn’t really an option.

I don’t think you’ll find better than 60Hz for $1200.

Edit: Samsung 32 inch 6K at 165 MHz refresh is on sale now for $1349.

3.8 flash is probably the sweet spot for most of your use cases. I’ve tried argon once or twice, and haven’t noticed it being better than flash for my dev tasks. Likewise, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash still seems better than any Google model I have access to.

Isn’t that a misnomer?

A 6K 32 inch from LG like $1200. You can get a 5K for $800 now, although it might be Asus.

Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…

Just do what Singapore does and import migrant construction crews from China or India (or other south Asian countries). You get the standard 33 story concrete blocks that they can build cheaply, and your housing problems are solved. You can even turn them into pseudo public housing (again like Singapore does).

I think in most of the west construction jobs are so incredibly protected and regulated, they just can’t seem to build anything anymore.

I can communicate well, people say my talks are easy to listen to and that my published papers are easy to read. But a 45 minute leetcode interview slot on some esoteric engineering problem without much time for thought digestion, that is something you just need to prep for because it isn’t a skill you’ll use much in real life. I can imagine interview prep programs moving in the direction of fast paced light context engineering discussions, just for the sake of interviewing well and not really for anything else (but alas, it’s a 45 minute slot, what else can you do but treat it like a performance?).

The time when a robot surgeon outperforms a human one probably isn’t that far off, I expect China will come out with something in 5-10 years.

But you’ve arrived at the ER and the attending staff are oversubscribed, so you have interns and residents primarily trying to keep you alive. Sure, if you are a VIP you’ll get extra special care, but most of us aren’t.

I'm implementing a similar process right now (calling it cleanroom for now):

Given a specification as a source of truth:

1. the lib agent can write lib code, but cannot look at test code.

2. the test agent can write test code, but cannot look at lib code.

3. the QA auditor can run tests and can look at lib and test code, but cannot modify either. It determines blame and then delivers feedback to lib or test agent in a way that doesn't reveal details about the code they are not allowed to look at.

You spend more tokens using this process (since multiple agents have to read the spec and similar files), BUT you get better results. The project is here:

https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom

I haven't formally released anything yet. I'm still benchmarking to show how and why it is better (and what the cost is).

You can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs. They can only smelt so much aluminum and they are exporting that also, so there are costs associated with that. In comparison, an AI result just needs a network connection to send.

Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.

Maybe to encourage longer stays? The cleaning fee is paid once per stay, not once per night. I get why it is a separate charge, since they aren't cleaning the place daily (like a hotel), only at the end of your stay.

Yep, I totally screwed up. Even coder-next is deprecated at this point. There are just too many models, and it is difficult to keep up with which ones are worth your time and which ones are just old news.