tarpitt
Company A netting $1 from 50 happy customers is nowhere near as profitiable as Company B netting $10 from 10 miserable customers. Consider that Company A and B also compete for capital and manufacturing capability and such, not just customers. The market has chosen Company B as the most efficient vehicle to extract wealth from customers.
In fact the more Company B (and companies like it) succeed, the more capital they collectively soak up and the fewer competitors they'll have. The less leverage these miserable customers will have.
It's like the market-driven spread of some technology, like shipping containers. Except instead of a cost-cutting technology it's a price-inflating technology. Like movie theaters choosing to add massive markups to their snack bar. If you're a movie theater and you don't extort your customers for snacks, you have to raise ticket prices or lower profitability and you can't make ends meet or be as capital efficient as competitors.
I think there is some solution to this that isn't just heavy-handed regulation that companies will shoot loopholes in and run laps around. Maybe some type of stakeholder capitalism where consumers have more power than shareholders. Crowdsupply is one such example.
And now that it's out of production, the parts are gonna be scarce. Speaking as someone with a chevy volt that has a screwed up battery. Unless you go with a prius or a tesla something you're not gonna get a reasonably-priced battery replacement. There really ought to be a standard battery form factor for EVs...
I think if you look at something at aptera, it's really the lightest vehicles that can take advantage of electrification. I mean, they are proposing 1000-mile range, with solar panels on the back that can recover as much as 40 miles of charge a day. It would be incredible if they can pull it off.
Charging your own electric car from the wall is also a challenge here in the country unless you own your own house or are willing to pay higher-than-gas prices.
I think what's unappealing to women about EVs is the unreliability with respect to range and charging availability. I struggled with my mom to charge an EV she rented for an inter-city trip and she swore off EVs for a while.
Slate truck is a good example, I saw that ad where it is like decal'd for a flower shop for example. It's pretty small and cute (I suppose electric cars are easier to customize aestheticially in terms of shape as long as you stick to the skateboard format), and the fact that it is quite different-looking than most trucks left some wondering who it's for. Mostly women I think.
Whereas men buy more trucks, and usually there is sort of a power aspect to it where they want something that feels and sounds powerful (and being a gas car is part of that), so they can race it or can pull a toy hauler or something. Women want more of a commuter, but not like a sedan, usually something more bulky like an SUV that makes them feel safe. And then like bachelors and gay guys want like a 2D coupe or a roadster or something.
But it is interesting how these niches influence the market.
It's like most of the money in every market these days is made by cornering the market a certain lifestyle and increasing markup rather than trying to produce some ultra-efficient everyman vehicle. The innovation is all in advertising and consumer control, that's how I feel about every market these days.
If GE cemented the electric car as a must-have for women of the time, then we would have seen advances battery tech and EVs decades earlier. It would eventually have become mainstream with men as well (think of how the wristwatch was originially seen as a women's accessory, back when men had pocketwatches). The real innovation is in controlling consumer sentiment.
I wanted to finetune it a bit, I wonder if I am gonna have to dogfood if claude refuses to help me.
If you don't have a local LLM setup you're gonna be permanant local LLM-less underclass.
Oh you didn't know? I bet you trade in "dollars". That's cute.
Not cyberspace or VR as we know it, but maybe something more real than that. Something that is limited in the way reality is limited.
>People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The problem, which i have been grappling with for the past decade, is precisely that there is too much opportunity. there are too many options. Things are too interconnected. Human connection is devalued. I don't think you can merely solve it with more interconnection (although I will try).
When the founders of this country got here, they similarly did it to embrace the problems of a dynamic, dangerous, unsolved world, and to leave the glacial solved world behind them. They went from an old occupied world into a new virgin world.
And I agree with you that we need to be like them, founders of a new world, but I disagree with you about what that new world entails because we don't know of virgin lands that would free us from the grip of the old world anymore.
It used to be that if you wanted to go to a virgin land you would sail out into a remote island or rainforest something. But now that remote island also has sattelite internet and we have airplanes and boats and we realize it's not really that remote. We could go to mars and the technological arm of the old world would reach us. Maybe the virgin, disconnected world I seek could be an underworld or something, so that there is justification for it to be close and meaningful and disconnected from the overworld. I don't know.
We need to discover an unsolved world. Up and out!
On the other hand, If BCI is possible and useful, life will be miserable and we will borg ourselves just to keep up with the cost of living. We will be brains in jars on server racks solving captchas or something. We'll be the solution to AI hardware prices- the paperclip machine will be capitalism and nature itself.
This is gonna be boring as hell, especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
>get laid
It's not possible or desirable for many thanks to the current state of sexual involution. I suspect that the hyperintelligent sex robots might also may make this inviable as a source of human-human connection.
>Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything
You need land ownership, which, as one of the few limited things in a post-scarcity society might just explode in value. But I admit it would be pretty cool if the post-scarcity world is basicially just like minecraft creative mode do whatever you want type of environment. Still, with some limitations still in place, I imagine it will look more like 2b2t.
You can try to make friends outside of the internet, but all of those friends will use the internet, or their friends-of-friends will use the internet. Eventually you realize that the social group is centered on the internet, and by trying to avoid the internet you separate yourself from reality more than you connect with others IRL more by avoiding it.
Not to mention people have their social needs met by the internet that would otherwise force them to go out and form IRL friendships. So people who would otherwise be friends with you aren't available in the real world. So it's this social involution.
Before the internet was this sort of escape from reality for nerds, but now it IS reality. It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
On the cheap end you can do something like qwen 3.8 27B with 24GB on a laptop, and a very minimal linux configuration. That's more similar to my previous setup.
You can also do a lot more with mixed setups like cpu-moe. I could probably run GLM 5.2 on this hardware with the right setup, albeit without LoRA. I know people have been doing this to run qwen 3.8-flash-next with 32GB cards.
>it sounds like you view women as a warm fleshlight
I think most people accept the fact that women and men are sexual objects. If you view me as a mysoginist for believing that, then I think I understand why you might think our society is still patriarchal or something.
In fact, I can't say that most straight men expect something cerebral or spiritual out of their partners. But even if it was the case, you could expect that a hyper-inteligent machine would exceed human capabilities in this regard.
The only types of people who aren't going to be humping robots are members of isolated societies who have a grudge against technology. Hence the amish.
There are an increasing number of loser men and women who have these AI partners. I think we may see a tipping point where "genetic dead ends" comprise the majority of the population.
With this level of sexual competition, who can blame them? If you're not at the apex you can put in the effort to reproduce but then your offspring are just faced by the same problem, one generation removed.
The majority of men born in this generation won't reproduce. For the average man, there is no sense in doing anything but devoting your life to some high-risk/high-reward strategy. I don't even know what that entails these days, but apparently it involves a lot of sports betting.
I'm normally endowed, as are like 90% of men (so I think these types of baseless insults fall flat). But if I wasn't, would you rather I pass on 3.5 inches of american steel to the next generation? Your insult stands regardless and reveals your underlying preference. If I was endowed well enough, I'm sure you would see my point.
It makes no difference personally, as a gay man who is uninterested in exploring robosexuality. I prefer to work my clankers.
K3 and GLM 5.3 flash are pretty mid by comparison when you consider how much more it will take to run them
In the future you won't be able to tell.
I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.
grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.
GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.
It doesn't even need to be decentralized: GNU Taler is one example that gets posted here a lot.
Any attempt to retrofit the old system of banking will only make it harder to replace by a system with better underlying assumptions.
The way I see it, automated systems should basicially have access to the financial system anyways. This is some of the appeal of cryptocurrency.
Sybil resistance built into the traditional financial system (for example firewalling based on residential IP, requiring banking apps, etc.) is a massive annoyance that can obviously by circumvented at scale.
For apple to entertain this idea is to create more problems for themselves in the long run.
If you understand this from my perspective, which is that these actions are motivated by a desire for more control. It begins to make more sense. If you can benefit from increased control, then these unreasonable expectations of security against your customers (held by other customers) are a desirable problem to have as opposed to an increasing burden.
Imagine the same being said of a car manufacturer. "We need to install security measures in place to prevent you from modifiying your car because other people may see that modified versions of our cars exist and that tarnishes our brand somehow".
As long there is no reason to allow companies to exert this control over consumers, it just allows the manufacturer to enforce a total monopoly on the post-market.