>> EV have far more tire wear because they are heavier
Is this true?
If an EV were 30% heavier than an ICE, would it produce 30% more tyre wear emissions? Or would it produce more or less than 30%? Is the primary factor in tyre wear weight and is the relationship linear?
The types of tyres appear to be quite different, the EVs seem to have smaller contact patches (narrower wheels) and they're made of different "less grippy" compounds that drag less. Does this change the equation at all?
in cold weather an ice is not close to 30%, that's an achievable warm weather figure when everything's working efficiently. Many ice journeys are so short in cold weather that efficiency never peaks above 10%
Well, EVs also lose a lot of efficiency in cold weather as well. You'll also note that the 70% figure I gave for power plants is more or less a best case scenario for modern, well designed plants. A lot of currently existing power plants do much worse than 70%
True, system thermal efficiency for the UK's CCGT generation is about 50%. Obviously that's with a varying throttle (the UK goes from say 5GW of CCGT to 25GW of CCGT in an hour if the wind drops just as everybody wakes up) and you'd do better than 50% if you were baseload running 24/7 at peak performance - but that's not a realistic place for CCGT to be when nuclear fuel is basically free and the two new big sources (solar and wind) aren't even running on actual fuel anyway.
Revealed preferences suggest otherwise and that matters because he says a lot of things, often contradictory.
Is it just another Epstein diversion maybe?
Oil story doesn't stack up though:
- it's heavy sour oil, the tar like substance isn't economically extractable without an almost doubling in barrel price
- cheaper (existing infra) sour supply chain with Canada already meets US shale light sweet oil blending needs for a long time
- decided on maintaining stability of existing Venezuelan regime over supporting regime change
One thing that lines up so far is it does seem to be disproportionately effective at displacing column inches spent on the pending bringing to justice of Epstein entangled elites. Disproportionately because that pursuit of justice seems quite resilient in resisting partisanship breakdown.
>> I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem
In most of these kinds of posts, that's still you. I don't believe i've come across a pro-faster-keyboard post yet that claims AGI. Despite the name, LLMs have no agency, it's still all on you.
Once you've defined the next most important problem, you have a smaller problem - translate those requirements into code which accurately meets them. That's the bit where these models can successfully take over. I think of them as a faster keyboard and i've not seen a reason to change my mind yet despite using them heavily.
If cars do not have agency how useful are they going to be. If the Internet does not have agency how useful is going to be. if fire has no agency (debatable) how useful is going be.
Call it what you want, but people are going to call the LLM with tools in a loop, and it will do something. There was the AI slop email to Rob Pike thing the other day, which was from someone giving an agent the instruction to "do good", or some vague high level thing like that.
That's in the US. Canada for example never had any legal reserve requirements.
However legal limits aren't the only ones that apply. Canadian banks still keep more than zero reserves around.
The more useful limitation in economic terms and in legal terms is on the amount of capital banks need to hold. A capital cushion is what makes your deposits stable, not reserves.
If you have a big enough capital cushion, you can always go and liquidate some assets to get the reserves needed to satisfy withdrawal requests. Having some reserves on hand is just very convenient, so the customer doesn't have to wait.
Fractional reserve is a model only for textbooks, it is not an accurate model of how the banking system works in most western economies with a central bank and sovereign currency today.
>> The more useful limitation in economic terms and in legal terms is on the amount of capital banks need to hold
Well this is usually the biggest of several limitations which impact whether a loan would be profitable to make for a bank or not so i don't entirely disagree but this is a legislative control, there's no "economic terms" here because in general no school of economics understands this or has anything to say about this control which you correctly point out exists and is central to loan decision making. People can argue about the degree of centrality because it's not the only factor so let me put it this way: it's central in a way which any notion of "fractional reserve" is simply not.
>> barely says anything about private sector money creation
It opens with the words "Money is created in the Canadian economy in two main ways: through private commercial bank loans..."
the introduction continues "... It also discusses how private commercial banks create money..."
And then it goes on to do exactly that in detail. I'm struggling to understand why you wrote that.
>> Your view of fractional reserve banking is rather.. unorthodox
Unorthodox is not the word to describe what has at this point been published by most of the central banks in western economies with a sovereign currency. From the Fed to the Canadian central bank, from the Bank of England to the Bundesbank and so on.
We're unfortunately living in a Copernican moment. We now better understand how money works but we're not permitted to say the earth orbits the sun just yet.
It's utterly ludicrous that the idea of Fractional Reserve banking is propagated in today's world as having any relevance to how banking works in these economies.
only thing i'd add is mas for mac app store apps you want to ensure are installed but otherwise i run pretty much the same setup.
When i install a fresh macos i have two commands to run - install nix using the determinate systems installer, then apply my nix config.
It's not quite as streamlined as nixos but good enough.
My biggest remaining pain point is dev envs - i've been leaning into adding a flake in each project, so for example i have a single project that's written in scala 2.13, when i cd into that project dir, the correct jvm version, sbt, intellij etc are installed, some useful env vars and shell aliases etc. - that's all great (i haven't felt the need to adopt denenv.sh or flox yet) but i do find myself wanting a devcontainer sandbox workflow more often these days (blame cli coding "agents"), i lean on vscode for that rather than nix so far. In python (where i spend a lot more time) uv loses a lot of value in nix and i don't like that.
> Entire categories of illegal states and transitions can be eliminated.
I have an over-developed, unhealthy interest in the utility of types for LLM generated code.
When an llm is predicting the next token to generate, my current level of understanding tells me that it makes sense that the llm's attention mechanism will be using the surrounding type signatures (in the case of an explicitly typed language) or the compiler error messages (in the cases where a language leans on implicit typing) to better predict that next token.
However, that does not seem to be the behaviour i observe. What i see is more akin to tokens in the type signature position in a piece of code often being generated without any seeming relationship to the instructions being written. It's common to generate code that the compiler rejects.
That problem is easily hidden and worked around - just wrap your llm invocation in a loop, feed in the compiler errors each time and you now have an "agent" that can stochastic gradient descent its way to a solution.
Given this, you could say well what does it matter, even if an LLM doesn't meaningfully "understand" the relationship between types and instructions, there's already a feedback loop and therefore a solution available - so why do we even need to care about the fact an llm may or may not treat types as a tool to accurately model the valid solution space.
Well i can't help think this is really the crux of software development. Either you're writing code to solve a defined problem (valuable) or you're doing something else that may mimic that to some degree but is not accurate (bugs).
All that said, pragmatically speaking, software with bugs is often still valuable.
TL;DR i'm currently thinking humans should always define the type signatures and test cases, these are too important to let an LLM "mid" its way through.
Completely agree with your on the types. Will be interesting to see what new post-AI programming languages look like and I suspect they will all be strongly typed.
I'm extremely pro-faster-keyboard, i use the faster keyboards in almost every opportunity i can, i've been amazed by debugging skills (in fairness, i've also been very disappointed many times), i've been bowled over by my faster keyboard's ability to whip out HTML UI's in record time, i've been genuinely impressed by my faster keyboard's ability to flag flaws in PRs i'm reviewing.
All this to say, i see lots of value in faster keyboard's but add all the prompts, skills and hooks you like, explain in as much detail as you like about modularisation, and still "agents" cannot design software as well as a human.
Whatever the underlying mechanism of an LLM (to call it a next token predictor is dismissively underselling its capabilities) it does not have a mechanism to decompose a problem into independently solvable pieces. While that remains true, and i've seen zero precursor of a coming change here - the state of the art today is equiv to having the agent employ a todo list - while this remains true, LLMs cannot design better than humans.
There are many simple CRUD line of business apps where they design well enough (well more accurately stated, the problem is small/simple enough) that it doesn't matter about this lack of design skill in LLMs or agents. But don't confuse that for being able to design software in the more general use case.
Exactly, for the thing that has been done in Github 10000x times over, LLMs are pretty awesome and they speed up your job significantly (it's arguable if you would be better off using some abstraction already built if that's the case).
But try to do something novel and... they become nearly useless. Not like anything particularly difficult, just something that's so niche it's never been done before. It will most likely hallucinate some methods and call it a day.
As a personal anecdote, I was doing some LTSpice simulations and tried to get Claude Sonnet to write a plot expression to convert reactance to apparent capacitance in an AC sweep. It hallucinated pretty much the entire thing, and got the equation wrong (assumed the source was unit intensity, while LTSpice models AC circuits with unit voltage. This surely is on the internet, but apparently has never been written alongside the need to convert an impedance to capacitance!).
And the thing to stand out was the change of meaning when the full quote is provided:
____
Fear or provocation of violence.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses towards another person threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or
(b)distributes or displays to another person any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him or another by any person, or to provoke the immediate use of unlawful violence by that person or another, or whereby that person is likely to believe that such violence will be used or it is likely that such violence will be provoked.
____
If you have to rely on this kind of disingenuous trickery to make a point, then you don't have a point.
The GP is correct in their statement:
>> What you cannot do is calling for violence against them.
The statute says "or" and an a) b) c) bullet point listing in a statute also means "or". Maybe you are unfamiliar with boolean logic, but I was listing the relevant lines of the statute which allow someone who did not call for violence to be prosecuted, and the standard interpretation used by prosecutors to prosecute people for non-violent, non-threatening, insulting speech.
What about Elizabeth Kinney, arrested for a simple slur in a private text message to a friend about the man who assaulted her, minutes after being beaten? What about the tens of thousands of people arrested who did not threaten violence?
I was giving an example of the format. That you think that it is necessary for a c) to exist for the example to be valid belies your absurd lack of understanding of the subject matter, whether incidental or willful.
And that doesn't even matter, because the text of the a) part explicitly says or at the end:
> (a)he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
It clearly is not disingenuous nor deceptive to clip out a) when I highlighted the b) part explicitly showing that it was merely one bullet point, and that a) contains or at the end (meaning that you do not have to commit the behavior described in a to be guilty under the statute). I was being helpful, showing only the relevant parts of the statute for readers that don't want to waste their time. You responded by posting more legalese not relevant to the point, potentially maliciously to try to complicate and confuse readers.
"Admitted" in journalist speak means he pled guilty. It doesn't lend credence to the idea this idea:
> "with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him..."
There's no way to go from "they should not be allowed to live here" to the idea that he is making people subject to "immediate unlawful violence". I stand in awe that there is anyone that can argue that with a straight face. This thread is about whether the statute covers behavior that is violently threatening. Admitted spreading of "racial hatred" in the form of simple statements opposed to migrant presence is not violent or threatening. It is an inherently peaceful form of political lobbying.
The UK is extremely litigious in regards to libel. Her lying would be an act of public libel against the crown prosecutor. She went on TV to talk about it. It's been well covered in everything from the IB Times to The Sun to the Daily Mail (as linked above), as well as fully televised on Piers Morgan. Naturally the team you obviously root for can just refuse to cover any prosecutions which are embarrassing for them and you can simply smugly say "well it's not in any source I trust so it didn't happen."
At this point, assertions such as these are a form of ad hominem fallacy against half of society. You are discrediting the multitude of sources who have covered this story because of the nature of the speaker while no hardline liberal outlets have covered this story at all and presented a counterargument. If you want to have an alternative narrative, you need to link a major outlet showing her to be a liar. The case has been presented to the public. You don't like the people presenting the case. That doesn't invalidate the case. You must, at this point, present a member of your team making a reasonable, evidenced based deconstruction of her claims. The fact that there isn't any coverage from your side at all of this incredibly well televised and written embarrassment for the legitimacy of crown prosecutors speaks volumes.
>> You could argue that NixOS hides a lot of complexity
They both have the same complexity in that scenario. Underneath it's very comparable configuration for both but Nixos provides an easy abstraction for that specific case.
If you can stay on the happy path with nixos then it's pretty lovely. I've even adopted nix-darwin for my mac's too.
I'd still deploy Redhat/Fedora over nixos on anything revenue generating though. The problem is when you have to come off the happy path in nixos and now you're debugging some interestingly written c++ code that evaluates a language that has a derivation expressing what you wanted done. Contrast with the redhat situation, it's simpler but less convenient in the general case.
> The problem is when you have to come off the happy path in nixos and now you're debugging some interestingly written c++ code that evaluates a language that has a derivation expressing what you wanted done.
I agree that Nix or NixOS are risky tools.
But it's not a problem that the `nix` program is written in C++.
A lot of the friction comes from the tension between NixOS's idiosyncratic design & its constraints, against the often 'dirty' way software is practically written.
For example, roughly, Nix's ideal software follows `./configure && make && make install`, where nix can then symlink the dependencies & maintain these in a read-only store. -- Whereas, say, Python wheels break this (because the precompiled binaries assume shared libraries are available globally).
When you run into friction with NixOS, you may need to understand things with a depth and breadth which aren't required with more common Linux distributions. (Including e.g. maybe needing to understand the rather large and obscure nixpkgs).
Do you have examples of times you've had to dig into the nix language like that, at least at a high level?
Just curious. I haven't run into anything like that myself.
Using nix for three months now, the main "pain" I run into is that I want app config files to remain writable by the app, but home-manager ethos is understandably against that -- and this is what you want on servers.
So I've had to vibe-code my own HM module for claude code, keepassxc, cursor, etc. and use activation to merge my nix settings into those files if they exist. That way when I rebuild, my nix config can assert a subset of the config I care about without locking the app out of writing to config -- and this makes more sense for personal desktop computing.
Though I put pain in quotes because it's still 10x better than what I was doing before, and an LLM can do it just fine.
NixOS is an improvement over RH et. al. even if you stray a small amount from the happy path; to use the GP example, if they couldn't do what they needed with the nixos LUKS options, they can click on a link from a related option definition and end up with https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/nixos/modu... which will describe much of how luks is configured. Often a small change there can widen the happy path, and with a PR, it can be made upstream in unstable relatively quickly and a release in the next several months.
Is this true?
If an EV were 30% heavier than an ICE, would it produce 30% more tyre wear emissions? Or would it produce more or less than 30%? Is the primary factor in tyre wear weight and is the relationship linear?
The types of tyres appear to be quite different, the EVs seem to have smaller contact patches (narrower wheels) and they're made of different "less grippy" compounds that drag less. Does this change the equation at all?
reply