Thanks for sharing! I'm still torn about it. Sure it'll feel more natural if you have the AI head animation, but I don't want people to get attached to it. I don't want to make the loneliness epidemic even worse.
Yeah, Qwen3 coder for Claude Code and 3.5 for OpenClaw replaced my full-stack use of Opus 4.6 already; it's fine for basic web apps, k8s/docker infra setup, optimizing AI models etc. with only slightly higher error rate than Opus. Upcoming 3.6 together with Gemma4 might make it even better (still to test). OpenAI's memory spot market play might have been directed at local inference as well.
Look for Deepseek 4 when it drops, I’m curious how good it will be.
The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.
Based on the current DeepSeek website I suspect it's not going to be great as their current model (V3.4? V4-mini?) often forgets or changes facts explicitly mentioned in the conversation which R1 never did. It's better than R1 at math or coding, but nearly unusable for deep conversation. I suspect they pushed MLA or linear attention too much, or quantize a lot more than before.
I keep paying ElevenLabs for 3 years after some early AI agent project where I used it as my payment data is bound to a google account associated with a phone number that expired in the meantime. I thought adding the google authenticator to the account and switching to it as a secondary authentication method from the phone number would allow me to cancel the subscription, but for some reason Google insists I verify using the expired phone number...
Mars pushes the frontier (even if no one might survive the trip due to human body deteriorating), going around the Moon is meh - we were there ~57 years ago multiple times so what's the point?
Mars isn’t a frontier, it is a wrong turn that leads to a dried out toxic well in the middle of nowhere.
We should aim for the asteroid belt. Maybe we can mine them or something. It’d be less like a frontier and more like an offshore oil platform, but still, it is at least semi-plausible.
EVs are still a bit underwhelming wrt range - ideally either 450miles/700km or 5 minute 20->80% recharge at an acceptable price (35k EUR) should be the norm. For cities it doesn't matter but for longer vacation trips it's a must, nobody wants to waste 3 hours on a 1100km trip recharging. Chinese EVs might be able to deliver it at this price point (BYD) but EU adds additional (up to) 45% in extra fees to penalize Chinese EV makers and to prevent collapse of EU car makers.
1 in 4 vehicles sold globally last year were EVs, and they are >50% of the monthly sales in China, the largest market in the world. EVs are mostly solved, even though they will continue to rapidly improve, both range and charging infrastructure. Norway is at ~100% monthly EV sales, other countries will get there eventually.
Importantly, we should expect to go faster as EV sales reach a point where combustion sales have declined to a level where they can no longer support combustion vehicle manufacturers as a going concern. Peak global combustion auto sales occurred in 2017.
The trend is clear but right now they aren't able to replace ICE cars due to what I mentioned above. Either they lack range/recharging convenience or they don't but are too expensive. They need a few more years of scaling or EU to stop penalizing Chinese EVs.
ICE =! NEVs (which includes BEVs and PHEVs, with BEVs still the majority). If folks want to buy PHEVs until BEVs steamroll them, whatevs, the BEV cost decline and uptake curves speak for themselves. Combustion isn't getting cheaper anytime soon.
Hybrid contain an ICE, and are fully propelled by an ICE on the freeway (after some small miles). Their sale includes a fully operational ICE, often functionally independent. ICE is an acronym for internal combustion engine, a type of engine, not a type of car. ICE are used in all sorts of non car things. But you're correct that an ICE car is not an NEV car, which I never claimed.
You should not be spending that much time at a charger. Tech Connextras (the sister channel to Technology Connections) just did a video about a real-life road trip in slightly below freezing temperatures.
It's standard to charge from 10->80% or even less like 20->60% when doing road trips. People that don't own EVs assume that it's always 0->100%. However, even in a gas vehicle you'd never start at 0% (I'd fill up at 25%->100%).
The result is that you spend significantly less time charging than you expect. For me, it's usually 10 to 15 minutes per stop. Sometimes it's as long as 20. But that's generally after about 2 to 3 hours of driving.
It's actually funny because I've owned my EV since 2018 and my parents STILL try to insist that I can't do road trips in it. Even though I visit them pretty frequently and do 6 hour trips pretty regularly.
The other thing that is commonly missed is that you spend almost no time charging most of the time. It's only road trips where you spend any time waiting for a charge. That's because you are (likely) charging your car at home. The video referenced even shows that it's possible to do that with just a 120V outlet available.
Now how much time do you waste on a 700 mile road trip the way you recharge? I suspect something around 1-2 hours extra time. Compare it with gas station's 20 minutes overall including a short toilet break. For rapid charging you also need an expensive EV, whereas any gasoline clunker would do "fast tank filling".
> Now how much time do you waste on a 700 mile road trip the way you recharge?
About 2 hours. And as luck would have it, I also did that trip with an ICE. My non-driving time added about an hour.
> Compare it with gas station's 20 minutes overall including a short toilet break.
Which you still need to do at least a couple of times driving 700 miles. Also, that's 10 hours of driving, you need more than just a single 20 minute break for that much driving.
> For rapid charging you also need an expensive EV,
If you are making 700 mile trips, you'll need an EV with decent range anyways. All of those support fast charging.
Actually, all EVs I'm aware of support fast charging. The slowest I know of is the leaf, but even that supports 50kW charging.
Look, if you are in the business of doing a weekly 700 mile drive in the snow pulling a loaded trailer, don't get an EV. You have my blessing. Most people aren't doing anything like that. My 700 mile round trip happens twice a year, roughly, and the added 1 hour over an ICE is no big deal. Distances more than that, and I'm probably flying.
So you are essentially agreeing with me that the tech is not there yet - either it underperforms compared to ICE or it's much more expensive when it matches ICE. In other words, I should wait a few years until it catches up price-wise or convenience-wise. I don't really care about luxury or "driving inside a smartphone" experience, but just need something reliable that doesn't hinder me. Wasting 2 extra hours on a 10h hour trip is too much; I typically try to do it as quickly as possible to have more time for target activities.
I can stay longer and work remotely from there as well. Anyway, why do you care what exactly do I do? I simply need the range or super fast recharging as non-negotiable items.
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