travisb

5 ms·

1.
by travisb 5d ago
In North America, it's fracked oil making up for declines in conventional crude oil production. Over the past 20-ish years fracked oil, which is mostly too light to cost effectively refine into diesel but makes nice gasoline, has made
2.
by travisb 3mo ago
Off-shore isn't available on the same schedule. My AIntern is available the moment I start my day (not normal for off-shore in a different time zone) _and_ is available after the end of my day when I want it to work after I've gon
3.
by travisb 3mo ago
I think a lot of the cost comparisons to employees are off by a factor of 2 or more. AI is the ultimate contractor. Available instantly. Doesn't charge during idle periods. Pre-vetted and pre-trained. No contract negotiations or comple
4.
by travisb 3mo ago
Bed length is a silly metric to use. It's single dimensional and doesn't capture any of the other important metrics. Such as width, air-volume, cubed-volume, or weight capacity. Slate's 5 foot bed is on the shorter end of com
5.
by travisb 7mo ago
That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from the graph) ~8% more expensive than combined-cycle
6.
by travisb 7mo ago
A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source. But that definition doesn't take into account availability. Th
7.
by travisb 7mo ago
Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe. The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle roo
8.
by travisb 8mo ago
I think both Slate and Telos will be failures. They will be too expensive to make economic sense for people, as opposed to businesses, to buy over a more conventional full-size half ton pickup. In some ways the massive online interest is pr
9.
by travisb 10mo ago
All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI studies which make them all but useless. It will take 15 or
10.
by travisb 1y ago
In most cases every residential system is getting payment rates at least that good. The problem is that wH-for-wH doesn't take into account distribution costs, which is most of the residential cost of electricity, and that a wH at noon
11.
by travisb 1y ago
Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home. The 20-ish
12.
by travisb 1y ago
Linux kernel drivers often end up being GPL'd, but out of tree. This is because Linux releases many very useful (and sometimes critical to the use-case!) functions behind a GPL-license API restriction. This is EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.
13.
by travisb 1y ago
In my experience in corporate environments, that ability to forward to new participants with most of the context is really useful. If few people are going to read the history anyways, then in my opinion this edge case is valuable enough to
14.
by travisb 2y ago
According to this article, a rather weak argument about people not liking to wake up before sunrise based on questionable correlation of commute times to sunrise times, ignoring factors such as average commute lengths, dominant (historical)
15.
by travisb 2y ago
I think the hypothesis was more true in the past, but mostly because both the necessary dependencies it is based on are less true today than in the past, and the products and services are more complex today. Back when anybody could start
16.
by travisb 2y ago
I think the author is missing the forest for the trees when they try to construct a taxonomy of 'elites'. Firstly, there is little reason to believe that per-capita is the correct way to think about surplus elites. It's just
17.
by travisb 2y ago
Harberger taxes seem like a spherical cow solution. It works in abstract economic theory, but encounters serious problems when you introduce pragmatic complications like cash-flow, malicious actors, non-rational actors, asymmetric value, tr
18.
by travisb 2y ago
But that's not how it'd work in practice. In practice the spiteful billionaire will monthly send you offers $10K over the higher of your estimate or fair market value. So you'd be moving every month and incurring all the movi
19.
by travisb 2y ago
At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet. Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't do it for small things. For decades now those situ
20.
by travisb 2y ago
Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however. On the engineering side: - Swapping requires standardizat
21.
by travisb 2y ago
Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get better. Good EV charging today is a peak around 300 KW
22.
by travisb 2y ago
I've never understood why people have such trouble with having their camera on during video meetings. Is it just some people being conscious of the always true fact that everybody else in the meeting can see you zoning out of the meeti
23.
by travisb 2y ago
My vague understanding of the related laws is that as long as the company has a consistent retention policy and is under neither a court order to increase retention nor retaining records for specific incidents as part of policy, that a shor
24.
by travisb 2y ago
At least one video call a day is more about socialization than work; chat and email doesn't really strengthen psychological feelings of connection to the team. Regularly putting a face to the nickname is important. I consider small mee
25.
by travisb 2y ago
Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks. Have a company-wide General/Coffee chat where people talk about
26.
by travisb 2y ago
It sounds like a good deal, hopefully they have mortgage support arranged with their local banks. For many young people, the ticket to getting ahead these days is moving away from the big cities. Unfortunately it takes effort on the part of
27.
by travisb 2y ago
If you look at an Aztek today it doesn't stand out as unusual at all. It feels like the Aztek was ahead of its time and many mid-size SUVs have since caught up with its aesthetic.
28.
by travisb 2y ago
Mostly the latter. Some of it comes down to the rocket equation because it takes a lot of energy to warm a battery up. If that energy has to come from a battery itself, then the vehicle needs even more battery. Carrying around that extra ba
29.
by travisb 2y ago
The big difference between my position and the article is that I don't believe the presence of women is a significant portion of the cause. At the core I'm making an economic supply and demand argument where the number of 'ce
30.
by travisb 2y ago
I think the author is reversing cause and effect and so not coming to a terribly useful conclusion. It rather seems to me that fewer men (proportionally) are attending college because the value proposition has substantially declined. Simil

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