Zero. If a skill actually provides value, one of two things happens: it gets absorbed into Claude Code (or similar) within a week, or a company packages it up and charges real money for it. The "free skill that gives you an edge" window is essentially nonexistent. By the time you find it, everyone else has it too. You're better off learning to prompt well against raw API docs than chasing a library of pre-built skills that are either trivial to recreate or about to be made redundant.
This intensification is really a symptom of the race to the bottom. It only feels 'exhausting' for people who don't want to lose their job or business to an agent; for everyone else, the AI is just an excuse to do less.
The way you avoid losing your job to an AI agent is not 'intensifying' its use, but learning to drive it better. Much of what people are calling 'intensification' here is really just babysitting and micromanaging their agent because it's perpetually running on vibes and fumes instead of being driven effectively with very long, clearly written (with AI assistance!) prompts and design documents. Writing clear design documentation for your agent is a light, sustainable and even enjoyable activity; babysitting its mistakes is not.
That’s a simplistic take. Displacement isn't about being "dumb", it's about unit economics. A company will replace a brilliant person with a good enough AI if it costs 10% of the salary. The "smart" people who are keeping their jobs are exactly the ones Simon is talking about. They’re being "forced" to work more to prove their value against a machine that never sleeps. That’s the intensification.
Retaining 90% range at -40°C sounds like a game changer, almost too good to be true. I'm definitely going to need to see some third-party real-world range tests to validate those claims before getting too excited.
Note that this article's summary has a significant error compared to the original press release[1]. The article says "90% range", whereas the press release says "90% capacity retention".
This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.
Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.
> Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.
[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but my car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.
It won't be as noticeable on a gas car because it is probably starting out around 30% efficiency (as compared with ~90% for an EV). This is a major advantage of gasoline, in a sense, because it means we have already engineered the package to account for a lot of wasted fuel.
Ah, so then the air temperature should reduce fuel consumption by 30%×30%=10%, which does seem to roughly match my experience. Thanks for pointing that out!
Internal combustion engines are actually more efficient in cold weather than hot weather. But the other factors like drag outweigh the increased efficiency of the engine. And since gas engines are so inefficient to begin with you don't notice much of a difference. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270072/heated-an...
Gas cars produce more power at lower temperatures - more oxygen gets into the combustion chamber, and the engine also can run more advanced spark timing without as much worry of detonation. This is why turbochargers have intercoolers.
Note that a 28% increase in drag results in a roughly 22% decrease in range, because 1/1.28 ~= 0.78. Also there are other losses (like rolling friction and constant loads like headlights or cabin heat), so range doesn't scale perfectly with drag. Drag is the main source of loss at highway speed, however
I drive long distance weekly on my gas car. Full tank in summer (+20C) gives me 520 km, while in winter (-20C here) I get 430-440 km. I noticed it on my current and previous cars. Maybe it's thicker oil and worse car efficiencies in winter ? And that's despite that full tank of gas has more gas in winter comparing to summer, gasoline is denser in cold temps.
It's the majority, but overwhelming or not surprisingly appears to depend on car model, at least per some calculations someone on reddit ran [1].
I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.
For most cars driving through air, at sea level, on planet Earth, at normal speed, the drag force F is proportional to the square of the speed (v^2).
That's not exponential because the speed (v) is not in the exponent. In fact, it's quadratic.
Corollaries: The power required to push the car at speed v will be proportional to Fv ~ v^3. The gas spent over time t ~ energy spent ~ power time ~ v^3 * time.
Define ‘high speeds’. There’s a reason race cars look like they do, to the point of having serious problems driving at speeds just a bit below highway speed limit.
I don't imagine the difference is very significant on long drives. If the car is cold soaked at -30, it uses about 10kW for the first 3km. Then everything is warmed up, and the ~25% difference is increased consumption, not decreased battery capacity.
As long as you have a heat pump harvesting the waste heat to keep the battery up to temp.
But might be significant on short drives, 10kW for the first 3 km is massive.
Yeah, this heat up effect is massive for around-town use. We have had below freezing weather for two weeks, which is very unusual here in Annapolis. That’s had a huge impact on my wife’s use case, which involves a bunch of 5-10 mile trips to drop the kids off at school, go on a grocery run, pick the kids up, take the kids to math tutoring, etc. She ran out of charge the other day during drop-off b/c the “37 miles left” we had the night before was actually a lot less than that accounting for warming the battery up the next day.
And human occupants will still run the heater more in winter. But it sounds like there could be a future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version of their cars for sale in colder climates.
Running a preheater loop for the heat pump from the systems than need to be cooled, inverter and motor that run better cold,and other optimisations could likely supply cabin heat with very little battery draw, solar pv blended into the exterior could zero that out on an average basis,but 40 below is nothing to play with unless you know exactly what you are doing, even if they say it will still work.
IIRC there are some surprising holdouts, at least in the NA market. For example as far as I'm aware the Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater.
Vehicle ASHP do little in deep cold temperatures, since the evaporator is necessarily so small. They're mostly effective in the 0-15C range. Note that all EVs have PTC heaters, regardless of heat pump. The PTC is what does most of the work for getting the interior to temperature quickly (they're 5-10 kW).
The VW id.3 costs about 30k. It doesn't have a heat pump by default, but it's a 1,200 EUR add-on. Which probably makes sense; in some markets where it's sold it doesn't really get cold enough that one is of significant benefit.
Interestingly, the Hyundai Inster (20k EUR) and Renault 5 (25k EUR) both have heat pumps as standard equipment.
just fyi for the MY23 and older software 3.8/9 should be available for update, which is a pretty significant upgrade compared to 3.2 or the 2.x builds (which I don't think a MY23 should have but idk).
There's one. Go to a Car and Driver article about cars with extreme ranges, namely those over 650 miles, and they will start listing out particular years' models over a 10 year period in order to get to even ~10 models, and most of them are EcoBoost or variants or poor selling hybrid versions of other cars.
Assuming a 1000km range is a very strange thing to do, as it's a fringe feature that almost no one needs or wants! Recall that "almost no one" means that there's still some, an existence of a handful of people on HN is quite consistent with "almost none."
Of course I didn't pick it for range, I looked at price and miles of what the local carmax had and then separately looked up how tall the top of the windshield was.
Which I would expect to typically find something that's, um, fairly typical on characteristics I wasn't selecting on.
my 2010 F-150 with the notoriously terrible 5.4L gas engine seems to manage 1000km range. there's absolutely nothing efficient about it, it's just got a big gas tank.
Yep, Ford had to put really big tanks on even the F150 to make up for the horrid mileage. Even with a 36 gallon tank, when towing with an F150 you might only get 300 miles. It's one reason the Lightning had problems selling as many as they wanted (aside from the ridiculous pricing the first year or so). Most people who are serious about towing don't use an F150 anyway, but that doesn't mean that F150 buyers don't fantasize about their potential towing needs in the future.
Comparing range of gasoline cars is idiotic. There are plenty of cars with long range (1000km), and they all have 60L+ fuel tanks and most run on diesel (which gives you ~15% more range per liter). It'd even argue the same for BEVs. More battery is more range.
> The point you are DESPERATELY trying to miss is you can easily "recharge", a "dead" ICE at home too
Eh? All I can see is you DESPERATELY trying to push the narrative that it’s common for people have barrels of fuel at home which is a pretty weird thing to try and prove since everyone reading this will know it’s not true.
You mean EVs? Yeah, none that I'm aware of. But petrol/diesel cars? Loads of them. Even my 400bhp Volvo XC60 will easily do 650 miles on one tank of fuel. A diesel one will do 700-800. And a diesel Passat will go over 1000 miles on a tank without trying. Hell, even my basic 1.6dCI Qashqai could do 700 miles on its 55 litre tank
Cool, I guess when I did 700 miles on a single tank of fuel driving Switzerland to Italy and then again driving Italy to Austria and then again Austria to Netherlands this summer I just imagined it. My total for the 3000 miles was 38mpg(imperial).
Also you are quoting a value for the B5, which is not what I have, mine is a T8(and before you ask - no, I didn't have any opportunity to charge it anywhere on the way).
> Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
The temperature difference should in principle increase thermodynamic efficiency. You get loss of MPG from other factors though mentioned in the link, like increased friction of moving parts, idling to warm up (0MPG), defrosters/seat heaters, lower tire pressure, denser air to drive through, winter fuel mixes which may not have as much energy, etc.
Sticking a piece of cardboard over a portion of the radiator was a common sight during the winter when I was growing up in rural Ohio. I didn't think our winters were that cold, but maybe late 70s to early 80s vehicles were more susceptible to running cold.
I had a car that developed a stuck-open thermostat and did the cardboard trick to get by until I could replace the faulty part.
I've had that happen, too, on a [more] regular car. I drove a Mustang 5.0 from Oklahoma to Oregon, and as I went through eastern Colorado the coolant temperature steadily dropped until it was resting at the bottom of the gauge. I don't recall whether the gas mileage suffered noticeably or not during that phase of the drive.
There are a bunch of things going on, and some people's measure of efficiency needs work.
1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas
2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives
3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way
4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment
5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
Assuming you can get the car to start (mine needs an engine warmer at that temperature), it takes at least 15 minutes of driving to reach that temperature. Unless you’re going on a longer trip the engine most likely wont be warm by the time you reach your destination.
I had to drive in -30C once, the engine could not get up to final temperature after 2 hours of highway driving because I had to run cabin heater at full blast on windshield and side windows so they didn't cover with fog inside. But that was in very old low power car.
My tiny diesel car (2008 Toyota) needs its auxiliary heater below around -15 C for highway trips. It's a switch in my dash that burns extra fuel, otherwise the engine won't get up to or stay at temperate.
Pretty normal with diesel as it gives off less heat than petrol. I have a van with an 88kW engine, and even at -5c I can see the coolant temperature drop when I am idling down hill and have the heater on. Any colder and it's worth blocking the radiator with cardboard.
I once had a condo with parking in a cave that was above freezing even when outside was -30 C (or F, close enough at that part of the scale). It was a great winter perk.
Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.
The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.
Open Source isn't a tech stack or a specific way of typing syntax, it’s an ideology. It’s the belief that knowledge and tools should be free to share, study and modify. You cannot kill an idea. Whether I write a function by hand or 'vibe' it into existence with an LLM, the act of liberating that code for others to use remains the same.
What's not the same is that the LLMs used to create the code are highly centralized and controlled. I suspect it's only a matter of time until the content industries start trying to restrict what code LLMs are allowed to produce so that you can't use an LLM to bypass DRM.
> I suspect it's only a matter of time until the content industries start trying to restrict what code LLMs are allowed to produce so that you can't use an LLM to bypass DRM.
I don't think this is a possibility anymore for multiple reasons. As others have already pointed out there are already "open models" available to use and that genie can't be put back in the bottle, restricting the commercial models wouldn't fix the issue.
And secondly, I think the state of commercial LLMs show that the big tech companies behind LLMs have already become far more politically powerful than the traditional content industries. (I don't think this is good thing, but I think it is a thing).
If you had explained the LLM situation to 15-years-ago me in terms of how they are trained (on almost entirely copyrighted material) and what kind of output they could generate and told me Disney hadn't managed (or really even tried) to sue various players out of existence I wouldn't have believed it, yet here we are.
A 80B MoE model with 3B params per activation is not a competent model regardless of what their cherry-picked benchmarks say. This reminds me of back when every other llama-7b finetune was claiming to be "GPT-4 quality".
This is just phase one; phase two requires the law to be changed so that you must do what the AI tells you to do, or be immediately terminated (read in to the last word whatever you want)
some do and some don't. the "outrage" button is appropriate for the first part (don't care about students; waste resources to increase profits), but destructive for the second (we do care about students; we use resources in the classroom). It is hard to discuss this important topic when things go to "yelling" immediately?
> They don't care about students or education, they care about wasting resources and making a lot of money in the process.
This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.
It’s not theater. It introduces friction into the process. And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper, or take a photo and upload the picture), you’ll get more people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active choice.
At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.
That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.
You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence -- making it easy for a prof (and their AI) to detect the presence of AI use, especially if students are also quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own summary.
Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow.
I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.
Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.
It’s not the time that’s the friction. It’s the choice. The student has to actively take the picture and upload it. It’s a choice. It takes more effort than reading the autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they replaced.
It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.
Are you really comparing the energy necessary to read something to taking a photo and having an ai read it for you. You are not comparing zero energy to some energy, you are comparing a whole lot of energy to some energy.
Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean another x% of the class reads the material rather than scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.
And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?
That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.
Anyway -
my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.
This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.
They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.
They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
This is a massive missed opportunity for financialization. We need a 3x Leveraged Bull Potato ETF immediately. Tokenize the crop, lock it in a vault and trade futures against the harvest. Why feed people for free when we could create artificial scarcity and pump the price 10x by next week?
McDonald’s fries pricing suggests the market has already priced in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print fiat.
I'm glad someone pointed that out. They even have call and put options, and thousands of FPGAs in Chicago trying to arbitrage deviations from put-call parity from market open to market close.
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism on everything, but dealing with excess produce is legitimately a hard problem because they have a shelf life and someone has to harvest them and move them to where consumers are.
With advanced preservation techniques, we can extend the shelf life of food almost indefinitely. This flexibility extends to the farm level as well: farmers have the agility to pivot production annually, switching from low-demand crops like potatoes to more profitable alternatives as the market dictates.
Not to mention it's factored into future prices. Futures for the same commodity, but for delivery on different dates can vary wildly in price. The most notable examples are oil and electricity prices going negative occasionally.
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