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This article is not making a good comparison.

Most EVs are luxury vehicles. Luxury vehicles depreciate much faster than regular cars. Luxury car buyers care if the car is new or not.

Tesla should be compared to BMW not Ford. Teslas depreciate at similar rates to BMWs.

EVs like the leaf are depreciating fast because their technology is becoming obsolete.

I think it is too early to be sure that EVs depreciate quickly.

You can usually remove the fuse that powers the 5G antenna. That will probably isolate your car from kill switch software updates.

Agreed that most people don’t think about this. I’m a preper and I hadn’t thought about this.

I’ve looked at the fuse box for my car and found the fuse that powers the Ariel Module. Removing this fuse breaks GPS and all cellular connectivity. Hopefully it breaks automatic updates. I am tempted to leave it disconnected to see if my car skips an update.

The rest of the car works fine. If the political situation heats up then I can remove this fuse to isolate my car from the internet.

Some people connect a toggle switch in place of this fuse so they can leave the car disconnected from the internet when they are not using online functions.

I would be surprised if simply removing a fuse voids my warranty.

You’ve got me thinking. I drive a Chinese made EV. If China ever had a nuclear war with the west they would definitely brick all of the cars they’ve sold us. Also it doesn’t have to be China that issues the command. Remote shutoff of cars is a great cyber warfare target.

Best case you’re transforming 10^6 cells and you expect 20 of them to take up the DNA.

Worse case it could be 10^11 cells for a strain of bacteria that doesn’t transform well.

You would have to look at a lot of colonies to find the one that transformed.

Biologists modify cells so that we can study them. The modifications are about 0.00001% effective. If you attempt to modify 10^6 cells then maybe 20 cells will be modified. Most cells do not take the modification. So you need to select out the individual cells that have been modified.

You do this by including antibiotic resistance genes alongside your modification. Now all modified cells are resistant to the antibiotic. Then you apply a small amount antibiotic to kill the unmodified cells. Now you only have the cells with your interesting modification.

This is the mainstay of molecular biology. Every lab biologist has done it. We even do it as college students in lab practicals.

Banning the use of antibiotic resistance genes in biological research is effectively banning all wet lab medical research.

The authors tried to find evidence of gene flow between the domesticated messor drones and the wild messor populations, but couldn’t. They sequenced about 100 ants, so it was not an exhaustive search. However if it was common you would have expected to see it.

The original paper discusses this in more detail. There is a well understood phenomenon called sperm paratism where male sperm will take over the egg, instead of sexually reproducing with the egg.

In sexual reproduction the offspring has 50% of its genetic material from both parents. In sperm parasitism the offspring is 100% related to the male and the female’s genetic material has been destroyed.

These inbericus females are allowing the messor male line to reproduce by sperm parisitism to maintain a domesticated messor line that they can then later sexually reproduce with to create hybrid worker ants.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w

In 1975 the British Queen instructed her representative the governor general to dismiss the Australian prime minister, dissolving the Australian parliament.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitution...

In principle this power still exists. Whether Charles could pull off the same trick depends on the political situation on the ground.

I think the author would say you did the simplest thing that could work.

Ignoring the namespace creates ongoing complexity that you have to be aware of. Your solution now just works and users can use namespaces if they want.

The author deals with this in the hacks section.

I’m unsure how the risk compares to an e-bike.

Assuming speeds are equal I think the consequences of a crash are better on a scooter. You don’t have a crossbar between your legs to trip you as you fall, and you start in a standing position, so you’re more likely to land on your feet. Also your head and shoulders are above the cars so you’re less likely to end up under the car.

Having said that I think scooter crashes are more likely given the tiny wheels and less stable frame. Try riding an e scooter without hands. It doesn’t self balance like a bike.

This sounds like the No True Scotsman fallacy.

We know all true scotsmen are good upstanding citizens. If you find a Scotsman who is a criminal, then obviously he is not a true Scotsman.

If you find a rationalist who believes something mad then obviously he is not a true rationalist.

There are now so many logical fallacies that you can point to any argument and say it’s a logical fallacy.

I think it’s a result of the concentration of wealth.

Lots of wealthy people invest their capital and live off 2-3%, while the portfolio is expected to average 7-11%. They choose this distribution strategy because they are trying to avoid a worst case scenario where they run out of money. The median return from this strategy is that their portfolio grows substantially. This growth of their portfolios is causing a concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich.

Now anywhere that is a good place to park money is shooting up in value. This includes stocks, real estate, gold and crypto.

My model predicts that everything investible will go up in value much faster than inflation.

The passive investment argument doesn’t explain why crypto and real estate are increasing in value. Most passive investors are holding stock and bond indexes.

Neither model can explain why bonds have crashed in value. Both models predict that bonds should be rocketing up like everything else.

> Or that theory could end up being disproved by unforeseen events. It wouldn’t be the first

I love this ending. Too many in the media are certain when no certainty is warranted.

Homegrown ORMs are universally terrible and a lot of the anti ORM crowd are really anti homegrown ORM.

I’ve used Django, SQLalchemy and Hibernate. All three have good migration stories.

100%

If a dev thinks that all SQL can be written by hand then they probably haven’t worked with a complex application that relies on complex data.

A good question to ask them is: what problems do ORMs solve? Good answers are:

Schema Changes + migration

Security

Code Traceability (I have a DB field, where is it used)

Code Readability

Standardisation - easy hiring.

Separation of data layer logic and application layer logic.

Code organisation, most ORMs make you put methods that act on a table in a sensible place.

Gold became a global standard.

People often forget the benefits of dynamic typing.

Maybe, I think the tyre shop is encouraging premature tyre changes. My local tyre shop recommends changing the tyres at 3.9mm. The tyre’s data sheet says it’s ok down to 1.6mm. You’re wasting 2.3mm of tyre, which is 30% of the life of the tyre.

My EV doesn’t use the brakes in normal driving. It can pull ~ 0.3G of regen before the physical brakes engage.

It will regeneratively brake all the way to a stop.

The brake disks are there for emergencies and spirited driving.

Agreed parent needs to get advice from 2/3 different tyre shops. Changing tyres every 10k means something is wrong.

VS Code and local Python virtual environments.

Packages managed with pip and versions pinned with pipcompile. One ML production environment forces us to use conda we inherit from the pip environment and try to have as much done by pip as possible.

Formatted with black and flake8

Unit tests with unittest

Azure Dev Ops for running tests, security screening, and CI

The happy path for deployment is build docker images in AzureDevOps unfortunately we can’t do that for good reasons

I’m not a fan of typed Python, it doesn’t work as smoothly as you expect if you’re coming from a statically typed language.

Be careful enforcing pylint quality. It can be a great way to kill your teams velocity.

I’m describing a boring stack that works. All of these tools are 5+ years old and very well supported.

I think count based logging works really well for batch processing jobs where each item is a fairly constant amount of work. The log shows the time you started and prints another line (with the time) for each 1% of the batch. You can see the progress and guess when it will be done.

The human who is debugging an issue can see when we started, see that some processed successfully, see regular progress through the batch, then see that the 58th percentile batch hasn’t completed and that’ll be where the problem is.

The main benefit over the time based logging is that the code is much simpler, and the log output is simpler too.

There are even libraries like tqdm that do this for you in one line of code.

Cleaning your house before a party is a reasonable ask.

Lots of plants can be used as soap with minimal processing (crush the plant in your hand while rubbing it on something). It’s likely that most of our ancestors used soap and we evolved to expect it. Just like we evolved to eat cooked or ground up food.

This isn’t about real photos of things that actually happened. This is about AI generated imagery.

So it’s not a photo of a politician doing something bad. It’s an AI recreation of what they are alleged to have done.

The law does have to be written very carefully.

I think this is great. It’s similar to the rights that brands have.

Imagine I drew a Coca Cola logo in paint. Now I own the copyright to my picture of the Coca Cola logo. Next I stick it on my new brand of soda. That’s not allowed.

Coca-cola own rights to their logo. You should own rights to your face and voice.

How do you agree a protocol to encrypt the message to agree the protocol?

This is the message that returns a list of supported ciphers and key exchange protocols. There’s no data in this first packet.

Alice: I’d like to connect Bob: Sure here is a list of protocols we could use:

You modify bob’s message so that bob only suggests insecure protocols.

You might be proposing that Alice asks Trent for Bob’s public key … But that’s not how TLS works.

Man in the middle interfering with TLS handshakes?

The handshake is unencrypted so you can modify the messages to make it look like the server only supports broken ciphers. Then the man in the middle can read all of the encrypted data because it was badly encrypted.

A surprising number of servers still support broken ciphers due to legacy uses or incompetence.

If you’re bored of Python go for a language that has very different paradigms.

Think C# / Java to learn about OOP

Scala to learn functional programming

Golang for concurrency and using the type system to handle exceptions.

Perl is very similar to Python so won’t teach you much.