+1. Increasingly it feels like the value delivered vs. token cost/consumption is wildly out of whack. There’s a lot of “this is 15% better for 100% higher inference cost” lately.

Just a ton of additional complexity and points of failure.

Reliability seems suspect - from the Moon the re-entry speeds would be very high, decreasing survivability of the munition and also increasing mass. Plus presumably you would base it on the surface so you have lunar launch fuel and hardware.

Alarming also are the employers/insurers who are increasingly pushing GLP-1s out of the control of doctors and towards prescription mills (for gating purposes).

You have consumers circumventing proper medical oversight but then you have employers who mandate it.

Whole code generation already works and works extremely well. But even then whole code generation is itself not the bottleneck in shipping useful software.

There’s a real lack of imagination around how to use LLMs in producing software that is largely an extension of pre-existing lack of imagination.

Yeah. The bottleneck has ~never been raw code generation. Figuring out what to build has always been the much more expensive bit, but culturally the industry has always devalued that (to the point where SWEs are excused from having that as part of their core skill set)

The modal reaction of “code is close to free” seems to be “imagine the amount of garbage I can ship now”.

Which isn’t surprising, but sigh.

In principle “code is close to free” can mean “now you can focus on shipping the right product”

In practice the industry has always devalued and sucked at this part and so… they are not using their newfound time this way.

More expensive gas + they built out a charging network much earlier than the rest. Density of public chargers where I am (Northeast) still trails CA pretty significantly.

It's getting better but it was pretty dire until *very* recently.

Likewise in NYC a huge portion of the budget amounts to food/housing/income assistance, which in Canada would also be largely absorbed by the provincial or federal governments.

Different scopes of spending. American cities generally pay for education, which ends up being the single largest budget item, where the responsibility in Canada is provincial.

Not yesterday. This was a week or two ago. Iranians released footage of a F-35 taking a major hit but the aircraft made it back.

Amazing. The Venn diagram between "using a LLM" and "people management" continues to converge!

Ditto with the 2-3 times a year I take this thing onto rural roads. The cost of doing that in a rental just isn't worth it - rental cars would have to be radically less expensive for that whole theory to work.

Like, I'm planning a ~1.5 week family vacation right now where I can either drive (~8h) or fly and rent. The rental is going to cost $2K (unless I want to YOLO on insurance). At that kind of cost I'm just gonna drive.

Totally. I sometimes resent the "if you have an infrequent need you should just rent when you need it" thing that is trotted out in urbanist circles. It just doesn't jive with any reality I have seen.

I'm all for regulating pedestrian safety, but that's not necessarily incompatible with higher clearance. That has far more to do with hood geometry, and I fully support the strict testing and regulation of that.

Honestly so do I. I don't think a slightly higher clearance is really a big issue - I take my car upstate often onto unpaved gravel roads multiple times a year and the ride height really does help clear some of the rougher roads.

They're station wagons with a higher roofline and *mildly* higher ground clearance. And it's great - wagons are awesome vehicles.

Turns out crossover are in fact distinct from SUVs! They market them as "SUVs" but they are in fact different classes of product (as full-size-and-up SUV owners are always reminding us)

In a lot of ways the best way to conceptualize these cars is that they're just nouveau-station-wagon.

This is the greatest line read in history and I will never miss an opportunity to remind people of it.

We went from “burrito taxis are a foreign concept to most people” to “burrito taxis are cheap and ubiquitous” to “burrito taxis are a luxury good” all in the span of 10 years.

It didn’t help that the low-skill labor-intensive work was heavily subsidized by VC money. Burrito taxis didn’t just become unaffordable, they existed in the first place because of heavy subsidy!

That's where I get stuck also. Of course they'd want security guarantees, but the US is not in a position to credibly promise it, nor is there a 3rd party that can credible ensure it. So.... what then?

I wrote something: sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/03...

It’s a real shame. I want to go EV but it just feels like we are right in the middle of an awkward transition where you really want to wait out these teething issues.

Oh yeah the “owning it” is still disqualifying to buying the car. A car that has a known tendency to strand owners and be in the shop for weeks on end repeatedly is not a car you should buy, regardless of how good the warranty is.

Volvos have a similar issue with their version of the same component. Seems like a common issue. To their credit they’ve owned it, but they haven’t *fixed* it. Their solution so far seems to be just keep replacing the component, cats-feeding-coyote style.

With the SSDs it'll be like taking out a second mortgage!