I'm not an Elon fan, but the timeline here is interesting:
The Model 3 Standard was released in October 2025 priced starting at $37k.
The $7500 federal EV tax credit was scheduled to apply to that car but was killed early by the OBBBA, ending in September 2025. Had the tax credit still been in place as planned, presumably the sticker price would have made it under $30k.
It sure looks like Tesla worked hard to hit their $30k sticker price but then Congress pulled the 'ol switcheroo. Elon left the Trump administration in ~June 2025, just before the OBBBA was passed, calling the OBBBA a "disgusting abomination".
I find that I learn to "trust" a model to get certain things right, as I would trust a colleague. So, as `expectation` increases, my prompting and context management gets sloppier.
`percieved_performance = actual_perf/expectation`
`expectation` is an increasing function over time.
`actual_perf` is a stochastic function of the model's true ability, context, etc. -> a recipe for some bad sessions.
As for multiple bad sessions in a row, this is a studied phenomenon in gambling where players perceive "runs" because our brains love to find patterns.
It always seems like a missed opportunity that trackballs don't detect when you twist the ball. It would be so natural for spinning a model in CAD or zooming.
The easiest approach would probably be to add a second optical sensor and do some math to calculate the twist rate.
These have been made on and off since 1995 at the latest. They never work out even though you'd think they'd be super popular for 3d modelers at least. I first encountered one for SGI workstations.
A lot of people who haven't seen one are confuse it with a trackball, but SpaceMouse and its kin aren't trackballs, they're double cascaded joysticks on a fixed mount shaped like a ball.
The stump om the base works as a 2 axis tilting joystick, and the stem of the ball works like its own 2 axis XY sliding pad with extra push/pull plus twist axes. There's a wire through the stem of the knob to get the readings. Together they capture the whole 6 axis deflections for the knob.
Trackballs OTOH is just rubbing a mousepad rolled up to be a ball to operate a Magic Mouse while charging.
Mouse sensors are usually ~16x16 CMOS cameras that just return signed int X/Y movements. Shutter speed is goverened by both luminosity and polling rates. There's no raw pixel output, and even in sensors that have it, it's for focus adjustment only and not useful in realtime sensing. They're also crazy cheap.
Therefore the cheapest way to do ball twist is to just put two sensors and use the error as the twist amount. You could use a singular high resolution highspeed camera pointed at the ball instead, but that won't be the cheapest way to do it.
With only one you can't detect rotation around the axis that goes through the sensor, and for rotation close to that axis the resolution will be very poor.
This is true, unfortunately. I've have had to walk away from a client because their software-illiterate lawyer didn't want me to build with copyleft dependencies.
It wasn't the only red flag in this case, but frustrating nonetheless.
Do you think "Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements" is the origin of "ricing" / "riced-out" or a backronym[1]?
Honest curiosity about language and language use.
In fairness and full disclosure: I have believed until now that the language comes from rice-burners and related, and I have never liked it. If I were still in communities that used it (unix desktop crowd), I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.
> I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.
Any negative connotations "rice burner" once had was lost when the term shifted towards referring to cars instead of humans. But now re-recognizing that the enhancements are inspired by the East Asian race turns the connotations back to humans. Isn't that a regression?
Yes, the term originated as derogatory slang towards the Asian population in the early 1900s, and its use towards them became especially popular during the Korean War. There is no question there. However, as before, the term evolved away from people and towards cars. You cannot be derogatory towards an inanimate object. It doesn't have a mechanism to internalize feedback. In that evolution, the term lost its derogatory connotations. The historical usage, while a part of our past, is used no more.
Reintroducing this to be something about a population's race reinstates the derogatoriness. You can be derogatory towards humans. Minimizing the cosmetic enhancements to be being inspired by the East Asian race and not valuable human achievement brings us right back to the same place we were when Japanese cars started being introduced into the North American market, diminishing the human contribution. It is a regression.
> The industry standard for the recovery of lithium (remember there is a difference between recovery and extraction) is 90%, with some platforms now achieving 95%+ like those that use carbonation.
Some battery recycling challenges are minimal volume at this point on the EV adoption curve, and LFP and sodium ion battery chemistries won’t be worth recycling for the materials alone (but still require recycling as ewaste).
Sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, sodium carbonate. Not catalysts but reagents. Most currently come from fossil fuel feedstock but that isn't essential.
Why would any of those compounds come from fossil fuels? Sulfur is mined, hydrogen peroxide is water with some oxygen taken off, and sodium carbonate is made from salt and limestone
Sulfur is produced when the H2S is removed from petroleum and natural gas. Elemental sulfur is burned to produce Sulfuric acid using the Contact Process.
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