what do you think of this one vega?

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger toyota is a dinosaur that bet on hydrogen. their market share is getting eaten by the chinese and the eu has mandated 45 minute breaks. you have absolutely no idea what is going on in the rest of the world.

Jebus murphy... the Ranchero will die within a few years, just like the Lightning. I love how you paint this with such rosy glasses. Toyota has been VOCAL about how they see the EV market developing. Maximum 30% penetration of BEV's globally, with their CEO explicitly stating a BEV pollutes as much as three hybrids. And you think adding a 3 hour charging requirement to match what a normal semi can do is a win... quit sniffing glue.

“A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds. That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations not superiority.” —@Shellenberger open.substack.com/pub/public/p/2…

@SowellianHaggis @hung_dinger @FaytuksNetwork no it's dumb because it's impossible

@hung_dinger @FaytuksNetwork Not nearly as dumb as letting them keep their enriched uranium, though.

BREAKING: President Trump requested a plan to seize nearly 1,000 lbs of highly enriched uranium from Iran. The U.S. military briefed him on a complex operation involving airlifting excavation equipment, building a runway inside Iran for cargo planes to extract the material, and potentially deploying hundreds of troops. - WaPo

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger samsung and gm's $3.5B battery plant is indiana is still moving ahead. CATL is investing over $20B in battery production outside of china. the list goes on and on. when it comes to freight, volvo group's newest truck has a 373 mile range w/a 30 min recharge time.

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger ??? by volume china's market is twice as large as all of north america. gm is still converting spring hill for lfp production. ford's new midsize ev pickup will be produced in KY. hyundai/LG's investment in GA is over $12B. toyota has invested $13B in its battery plant in NC.

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger i sincerely doubt you have a better understanding of chemistry than the people being paid by samsung, BYD, and CATL. believing that you do explains a whole lot though.

Ha, no I am not but I have enough of a background in chemistry to understand there is a limit to the energy storage of materials we have today. Keep fluffing for those government subsidies though... I'm sure they generate the next magical breakthrough sometime in the "near" future.

??? lol

@eigenrobot @fdondi1 strait is still closed

@fdondi1 hows that working out

why is iran still lobbing missiles at israel. morale i guess? feels basically pointless yet costly, as it exposes launchers and wastes missiles while accomplishing nothing tactically nor strategically

@wildcat_of @alltheputs @Nature how are papers with nonexistent citations being reviewed for publication in the first place? that's a much bigger problem than the lazy research people try to publish to appear productive.

@alltheputs @Nature Can you explain tho? This statement on its own just makes you sound like a conspiracy sheep

Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests go.nature.com/4dnjvil

@NathanJRobinson so you will only publish articles about ai that are negative?

we have the opposite of this where if you write a good essay lambasting AI we will pay you money: currentaffairs.org/writers-guide

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger they're not going anywhere. progress isn't stopping. the incentives are to completely reshape global transport, freight, and industrial policy, and incentives work. you aren't privy to some magical wall of physics that ensures no further progress. cope.

It's embarrassingly stupid to always assume the next big breakthrough is just around the corner for EVs.. which is always the case for EV pundits. Billions invested in batter research and all we have are longer lasting power tools and cell phones. Transportation or grid capable systems are a pipe dream.

@freadomtruck07 @FreightAlley many of their cars are better than anything sold here, so yeah, probably

@FreightAlley Do they have any IP worth transferring?

I think we should rip a page from the Chinese playbook and tell Chinese OEMs if they want to sell to American consumers, they must open up production in the US with an American OEM. As part of that arrangement, the Chinese OEM will be required to transfer IP over to the American OEM.

@berniemoreno sorry but i want better cars that cost less

This is simple: no Chinese autos on American roads. Period. And to our western allies letting this cancer infect their economies, turn back now before it’s too late. reuters.com/business/autos…

@the_Savage_Quad @PresidentJose3 @Handre they were huge pieces of shit lol

So, a car that people love the year make and model of was destroyed for the sake of the government's vanity. Vehicles that families could afford, just because they didn't get enough gas mileage for you. Don't even try to defend this, it will only make you look stupid and pathetic. My 2006 Ford Taurus got 25 miles to the gallon, yet they would have totally accepted that car and destroyed it. Make that make sense. And don't try to tell me they wouldn't have taken it because it got over 18 MPG, it's the damn government, they wouldn't have hesitated.

Cash for Clunkers destroyed $2.4 billion in working capital in 2009. The government paid dealers to pour sodium silicate into 690,000 perfectly functioning engines -- rendering them permanently inoperable. These weren't junkyard cars. The program required trade-ins to be drivable and insured. You had working vehicles that poor families desperately needed, and bureaucrats systematically destroyed them to boost GM sales (while GM was under government ownership, naturally). The environmental impact? Pure theater. Most clunkers got 18+ mpg -- hardly gas guzzlers. Meanwhile, building new cars generates 25 tons of CO2 per vehicle before they leave the factory. The program likely increased net emissions while making transportation less affordable for everyone earning under $50k.

@Handre nah most of the cars were junk

@svpino people do the same thing

The same AI that wrote your slop code is now reviewing it. Please, don't call this "code reviews". This is like you grading your own homework. Every AI tool has blind spots. Every tool makes assumptions, takes shortcuts, and misses edge cases. What do you think will happen when you ask this same AI tool to review that code?

@DrGeneCallahan @IJoukov @heygurisingh wait until you find out how your eyes work!

@IJoukov @heygurisingh It cannot possibly see images, because all that it gets as input is high and low voltages in a computer. And those are not an image at all

Holy shit... Stanford just proved that GPT-5, Gemini, and Claude can't actually see. They removed every image from 6 major vision benchmarks. The models still scored 70-80% accuracy. They were never looking at your photos. Your scans. Your X-rays. Here's what's really going on: ↓ The paper is called MIRAGE. Co-authored by Fei-Fei Li. They tested GPT-5.1, Gemini-3-Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini-2.5-Pro across 6 benchmarks -- medical and general. Then silently removed every image. No warning. No prompt change. The models didn't even notice. They kept describing images in detail. Diagnosing conditions. Writing full reasoning traces. From images that were never there. Stanford calls it the "mirage effect." Not hallucination. Something worse. Hallucination = making up wrong details about a real input. Mirage = constructing an entire fake reality and reasoning from it confidently. The models built imaginary X-rays, described fake nodules, and diagnosed conditions -- all from text patterns alone. But that's not the scary part. They trained a "super-guesser" -- a tiny 3B parameter text-only model. Zero vision capability. Fine-tuned it on the largest chest X-ray benchmark (696,000 questions). Images removed. It beat GPT-5. It beat Gemini. It beat Claude. It beat actual radiologists. Ranked #1 on the held-out test set. Without ever seeing a single X-ray. The reasoning traces? Indistinguishable from real visual analysis. Now here's what should terrify you: When the models fake-see medical images, their mirage diagnoses are heavily biased toward the most dangerous conditions. STEMI. Melanoma. Carcinoma. Life-threatening diagnoses -- from images that don't exist. 230 million people ask health questions on ChatGPT every day. They also found something wild: → Tell a model "there's no image, just guess" -- performance drops → Silently remove the image and let it assume it's there -- performance stays high The model enters "mirage mode." It doesn't know it can't see. And it performs BETTER when it doesn't know it's blind. When Stanford applied their cleanup method (B-Clean) to existing benchmarks, it removed 74-77% of all questions. Three-quarters of "vision" benchmarks don't test vision. Every leaderboard. Every "multimodal breakthrough." Every benchmark score you've seen this year. Built on mirages. Code is open-sourced. Paper is live on arXiv. If you're building anything with multimodal AI -- especially in healthcare -- read this paper before you ship. (Link in the comments)

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger also lol the idea that EVs will "never work in long haul freight" is hilarious. what you're saying is essentially, "battery technology will never improve", or, "billions of dollars already invested into solid state batteries will amount to nothing". embarrassingly stupid.

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger no it isn't. they are selling genuinely better cars than their competitors at cheaper prices because of much cheaper cost structures and vertical integration. they're winning, and you're coping.

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger what kind of tax breaks and subsidies does milwaukee get from the US governmernt to produce their battery powered tools? where can i buy unsubsidized two cycle powered drills? it's weird, i walk into home depot, and all of the tools have these dumb batteries????

Hahaha, right. Norway did it by funding tax breaks from... their petroleum industry. Denmark saw a significant market drop after ending their subsidies. South Korea did the same tax strategies and EV + hybrids account for only 12% of their total vehicle registrations. You're full of shit. Europe is barely at 22% IF you include hybrids.

@TrevBouds @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger buddy no one gives two shits about what sells specifically in your little protectionist market niche. china's auto market is already 2x the size of the usa, and EV sales are growing y2y in the EU. EVs will make up >25% of global car sales this year. hope that helps.

@s_pect_re @clawrence @LLBiggers @shellenberger Hahahaha... I love when people insult me when they can't read. "In any developed country".. guess you missed that part, eh champ?