gnicholas

How does your car insurance treat the vehicle in terms of replacement cost? Does the low FMV predominate, or the high sticker price and high cost of repairs?

We've looked at doing this as well. Our commutes are so short that a vehicle with only 50 miles of range would work for 90% of our trips. Such a vehicle is nigh-useless to many people, but for us it's a great complement to an ICE or PHEV. It helps that we live in temperate climate, so we never really have to deal with the freezing temperatures that would knock off 20 or 30% of the range.

Leasing my Mach-E was the right thing, and more are doing it. Leasing made up over 35% of new EV financing in the first quarter of 2024, up significantly from 12% in 2023, according to global data company Experian. It makes sense for such fast-moving tech. When my lease expires in two years, I expect better batteries, chips and more.

Part of the reason leasing is popular is that the current batch of incentives offers some rebates only if you lease. Some vehicles qualify either way, but a decent chunk of them it's only if you lease. I would have liked to have seen numbers here that show it's actually better to lease. If you only have a vehicle for two years, the bit about low-maintenance is mooted, since most vehicles have little maintenance in the first couple years anyway.

I've had Siri call people randomly when I didn't even say hey Siri. It called someone I hadn't talked to in years.

This can't come soon enough. Apple has made Siri dumber over the years. I used to be able to say "Hey Siri, play Overcast" and it would play my podcasts. Now it says "I don't see any music by Overcast in Apple Music". When I say "Hey Siri, tell the Overcast app to play" it replies "the Overcast app doesn't have any unplayed content" — even when I'm in the middle of an episode, and I have many unplayed episodes. It is dumb as rocks.

But how can you tell that the chlorine has been depleted by doing its job?

According to Brian Spear, whose company handled the chemical filtration of the pools used for U.S. Olympic Swim Trials, the potent smell associated with swimming pools is the byproduct of odorless chlorine reacting with organic compounds in the water, like hair or dead skin. Or urine.

Interesting...so if a pool "smells like chlorine," that means it's very dirty?

Interesting. I have noticed that my most-upvoted comments relate to legal questions, which I have relatively more expertise than most HNers (I used to be a lawyer). Although I'm not among the top commenters for law/legal/lawyer according to this tool, I definitely recognize some of the top names and can recall seeing their comments in legal threads. Pretty cool tool!

I guess it gives them leverage vis a vis Google?

I like that it tells me what lane to be in, so it's my main mapping app. Also presumably better privacy than Google Maps.

Yes, earnouts can help bridge a valuation gap — and if the buyer is reasonable/kind, then they can create a win-win scenario. The question is whether a seller can accurately identify whether their counterparty is reasonable/kind. This is the sort of thing that lawyers should be able to help with, since they're involved in many deals. But as mentioned above, they may have misaligned interests that cloud their judgment.

I used to be a lawyer in SV, and whenever my lawyer friends talk about earnouts, it's always in the context of what a bad deal they are for founders.

Basically, they take a lot of lawyer time to negotiate, in order to make them as close to airtight as possible. And if anything goes wrong, it takes a lot of lawyer time to resolve them. And lawyer time equals money (as much as $2k/hr, billed in 6 minute-increments). So you could pay six figures negotiating an earnout, and another six figures when things don't go as planned. That doesn't mean they're always a bad idea — just the vast majority of the time.

A candid lawyer will counsel you away from an earnout, and if a lawyer doesn't mention the potential downsides of earnouts, I'd consider that a big red flag.

Put simply: it would require a constitutional amendment, and those are hard to come by. The Constitution only sets a minimum age for offices — no maximum ages.

True, but the landed gentry (who were the only people that might end up as President) lived to be considerably older.

That would presumably already be against the law in many jurisdictions (cities, suburbs), so there wouldn't need to be an additional law to cover the situation where you're shooting at a drone versus a squirrel.

There has to be a recognition of:

• size of target

• souls on board

• possibility of intrusion/spying

• type of projectile used

A 747 is huge, filled with people, and is not spying on you. To take it down, you would need serious artillery. At the far other end of the spectrum, if some drone is zipping around your house and videoing in your windows, are you allowed to do anything to take it down? Could you throw a baseball at it? Whack it with a pool skimmer?

There needs to be some nuance to recognize the massive differences between a SAM fired at a passenger jet and a pellet gun fired at a small unmanned drone snooping around your house.

The Federal Aviation Administration punishes any shots fired at drones with the same weight as if you’d opened fire on a Boeing full of passengers. Shooting at any aircraft is charged as a felony with up to 20 years in prison as the recommended penalty.

Whoa, crazy. I wonder when/how this will be updated?

“I’ve actually run out of space,” Jacobsohn says. “I have 30 boxes in the attic. My wife wants to build an extra room on the house.”

My guess is she'd actually like for him to stop collecting this stuff.

There may well be tiers like on NFLX, where some are ad-sponsored and some are not. But seeing as how rapidly the free/open models catch up to prior-generation proprietary models, I doubt there will be much margin or room for ads on anything but the latest/greatest.

Won't people who hate ads just choose to cut out the middleman and use 4o mini on their own?

Presumably this wouldn't work in areas that flood, but Fresno isn't one of them. I also wondered about earthquakes, which are a risk in some parts of CA.

I'm on PG&E, so we've been paying more for a while now, and with PSPS outages for the last few years to boot.

Bingo. I expect that the "home schooling" market will balloon in coming decades, and that it will no longer be called "home schooling". It will be "independent schooling" or some such thing, and will be extremely popular. Combine this with remote work, and all of a sudden parents can live in all sorts of places that would have previously been impractical or impossible.

Edu software can't provide the social benefits of exclusive schools (whether they are private or public). Parents know that which is why if they can afford to, they avoid underperforming schools.

Well, the underperforming schools also have worse teachers, and can be dangerous. It's not like the reason people avoid bad schools is because of the software. A parent recently told me he's sending his son to a private middle school because he's worried about gangs and bullying at the public school. An AI chatbot wouldn't bring those risks (though it also wouldn't deliver benefits of social interaction with well-behaved, bright children, either).

I agree that knowledge of local schools/teachers is helpful. But this misses the forest for the trees. My point (as another commenter who asked about parents as a market elsewhere) is that this could upend the entire education system. Who cares what my local school teaches for biology, if what I really need is for my kid to learn bio and get a good score on the AP test?

Furthermore, the fact that some people use in-person tutors doesn't mean that no one uses remote tutors. This absolutely happens. We live near Stanford, and there are tons of Stanford students who advertise their tutoring services on ND. These kids didn't go to local schools, and they don't know the local curriculum — they're from all over. But parents pay to have smart students tutor their kids.

I imagine that these parents would also pay to have an AI bot tutor their students if the results were good, the price were favorable, and the bot were (of course) available 24/7.

BTW, I'm curious where you live that "education technology" is called "edutech". You mention having been in the field a long time, but I've never heard it called this (always "edtech"). Where have I not been that it has this alternate moniker?

I have never understood why AWs consume so much battery at rest. I have a Garmin that lasts for several days, and I would be happy to have an AW what doesn't do all the stuff the AW does, but which is made by Apple. It could be a dumbed-down version that just vibrates and displays messages that I receive. I basically want a smartwatch so I can avoid phantom vibrations, and so I can quickly see what messages have come in so I don't have to get out my phone all the time.

Is this an issue with WatchOS, the chipset being used, or the size of battery they have chosen? I know a lot of people out there who do not consider an AW or any other smartwatch because they don't want to have yet another device to charge daily. There are other companies that have achieved very good battery life (Amazfit, Garmin, Pebble), so it is clearly possible to have weeks-long battery life with a feature set that is more than enough for people like me.

I feel like I'll never have an AW until they decide to make an AWU-sized device, but with more battery and fewer hardcore workout sensors. I don't need to dive with my watch, or have it utilize multiple satellites for GPS. What I do need for a watch is to have it last for more than a day or two, so I don't have to bring a charger whenever I go on a trip.

This claims multi-day battery life, since wrist detection can be turned off. I’m curious to know how much of a difference this one change makes. I haven’t bought an AW because the battery life isn’t good enough for a “watch” in my book, but if it can get multiple days of life, and it’s more like a phone replacement, then I’d be more likely to give it a try.

Does this work with Siri? I'm not running the beta so am not familiar with the features and limitations, but I thought that it was either answering based on on-device inference (using a closed model) or Apple's cloud (using a model you can't choose). My understanding is that you can ask OpenAI via an integration they've built, and that in the future you may be able to reach out to other hosted models. But I didn't see anything about being able to seamlessly reach out to your own locally-hosted models, either for Siri backup or anything else. But like I said, I'm not running the beta!

This is great! I really wish Apple allowed your device to query a model you host instead of skipping to their cloud (or OpenAI). I'd love to have a Studio Pro running at home, and have my iPhone, iPad, Mac, and HomePod be able to access it instead of going to the cloud. That way I could have even more assured privacy, and I could choose what model I want to run.

They are structural problems related to the three main types of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2. Companies (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals (self-learners). There are other types of buyers but they don't represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these three.

What about parents? That would seem like a natural market for a product that could replace expensive private school tuition (or paying high property taxes in order to be in a good public school district). I recently saw a literacy product aimed at parents, and which costs $50/month. They justify their pricing based on its substitutes being a tutor or private school tuition. While this is a bit of a stretch for a literacy tool, it would be a very fair comparison for a very good AI tutor that teaches the child and has a dashboard/summary for parents.

Kind of like mini-USB, which was briefly popular but quickly supplanted by micro-USB. I think my only surviving mini-USB device is a bike light battery.

Hockley Mint has also upgraded its windows so that blinds are now encased between panes of glass — their fabric panels were a magnet for precious metal dust — and it also has an on-site laundry to process workers’ clothes.

Hilarious — I guess big tech companies weren't the first to offer employees on-site laundry after all!