I got married at 20, Still married and it’s been over two decades. We had some good times, we’ve had some significant bad times too.

The biggest problem wasn’t “I changed” or “she changed” it was “kids are a massive stressor” in life and having two parents working full time sucks for everyone.

Given the current economic situation in North America, I probably wouldn’t have kids if we were young again now.

I love my kids, but they burn through every single dollar we can earn. Larger house so they can have separate rooms, more money. Daycare (for those ages), Money. Larger vehicle to fit them in, more money. More food, more money. Sports and activities, money. Birthdays and Christmas, Money.

We don’t even have the money to eat out regularly anymore, which is absolutely ridiculous because both my wife and I have significant incomes.

Union employment has dropped off a cliff the last few decades, we won’t be celebrating it much longer.

Americans putting their thanksgiving in November.

WTF is wrong with you guys. It’s 4 weeks to Christmas, you need to spread your food based holidays out better.

Easter, Independence Day, then fucking nothing until bam, Thanksgiving and Christmas back to back.

I don’t want to hear about Labour day being a feast, it’s a day off work to celebrate working. Stupid fucking holiday.

Taxi companies don’t keep specific vehicles for 20 years, they wear out long before then. Keeping them maintained to pass inspection at that point would be a costly nightmare.

The first Tesla only came out 17 years ago, and it was a 2-door sports car… so yea it’s not really surprising you wouldn’t see 15 year old Teslas regularly. They do exist though. The Model S has only been out for 13 years, and there are definitely still first run Model S vehicles driving around. There are 8 from that original year for sale on Autotrader.com right now, all in running condition.

There are only 2 Prius C from 2012, and 2 more Prius V from the same year. Those were the first years of each of those models as well, just like the Tesla.

I think Teslas are shit though. They’re designer brand electric cars, poor quality, and they make zero financial sense at all compared to full EV models from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, or VW.

Also, like I said in an other comment, Taxis are not driven the same way that a regular person drives their car. Hybrids are absolutely perfect for the Taxi driving use case. They make almost no sense when used once a day to go to work, and then hit the grocery store and gym on the way home.

You mean Comprehension?

Cabs don’t drive like you do. Neither based on distance driven, nor the constant stop and go driving that optimizes hybrid use case.

Full electric is better for a lot of taxi locations, which is why a lot of Cab companies are now starting to switch their fleets over.

Even Uber ditched it’s Uber Green branding for Uber Electric.

Every single Waymo on the road is fully electric at this point after they phased out their hybrid units a couple years ago.

And then it will become more expensive to maintain than the gas version the year after, and worth less at resale because of a degraded battery or some shit.

Also, brakes are not a primary cost in ownership of a vehicle.

Math is fun, but you need to do a total cost of ownership calculation, not a cost to date calculation.

Full electric is simply better math.

At a very near point though, it’s likely going to be impossible to do it without AI involvement, or at the very least without proving you didn’t somehow.

AI is being baked into almost every dev and art tool. They aren’t just talking about using ChatGPT, if your game uses a single texture or model that ever got touched by a machine learning algorithm, you’re using AI.

If you’ve only had it three years, the expensive maintenance part hasn’t started yet, it’s probably still under warranty.

A) Your car is not an EV. It’s a Hybrid.

B) All hybrid cars were/are bad investments.

You take a car, make it more complicated by adding an entire second power and drive system, and then expect it to not cost a fortune to maintain later?

Fucking stupidity.

The costs of distribution aren’t so expensive for anything but the largest amounts of data (video)

You can grab a digital ocean server droplet for $6 per month that allows a Terabyte of transfer. That’s 0.6 cents per GB, and includes the compute to actually be able to serve that data as well as the transfer amount.

Covering operating costs doesn’t make sense as the threshold for this discussion though.

Operating costs would include things like computing costs for training new models and staffing costs for researchers, both of which would completely disappear in a marginal cost calculation for an existing model.

If we use Deepseek R1 as an example of a large high end model, you can run a 8-bit quantized version of the 600B+ parameter model on Vast.Ai for about $18 per hour, or even on AWS for like $50/hour. Those produce tokens fast enough that you can have quite a few users on it at the same time, or even automated processes running concurrently with users. Most medium sized businesses could likely generate more than $50 in benefit from it per running hour, especially since you can just shut it down at night and not even pay for that time.

You can just look at it from a much smaller perspective too. A small business could buy access to consumer GPU based systems and use them profitably with 30B or 120B parameter open source models for dollars per hour. I know this is possible, because I’m actively doing it.

lemmynsfw.com

You can also somewhat do this with other providers in some cases.

For example, Gmail has the +Alias feature where you can use a plus symbol on your existing username to make things unique. If you go to a website and use [email protected] those messages will still go to your same inbox. You can then use rules to handle them differently. The only problem is that some signup systems won’t accept a + in an e-mail address.

Technically you can also do this with periods as well with Gmail, since:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Are all the same and go to one mailbox too. So you can use a particular variation with periods for “spam” signups, then filter those messages out.

The financial argument is pretty difficult to make.

You’re right in one sense, there is a bubble here and some investors/companies are going to lose a lot of money when they get beaten by competitors.

However, you’re also wrong in the sense that the marginal cost to run them is actually quite low, even with the hardware and electricity costs. The benefit doesn’t have to be that high to generate a positive ROI with such low marginal costs.

People are clearly using these tools more and more, even for commercial purposes when you’re paying per token and not some subsidized subscription, just check out the graphs on OpenRouter https://openrouter.ai/rankings

You say “pro-AI” like there’s a group of random people needing to convince others to use the tools.

The general public tried them, and they’re using them pretty frequently now. Nobody is forcing people to use ChatGPT to figure out their Christmas shopping, but something like 40% of people have already or are planning on using it for that purpose this year. That’s from a recent poll by Leger.

If they weren’t at the very least perceived as adding value, people wouldn’t be using them.

I can say with 100% certainty that there are things I have used AI for that have saved me time and money.

The Anti-AI crowd may as well be the same people that were Anti-Internet 25 years ago.

Very common.

Who you know is often far more important than what you know.

Not common, he’s out of touch.

There are definitely people who have cabins at the lake or mountains, but even that is more wealthy people.

Welcome to the Matrix.

The molecules are also mostly created through the use of energy from our sun.