jj4211

Heh, certainly the tone of their material is toward "pavement princess" usage, but a hair dryer does pull just about as much current as you could expect from a standard outlet, more than many power tools, more than some microwaves. Sure, if they showed a higher end electric welder than that would be more impressive, but no way are they going to take things that far.

It it can power a hair dryer, it could power a circular saw. Whether it would be suitable to get to work sites that demand a bit more off-road capability... I'm guessing no.

I can't blame them too much, they went with the 'F150 for your professional needs, just electric' and it didn't ultimately pan out that well. So they are going more city truck.

Yeah, the Maverick misses the mark by being roughly the right size, but a teeny-tiny bed for the sake of the crew cab. A car that begrudgingly has a token bed. People have gotten surprisingly good use out of the tiny bed and going to all manners of awkward tailgate-down shenigans to carry things that don't fit, but it's awkward.

The "more passenger space than a RAV4" makes it clear they are going to have an even bigger cab than a maverick, so that's a worrying sign. However, since they seem to also be obsessed with "you can fit your surfboards in the bed", then they may have at least done a mid-gate, and that could get me the sort of truck experience I'd need, with the compromise of being open to the weather to get full bed length. Might suck for trying to haul stuff into super dusty worksites where you'd probably not want to be open to the elements too long, but for me that might be an acceptable compromise (I do have to carry enough passengers to usually need the passenger space, and on the occasion I need to carry something long, I generally have a nice day of weather and don't go anywhere too filthy). Would be better than my current situation where I have to rent a trailer anytime I want to do anything mildly significant to tow with an SUV.

“Ai” has mostly wasted my time.

Particularly other people's use of AI has wasted my time....

Out of the few that said AI made their productivity better, most of them couldn’t code.

Note this point makes business leaders so excited. They hear "cheap labor can be productive". Missing the point that the output is supremely dubious. They are "productive" because they don't even know if the result is good or not, and so they can accept what is handed to them.

Currently, have a feature I thought we should have done, but management said one of the sales reps vibed up the answer, so we don't need to do it. I used it and pointed out that the result was actually incorrect, but management thinks I'm just some luddite because they can't understand the nature of the problems either.

One thing worse than AI PRs is AI bug reports.

One is a user that experiences a symptom that could be described in a quick copy/paste with maybe a sentence. Instead they have "AI" dig in and generate a dissertation on what it thinks is the issue and the original issue is lost in the AI diagnosis. Since the user doesn't even have it wired up to actually test the hypothosis, it is just the AI first guess, which is frequently wrong. Wasting my time and failing to provide data.

The other is someone letting AI run over code and report "bugs" as in "it disagreed on some detail in the code, even though no person has actually experienced misbehavior, nor is the particular issue a security issue, but it might be an issue that some person one day eventually might hit".

But I totally feel the coworker that had questionable code before that is now just utterly hopeless thanks to AI. I have nothing to do with his project but occasionally got called in to figure out and explain why his code would flip out. It hasn't passed test in over a month as it's now eternally buggy. Any attempt he makes to fix bugs inevitably lands with more bugs. But it's too far now, he can't turn back (CodeGen rewrote his codebase in a language he can't follow, so he can't hand edit, and he's too afraid to roll back to when he almost understood his code). Hilarious one time within a week where he reported he could work on his project no more because he had exhausted his tokens, and without the tokens he can't do anything anymore. Framed this as a failure of management to fund his needs adequately.

I have been shocked at just how many people, people long in the business seem to actively hate writing code. How much additional work they are willing to go through to claim victory in development through prose. Spending hours trying to get CodeGen to fix a trivial CSS issue in a web page that would have taken less than a minute if they just hit f12 and looked at the offending element. I can't fathom how they could stand their careers for sometimes two decades before CodeGen came available if they hated it just so much.

One of the rumors has me particularly wondering about this point... Allegedly no low-voltage battery. Low voltage is 48v (fine) but not even a 48V, just pulling from the traction battery. So the gigantic battery pack is now constantly running instead of being disengaged most of the time it is sitting.

I guess I haven't heard anything suggesting EVs have safety issues more often when charging, so maybe it's ok, but would want some assurances that there are good reasons why they skip a discrete low voltage battery when everyone else seems like they need to.

Sounds like it will be a poor road tripper, but on the other hand, I have used a DC charger exactly once in three years of EV ownership, so I personally am not going to fixate on that. Of course I have about 270 miles of range so a shorter range could change that equastion...

If the pickup is at a lower height, less ostentatious/dangerous grill, and shorter than 200 inches, I won't begrudge someone a pickup compared to an SUV.

Well, could be worse. Could be BMW or GM leadership... At least the seats won't be by subscription and at least it will bother to support Carplay/Android auto...

The release? Seemingly mostly for the Ford marketing folks that think the customers care more about what they name a car and pictures of random people doing stuff more than any actual actionable information about the vehicle.

A small-ish electric pickup? People who wanted cheaper and/or smaller than the current wave of EV pickups. Especially a lot of folks that installed EVSE in their garage for their cars and full-size pickups frequently don't fit in garages.

Slate is in the same area and has quite a bit of interest, despite being yet another unproven manufacturer. Depending on the details of the truck, this could take advantage of the same niche but with a more familiar brand and potentially executing some things better when it comes to truck features. One issue I recall with a colleague's Tesla was that they got a lot of the 'boring car stuff' wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if Slate makes some similar mistakes. Particularly I suspect Ford will get the two-row seating/serviceable bed compromise down better than Slate. Though Ford could still flub the size and not fit in my garage while absolutely a Slate could, will have to see. I wish Ford would embrace the "maker" sensibilities that Slate seems to cater towards but they will absolutely fail at that.

This likely refers to the famous fictitious quote from Heny Ford that wanna-be self-important "innovators" like to trot out to show how they are smarter than the customer when they put out some unasked for bullshit.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

People like to imagine the car as some miraculous thing no one but a genius could have imagined wanting and the genius descending from on high and delivering. Truth was people could easily imagine and want it, the genius was in knowing how to make what people knew they wanted.

Instead, Henry Ford said: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”

So essentially the exact opposite of "screw the customers, we know better!"

It sounds like how students think professional sounds.

Well, also some executives that I can't stand that, if I didn't know better, would swear were ChatGPT for decades...