I also have a standing desk, and my desktop computer is still on the floor. That way I can just route all the cables to the back and then under the desk to my PC. Looks very clean as well.
> There is an idea of the world hating the Jews as being a pre-condition within Jewish religion for them to win within the end-times theology of the jewish faith.
Just so we're clear, this is religious fundamentalism.
Mostly at the massive switch statements and 1000 line's of flow control logic that end up embedded someplace where they really dont belong in the worst cases.
Everything points to solid-state batteries being quite expensive and prioritized in higher end cars, think iX3/GLB/GLC/EX60, where people want more range and care less about weight (these cars get 100+ kWh batteries today). It will take time for these batteries to trickle down to lower range cars, I think.
And if you can charge faster, you can use an even smaller battery.
If we could automatically plugin every time we parked, our battery could be sized down to just large enough for the distance of the max trip times margin.
Those numbers include PHEV cars. As a BEV owner, I consider PHEV to be more ICE than BEV. BEV numbers are not as impressive, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. A bit slower than I would've hoped.
The Danish numbers normally exclude PHEVs. Not that it matters, since PHEVs are almost dead as a segment here. Over the past two years 310k BEVs were sold here, but only 6k PHEVs. The situation in Norway is very similar.
And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.
My Phev is about 80% ev. It uses a tank of gas a month, replacing a nearly identical vehicle (similar body and same engine - though other things have changed) that needed one or two tanks a week.
sadly thats not the norm. Various recent studies from the EU based on real world vehicle data show that actual savings from the PHEV category are about ~20% less emissions than a pure gas version. Aka, they are just gas cars. Despite manufacturers claiming ~70-80% for emissions credits. The category is today kind of a scam, in aggregate.
It doesnt have to be - bigger battery strictly-series EREVs would likely show better numbers than the weak-ev phevs sold today.
I think it is the norm only because people never run the numbers. At least where I live gas costs me 5-10x more than electric (I live in the US, gas is cheap, but all my electric is from even cheaper wind). It wouldn't be hard to teach them to plug the car in when they are at home anywhere (many people park in a garage with an outlet - if this doesn't apply to you then PHEV doesn't make sense - you don't get enough range for your effort to find a charger)
For most in the US what makes the most sense today is one PHEV they use for long trips and towing the boat. The rest should be pure EVs, which have enough range for the typical trips and the few exceptions they just reserve the PHEV that day. As time goes on more and more chargers will be built and eventually pure EV for everything will make sense, but right not there isn't enough charging infrastructure. (You can get almost anywhere in the US, but the trip is planned around where the next charger is, not where either you feel like stopping or where the battery is low - gas stations are at nearly every exit, fast chargers 1 in 30 exits or something in that range)
PHEVs when you already own them cost vastly less in electric mode. That people don't bother plugging them in is because they don't care about cost enough to bother to see if there is a difference.
It’s also because most PHEVs sold are terrible EVs. Weak, short range, cut to gas all the time. Impractical to use as a pure ev. This style of phev is greenwashing and should be sold as a gas car for emissions rules.
EREVs are a different story, and have a place in the transition for awhile.
This doesn't make them terrible! This makes them great. That means they can run 80% of the time as an EV, yet use the ICE just enough to not ever have stale gas in the tank. As a driver you barely notice, and someone outside will have no clue what mode it is operating in. (wind noise is louder than the ICE)
When there are fast chargers on every corner like gas stations are PHEV will make less sense. However in the world I live in today an EV can do a road trip but it forces you to plan your stops around where there is a charger, while with gas can still assume it will be close when you need it. This will change over the coming years, for now I won't take my EV on a road trip, but my PHEV has done it several times.
PHEV feels good on paper, but in ICE mode they’re terrible. On a recent long road trip they do about 14km/L with a fully charged EV range of 50km. Quite inefficient to lug a petrol engine and a semi large battery all the time.
I feel xAI is just a very big version of the Boring Co. "flamethrower": an unserious endeavor which is just a reskinned existing tool (it was a reskinned weed burner), but people were wowed by it anyway, since Musk was behind it, and they all pretended it was something new and notable.
The burning (heh) question is which SpaceX subsidiary will fail first, xAI or Tesla (not yet a subsidiary, but it's written in the stars (heh))?
Then again SpaceX is also jumping the shark what with their orbital data centers (remember those?).
Crazy thing is if Hormuz stays closed, Tesla could theoretically be positioned to reap massive benefits. But they seem to be moving away from consumer electric cars as their focus.
I think if you've been set for life since the late 90s/early 2000s and didn't really have to work another day in your life if you didn't want to, it's a lot easier to be cavalier about giving away some of your output from way back when.
He can easily afford to be altruistic in this regard.
But Carmack isn't wired for empathy; he has never been.
Attack the argument not the man. Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.
> people who open source their code do not care about profit
Not only are there businesses built around open-source work, but it used to be widely-accepted that publishing open-source software was a good way to land a paying gig as a junior.
I think that whether you need to continue working to afford to live is very relevant to discussions about AI.
Profits don't need to be direct - and licenses are chosen based on a user's particular open-source goals. AI does not respect code's original licensing.
I think you are splitting hairs. Yes those models “exist”, if by exist you mean they have dual-licensing setups with different tiers (community, professional, etc).
The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
I'm not splitting hairs, it's a crucial aspect and a common misconception that it would be quite helpful to get rid of (hence my reaction). And no, it's not necessarily dual licensing (why not though) or different tiers, or fauxpensource or whatever, there are many projects which are completely open source. See for instance Nextcloud, XWiki, PostgreSQL, Linux...
Again, as I said, I was only reacting to that specific part of your comment, because it is obviously wrong.
(and thus the rest can't follow since you use it to draw a conclusion -- which doesn't mean you can't fix this, I don't know, actually I didn't get your point and I don't see how it counters what you replied to -- but I'm not really concerned about this part)
> The point is that most individuals who open source their code do so without expecting financial returns from it. In that context, whether Carmack has a $1 or $1e9 doesn’t make a difference.
Bruh, there are thousands of projects, maybe tens of thousands, that survive solely on donations, hundreds thousands written by hungry students trying to land their first gig. Maybe you’re right in “free as in beer” sense, but you’re certainly, majorly wrong in general OSS definition.
Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom decades ago may have different priorities than present and future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
>Pointing out that a man who has achieved financial freedom decades ago may have different priorities than present and future wage slaves isn't attacking the man.
saying he has no empathy, and has never had empathy, on the other hand...
It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a single paid open source tool off the top of my head but could name dozens that you can just use for free.
But the man's argument is that since he sees something a given way then it's the truth. What people are doing in return is showing that he can only do so because of who he is.
> Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_, since, presumably, people who open source their code do not care about profit.
What's your point here? Because whether or not someone needs income to pay their bills is MASSIVELY relevant to whether or not they have to care about the profit on their work.
The bulk of Open Source maintainers aren't "set for life", and need to get a real job in order to not be homeless.
For a full understanding of any text, you always need to consider the context as well as the content and the author, in this case Carmack, is part of the context. You cant just separate them.
This is especially true when it concerns contemporary issues.
> Whether he is set for life or not has nothing to do _in this context_
Being a millionaire set for life, who doesn’t need to work a day if he wants to, has nothing to do _in this_ context of AI companies siphoning away all the open source code, profiting off it, and then threatening to automate away at least one cell of white collar jobs and potentially others too. Hmm.
Privilege does matter, obviously, because your perspective and biases influence your opinion. When someone says something, we can't just analyze what they are saying, but why they are saying it. What is their motivation? What are their incentives? If they're right, who wins? Who loses? How much do they lose?
This is why politicians are able to lie through their teeth. There's enough people out there who refuse to, or can't, deeply analyze people's words. "Well, the government hasn't yet announced their plans to abuse X Y and Z, so obviously it's not gonna happen!"
Such an argument seems painfully poor, but, believe it or not, it's, like, the primary argument when these things come up.
At the end of the day, you and me have a lot to lose from AI. Carmack has less, perhaps he even stands to gain. Hm, that colors things, no?
They’re ought to take your whole profession away, threatening to leave you flipping burgers or on the street, but you’re busy protecting Carmack and his $100+ millions online.
No please, for the love of god, he's been an asshole for decades. He has set back gaming everywhere he's been in charge. The guy makes 1 kind of experience. He's the opposite of a good leader.
GPL is not for you to make money. It is for the end-users to have freedom with their hardware.
If you want to make money, use a proper license.
To expand on this, GPL is not against capitalism neither. Sometimes, end-users' freedom with their hardware is good to make money on (they buy your support, to have confidence they can migrate from one hardware to another, or use their hardware way longer than the original manufacturer can stay in business). But it is also not an automated license to say "give me your money" neither.
If people need money they should seriously considering charging money for the software they make instead of giving it away for free and hoping it somehow becomes profitable.
Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing. I don't even think it's his fault per se. I'm fairly sure he would actually agree with the assessment. His raw intelligence is sky-high.
And that is a big reason why he's making this post, is what I'm saying. It doesn't excuse him, but it's not surprising in the least.
> Anyone who knows anything about Carmack knows that he has trouble empathizing.
Can you give some examples, outside of this post? I only know about Carmack by the things he'd worked on, but not anything personal like this. This would help me get a more complete picture of him.
I'd read Masters of Doom (the psych eval/juvie story and the cat story stand out). You might think "oh he was so young back then", and it's true, but keep in mind that book details id Software up to and including Doom 3 development, and he was in his early 30s there. I'm sure you can find excerpts if you don't want to read the whole thing. It's an interesting book though; great glimpse into trenches of 90s game development.
I've (unoriginally) always been impressed by his technical ability and work ethic, and while I used to religiously read his .plan updates (you might not know what that is, because I'm an old, OK? It's the precursor to blogs) and also follow the old Armadillo Aerospace development blogs, and watch the very long QuakeCon talks, I haven't kept up much as I got older, just come across things here and there (like this Twitter post), and I have not picked up a big change in demeanor or humility in regards to labor, political and societal issues from back then, and those are things he's written about. It's very much objectivism, the criticism of which is beyond this topic, but suffice it to say it's not a philosophy conducive to empathy. I seem to recall he made a bunch of libertarian rants on Facebook when he worked there too, but I'm not going to give Zuck the traffic. I'm sure you can find some.
Except him being wealthy could just as well be used to support the argument for using GPL instead of gifting. "He does not have to make real money off of it, he is privileged".
Oldheads are not the exclusive group of people who have ever meant actual altruism by their open-source licenses. You can't just pick an attribute to dismiss an opinion based on. Creative control over the lineage of a line of code is just not something the open source world is very concerned with in aggregate.
Anti-AI sentiment comes primarily from slop PRs (and slop projects) along with the water use hoax; copyright concerns originate almost entirely from the art sphere, crossing over into the open source sphere by osmosis and only representing a small minority of opinion-havers therein.
I mean it's the truth. It wasn't necessary to base your argument on it in the context given but still disregarding it with a hand wave is strange. Everyone who worked with him knows people skills and altruism are really not his strongest character traits.
Doesn’t diminish the fact that he does so from a platform of privilege that his early success provided him. He can be both. It’s ok.
He’s right about both points. It was a gift. A tremendous gift. He’s right about open source. Too many people see it as a reputation builder rather than a utility like it was intended to be.
Under your desk, right? Right?!
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