I live in Austin (well known for its high energy prices relative to the rest of the state.) I’m at $0.09 for the first 300KWh (I’m including all fees/markups/charges in this calculation.)
For the next 600Kwh it goes to $.10, and then the next tier I used 882KWh at $0.12.
I find the rates reasonable. Texas is also leading the way on both solar and wind adoption. This is keeping the power supply at peak much more stable.
If you live in Austin, there’s a $4.17/mo charge you can add to your bill for unlimited charging at Austin Energy-owned Level 2 chargers. They’re installed all over the city. Many people commenting here don’t live in Texas and are unaware of initiatives like this.
Is it really appropriate to use Austin as a proxy for the entire state?
Didn't Texas, the state, recently pass an exceptionally high EV registration tax that 100% exempts hybrids?
Edit:
> Austin Energy is the prime recipient of
> Department of Energy funding and has
> successfully led an infrastructure planning
> process called the Texas River Cities Plug-in
> Electric Vehicle Initiative.
You're highlighting the results at the edge of federal funding that must be spent on these things. TFA is about grid-scale problems, the energy supplying these charging ports.
Why would you spend dev time on this when you can set up something like Bitwarden across the org and have all the same benefits without wasting precious dev time on it?
FWIW I’m on 1Password and it hasn’t had any of these issues, either. I would not spend dev time on this as a startup/software company founder.
I have owned Apple Watches since the Series 2. (Currently on an SE 2) I have always used third-party watch bands I get off Aliexpress--much cheaper than Amazon if you're patient with shipping. Zero issues with the latch mechanism.
Many years ago, there was an image that floated around with Craigslist and all the websites that replaced small parts of it—personals, for sale ads, etc. It turned out the way to beat Craigslist wasn’t to build Yet Another Monolithic Craigslist, but to chunk it off in pieces and be the best at that piece.
This is analogous to what’s happening with AI models. Sam Altman is saying we have reached the point where spending $100M+ trying to “beat” GPT-4 at everything isn’t the future. The next step is to chunk off a piece of it and turn it into something a particular industry would pay for. We already see small sprouts of those being launched. I think we will see some truly large companies form with this model in the next 5-10 years.
To answer your question, yes, this may be as good as it gets now for monolithic language models. But it is just the beginning of what these models can achieve.
https://www.today.com/money/speculation-craigslist-slowly-dy... from 2011 - is that what you were thinking of? Strange how few of those logos have survived, and how many new logos would now be on it. It would be interesting to see a modernised version.
Isn't this really bad for OpenAI? Essentially, this means Meta/Google/others will catch up to them pretty soon and there is nothing OpenAI can do in the near future to get further ahead.
I also checked Jersey Mike’s, another familiar chain, and a regular size “original Italian” is $9.95 here.
I will say that generally Texas tends to have lower prices on food than coastal metros like NYC/SF/LA, but the airport prices mentioned in the article for NYC still seem absurd.
Is Austin still worth moving to from CA or has it gotten a lot more expensive? I’ve only spent a couple days in Austin many years ago, so I don’t know much.
Depends from where in CA. Austin cost of living is not very low anymore. It's not San Francisco stupid levels, but I didn't feel a lot of difference between San Diego and Austin in the last couple of years.
Texas makes up for not having income tax by having big property taxes. So, you may make out on that exchange depending upon what your family situation is. If you're earning are closer to median, California is probably better than Texas. If you're a high earner, Texas is probably better because California is biting you via income tax.
However, if you're coming to Texas, make damn sure your healthcare situation is sorted out. California is good about healthcare--the exchanges are decent and you can by healthcare retail for the price advertised on the exchange. This shocked me at one point as it meant that a friend could completely bypass the exchanges for healthcare and just buy it. Yeah, you wouldn't get reimbursement like the exchanges, but you could just whip out a credit card and purchase it retail.
Texas, on the other hand, is terrible at healthcare. The Republicans have sabotaged most things from the Federal government. Most of the hospital chains are mediocre and below, and many publicly available health plans are ferociously bad.
Housing in Austin metro has gone up in recent years but it is still 1/3 the price of a home in the Bay Area or San Diego.
Property taxes are proportionately higher than in California but lower on an absolute basis for a similar property due to the large difference in purchase prices.
No state income taxes means most people with decent incomes will come out ahead in Texas.
What the sister comment says about healthcare in Texas is true, unfortunately. Most healthcare providers are private equity backed and treat healthcare as an assembly line. It is difficult to find providers who prioritize quality care over checking boxes.
As for publicly available plans I don’t have personal experience, but I don’t doubt the sister comment’s claims. Best have a good job with a quality healthcare plan.
I run phone repair shops and the app starting up slowness is often caused by a failing battery.
In fact, at our shops, on older iPhones, I can test the battery state by opening the camera app. If it takes 10-20 seconds to open, it’s usually the battery causing it. (The other cause is storage being close to full.)
This won’t help the app resetting issue, which the author correctly identifies as a RAM problem (that I also encounter on my personal iPhone 13 Pro. Apple is horribly stingy with RAM even on the Pro models.)
In general, if you use your phone daily, I recommend getting the battery replaced every 2-2.5 years.
Remember how people laughed at Windows users and the Windows OS? That you have to reboot daily or else it slows down?
Well, these days, my Samsung flagship actually pops up a notification every once in a while, reminding me to please reboot the phone to ensure smooth operation. There's even an option you can turn on to make it automatically reboot every night!
(I imagine that option doesn't automagically skip the SIM card lock and the Android security lock, so IMHO running it is insane, as it would make the phone unreachable until you wake up and unlock it properly.)
As a former Cobalt employee, it made my day to see someone resurrecting old RaQs! What a fantastic piece of equipment for its time. I worked there in 1999 through the Sun acquisition and then at Sun for a little while before I started my own business—a web hosting company, started with a glorious rack of RaQs, of course. :)
Hi Erica! I was there as a Sales Engineer serving the southwest region around the same time you were there too (2000-2002), based in San Diego. I wish I had kept the RaQ and Qube units I had at home (I had pretty much one of everything from Qube2 through RaQ 550).
Cobalt was an awesome place to work and had amazingly skilled employees. Too bad the Sun acquisition was the death knell for the products...
Most phones are not glued shut, including iPhones starting all the way back to 4/5. iPhone batteries are also not glued in. Source: We run independent repair shops.
OK. We literally repair these for a living. You and I may have differing definitions of “glue”, but the water seal gasket is not what I would call glue. It is a sticky gasket that is peelable and removable. It can be replaced, and in fact we replace it when we do repairs. Think of it like double-sided tape.
If you watch videos of people doing iPhone screen replacements, you can watch them peel it off easily and then replace it when they put the new screen on.
I am a bit surprised that someone would want to argue with a person who runs shops that do this for a living, but maybe this explanation will help other folks understand.
Also, I can’t reply to your other comment, but the iPhone 14 that is sold in the United States does not have a SIM tray.
>It is a sticky gasket that is peelable and removable.
It is a gasket with a sticky substance to keep the back from falling off. This sticky substance is, as far as I am aware called "glue".
I do not know what your point is. If you want to say "phone backs are secured by sticky gaskets" instead of "phone backs are glued down", be my guest. Who cares?
Still, it is done for a particular purpose and shouldn't be legislated away.
>If you watch videos of people doing iPhone screen replacements, you can watch them peel it off easily and then replace it when they put the new screen on.
I suppose the point might be that if the speculation is that the phone is being “glued shut” to inhibit repairs, there are other glues and epoxies that would be far more effective at the task than the ones chosen for the waterproofing seal or battery mounting.
Their point was that you were saying a thing confidently that was not true. I'm trying to figure out what your point is, other than pretending like you have inside information about the necessity of glue that isn't there.
What was I wrong about? What do you think the sticky substance on the gaskets is? Couldn't possibly be glue.
My point is the phones are glued for a good engineering reason.
That definitely helps my understanding, and thank you for it. Based on my previous understanding, that the adhesive needs to be heated to release. Is this true of the newer models with the gasket, or only the older "glued" models?
When you say "we do replace it when we do repairs", do you mean that you place the original gasket back into location, or that the original gasket is replaced with a new gasket?
It definitely helps to heat the phone for a bit to loosen up the gasket. We have a blue heat mat that helps with this, as do most repair shops.
I had to go back and look since my knowledge dates back to around the iPhone 4/4S (we've been running our shops since 2014.) Only the original iPhone was glued together. The gaskets started with the iPhone 6s, to my memory. The original gasket is peelable, so it typically gets destroyed when you open the phone, but they are cheap and pretty easy to replace. If you buy a DIY replacement iPhone screen, it will usually come with it.
>I am a bit surprised that someone would want to argue with a person who runs shops that do this for a living, but maybe this explanation will help other folks understand.
By how many $ will this affect your 'living'?
# serious question.
You mean the passing of Right to Repair? Completely unknown at this point. We're hoping it will be helpful to raise awareness of independent repair and offer more choice to people who want to get their devices repaired.
How is this relevant? Which phone does not have a "user removable SIM tray". Usually they are sealed as well.
And in any case, how does this matter for the back of the phone?
I haven't opened one myself since the 5S but that sticky substance that holds down the battery, while it might not be "glue" in a strict technical sense, adheres the battery to the case rather firmly. It's totally reasonable for someone to say that's "glue". This is especially true if they end up deforming the battery when removing it.
I think it all boils down to reparability. Just doing the basics (disassembly, and part replacement) with these assemblies take A LOT more practice and skill than the vast majority of people are generally prepared for.
Does it have to be this way? I think that's the key question. There's ultimately trade-offs between having something that's easy to work on vs something sleek and thin vs something that's affordable vs something that's performant. As consumers we are at the mercy of "genius designers" to decide those trade-off's for us. Personally, I don't mind having my phone be a nightmare to repair as long as it does the job I need it do and I can pay somebody to fix it if that's prudent. With other things, like appliances (that don't have borderline microscopic parts), I really want something that has a service manual.
iPhone batteries have underneath them strips of adhesive that can be peeled up using a screwdriver rolling in a motion like you would twirl spaghetti on a fork. This isn't glue.
Certain older MacBook batteries were glued down. But now, even on newer MacBooks, the batteries are held in by similar removable adhesive strips. All of this is a step in the right direction.
Believe me, Apple has done a lot of things to make third-party and independent repair more difficult. I'm not super thrilled with them. But saying Apple is gluing batteries or screens down when they're not is where I feel it's important to step in as a repair shop owner and explain what is actually going on.
As a consumer, that adhesive strip is just foam tape with glue on both sides. You're correct that it's easier to disassemble then glue alone. But, it's still glued by most people's definition of the word.
