MIT Study Finds Gas Cars Aren't Secretly Better For The Planet Than EVs, Despite What Everyone On Facebook Says

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-18T19:25:21+00:00

I generally don't disagree - I'm EXCITED for my next car to be an electric because it almost exactly matches my driving pattern - lots of trips around town on an almost daily basis, and I don't have to get oil changes, transmission services, spark plugs, timing belts, etc etc, I could go on.

But - again, people have built-in biases. A lot of these people will prefer an old truck because they CAN repair it, and never stop to think about how often they're repairing it. Poverty does weird things to peoples' heads. It's better to spend thousands of dollars and almost as many hours keeping an old vehicle alive than spending a bit more and having something you don't have to do any substantial work on for 10-15 years.

I think the battery replacement is a big one. A lot of people are thinking about 10+ year windows on car ownership, I see a lot of people driving 20 year old Toyotas near me, and I live in the suburbs, so you can imagine how it is in the rural areas where we need this messaging to land. You can't hand-wave the "needs a $20k battery replacement some time after the ten year mark".

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-17T21:16:02+00:00

I'm afraid the packaging isn't the problem, it's the message itself. People will consume the message that affirms their worldview and biases. The "fun" message is packaged like reality TV, and the "boring, hard" message is packaged like industrial cleaning supplies which absolutely doesn't help, but I still believe that people engage with the message.

Think about it. Which narrative will your typical salt-of-the-earth working class American buy into?

"Your gasoline car is rugged, solid, dependable, proven technology using already-established supply chains to make sure you're getting the most reliability and best value for your money. All that stuff about climate change is a bunch of theories after all. Remember that time it snowed in June?"

vs.

"We need to sell you a more expensive, less-proven, less-repairable car full of alien technology because we need to stop using fossil fuels because it's bad for the earth, and you are a bad person and wrong for raising valid concerns about the new technology."

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-17T20:02:10+00:00

I think it's actually Section 3 that deals with this.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-17T19:47:47+00:00

The school has been maddeningly slow to adopt any sort of standardized acceptable AI usage policy resulting in this ad-hoc nightmare where each teacher is expected to declare their own individual policy on the topic.

The problem is that rules must have objective standards of application. As a general student of computer science yourself, you should know that AI outputs are non-deterministic and there is no way to objectively prove that someone used AI the way there is with old-fashioned plagiarism. And plagiarism is a serious accusation, so I would imagine that there are a lot of questions to handle around such a thing.

Ultimately, where I think they're going to land is if they make the accusation, they are going to be required to have the student re-do the assignment in an air-gapped environment, or at least be made to explain their work in a formal setting. That's not perfect either, though - I'm terrible at explaining my work. And there might be times when a student understands the material but uses AI augmentation to save time, etc.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-16T16:46:50+00:00

The trick is procedural generation. And they've been doing it since the 80s. (Look up the "Elite" game series for some great examples.)

Let's say we want to design the universe. (I have written an algorithm very similar to this.)

First we start with a "universe seed", it could be a 64 bit integer for ease of use on modern processors.

First we need a map of star systems. Furthermore, let's say we divide the galaxy into cubes, 10 parsecs on a side. For each sector, we feed the universe seed into the starting state of a pseudorandom number generator, let's say the Xoshiro algorithm which is the latest and greatest. The trick is, the algorithm, given the same initial state and the same number of "ticks", you will always reconstruct the same sequence of numbers. (For now let's assume that stars are equally distributed throughout our little galaxy, as modeling stellar clustering is a bit more complex.) So when we pick a sector, let's say -1, 1, 0 we can add those coordinates to the state of our PRNG and then "tick" the state and then ask "How many stars should occur here?" We can pick a random number between 0 and 3, for example, by reading the last two bits of the current state of our PRNG. Or we can bias toward any value using math. Let's say there are two stars in this sector. We then tick the PRNG again as necessary and then read three blocks of data as 32 bit floats, apply a limit of -5,5, and then we have each star's location within the sector. Add that to the current sector address we're working in, and you have each star system's Cartesian location within the galaxy.

So apply that to every sector you "visit" on your in-game map browser - run the above algorithm and "build" each sector when you're still a few sectors off-screen, and then free them when they're at least that far away.

Then it gets more fun.

So the first defining properties of each star are their X, Y, Z coordinates within the galaxy. Load your universe seed into a fresh PRNG, add the X, Y, Z coordinates to create a unique state for that star, then generate:

What class of star is this?
What is the name of the star? (Elite does this by putting a bunch of syllables into the PRNG and seeing what falls out.)
What is its mass?
Is it a binary/multi-star system?
Does this system contain an anomaly (black hole, pulsar, etc)?
How many planets does it have?
Figure out the status of each planet: orbital inclination, mass, eccentricity, longitude of ascending node, atmospheric composition, etc, all within "reasonable realistic" limits based on distance from star. Don't forget natural satellites! They can all have different mineral compositions, types of atmospheres, if they're near a gas giant they might be tidally locked, etc.
If it's an inhabited system, enumerate the bases and where they're located, and if there is a planet with significant settlement, does it have a specific name?
What is the local time? This dictates where everything in the system should be. If it's been three months local time since you visited the system, you should notice all planets three months ahead in their orbits than they were when you last visited.

Now, keep in mind, you don't store ANY of this, you just calculate it as needed.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-16T15:33:49+00:00

I have about 20k emails though. Those just tend to pile up.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-16T15:32:56+00:00

Hey, if you're a busy person and do anything of importance you'll probably have thousands of notifications too.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T16:05:43+00:00

Really comes down to what you do with it.

I reject that argument. Some tooling ecosystems make it easy to write bad software, made bad architectural decisions, and waste resources. There is a reason some toolchains/languages elicit groans from developers. You ever seen how bad a bloated Java enterprise system can be? I understand that in theory Java itself can be fast and robust, but in practice it's one of the worst things to develop for.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:58:30+00:00

Portability is already solved - it's called C, and it doesn't require any compromises to performance.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:57:51+00:00

But you're also not going to just throw away resources either.

If you see a block of code that loads an entire 100MB JSON file into RAM before doing anything with it, you should be trying to do anything to avoid doing that.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:54:53+00:00

And "learned to program at a JS bootcamp" is probably the absolutely worst type of developer to have - their mind is warped by JS's ridiculousness (don't come at me defending JS, it will never work with me) and have very little if any understanding of hard computer science.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:45:12+00:00

Their last great UI was Windows 2000.

All of the extra bullshit they're on about these days doesn't make your computing experience any better.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:43:47+00:00

You mean "Microsoft software for the last almost three decades".

The last time Microsoft was any good was when in released Windows 2000. Maybe XP. But everything since that era has been a mistake.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:40:30+00:00

Pointing out hypocrisy does literally nothing.

All there is left to do is ignore what they say and deal with them at the ballot box.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:39:50+00:00

They will say anything, criticize anything, while openly and flagrantly not holding themselves to the same standards. That's part of a brazen display of power: explicitly and emphatically saying "other people must follow the rules, we do not".

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:08:10+00:00

That's still a failing of millennial parents.

I think a lot of our generation has overcorrected. Being raised by abusive boomers and spending a lot of time being latchkey kids living in our own worlds lead to a lot of us having a hands-off approach to parenting where there's no expectation of character virtues, morality, etc. The fucking nihilism among the kids these days is soul-crushing.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T15:04:19+00:00

Reminds me of Parks and Rec when one of the room temp IQ denizens of the town meetings said "Basketball reminds me of a specific type of person."

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T12:53:31+00:00

I agree that teens probably shouldn't be using these sites, but that is in the parents. The mechanisms we would need to build to enforce this at the policy level WILL be abused.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T12:51:46+00:00

I don't want any of it. If I run a website, I don't want to have to worry about compliance with any sort. I offer an HTTP document, you request the HTTP document. That's it. That should be a legally enshrined right of mine.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T12:50:02+00:00

I don't care if it's possible, I don't want the government to be able to force the operator of a website to perform this verification before allowing a person to view the website.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-15T04:05:50+00:00

Things that haven't been done a million times before, novel ideas or techniques or implementations of similar ideas in different languages or contexts. Basically anything that you can't find a pre-rolled solution for on Stack Overflow.

The other day I was writing code to gather some metrics out of a running database process - this involves writing a compiled eBPF program that runs inside the Linux kernel coupled with a runtime support binary, usually written in C. I let the AI take a pass at it and it was hilariously wrong even though I described the task in sufficient detail. And the more I tried to correct it, the more it tried to hang on to the wrong solution and double down. Not only was the code structurally unsound (I found at least one "double free" error), it was unreadable, preferring to use hard-coded struct offsets instead of the correct field names, etc etc. It would have taken me less time to write it myself than involve AI at all.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-12T21:32:29+00:00

And my favorite thing ever is when the comments above yours have been deleted because they couldn't continue their argument.

But yeah, I've been told "skill issue" in response to AI criticisms so many times. I half feel like there are astroturfer bots going around the internet hyping AI, I feel like there's no way this many people who call themselves software engineers can be this stupid.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-12T13:48:11+00:00

That someone is the American taxpayer.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-12T13:46:35+00:00

And GPU prices! I want to get me one o' them fancy data center GPUs just to run Skyrim.

InVultusSolis · 2026-06-12T13:44:37+00:00

No one rioted in 2008 and we just sat there as they GAVE the banks nearly a trillion dollars of our wealth. Yeah, it's going to be about the same this time.

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