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I had a nasty slow claude code startup time at one point something like 8s, a clean install sorts it all out. Back up your mcp config and skills and you're good.

Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.

Not similar at all. One has been a miracle for the Python ecosystem, another was a small scale Twitter hype-fart.

I suppose my point is: I would expect that Charlie and co. carried their negotiations with OpenAI with the same laser-focused, careful judgment that catapulted Astral to success in the first place. I don't mean to fanboy, but I generally trust that they made the best decision for not only them, but the Python community as a whole.

You know how investment works, right? You realise that there were people sitting around wanting a return? People that aren’t as laser focused and principled or whatever as the guy you’re putting on a pedestal.

Norway is a very special case in that it has massive hydro energy resources and nobody lives there.

Norway has roughly the population of the average US state. So I guess no-one really lives in the USA.

The crazier fact is that a hand full of cities alone in the US has a higher population than all of Norway.

most US states have a lower total population than LA county.

Let's put it more concretely: Norway has about the same amount of people as Alabama.

So nobody lives in Alabama

I understand that you're being intentionally difficult, and probably think it's quite clever, but clear to the rest of us that the original point was that Norway is an extreme outlier with their immense (oil) wealth, hydroelectricity generation and tiny population density.

People love to compare the US to an individual country, rather than a continent.

Compare a country to a state if you want to be honest.


0.1% of the population is pretty close to 0% to be fair.

The USA has 50 states.

And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.

Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.

It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.


There must be more to it than this, or we'd have fantastic EV uptake here in New Zealand (we don't - EVs currently only have a 6% market share).

As other siblings have said, it's also very rich and offers mega tax breaks for EVs.

Out of interest, do you mean 6% of cars on the road of 6% of new cars sold last year?


I mean sales, specifically new car pure EV sales for 2025. We are only at 3% EVs on the road.

I think for much of the population a brand new EV is simply too expensive.


Tbf a plug-in is just an EV that somehow runs on petrol 4 times a year. In practice the vast majority of driving is done on battery power.

sadly thats not true at all. In practice, on average as a category, PHEVs barely save any real world emissions over gas (~20%).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-...

https://electrek.co/2026/02/19/biggest-study-yet-shows-plug-...


If you include PHEVs along with pure EVs the total is around 12% total sales for 2025, and 4% total on the road. I'm not sure when PHEVs became available overseas but they haven't been an option here for that long. Heaps of hybrids are being sold but for now still mostly of the traditional non-plug-in type.

As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.


Hybrids and PHEVs are more complicated given that they are both ICEs and EVs. A pure EV is much cheaper, and many places in the developing world don't have easy access to oil anyways.

Even in the US, our overpriced EVs are cheaper than comparable ICE.

They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.

EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.

In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.


Model 3s are Honda Accord class, so compacts, not sub-compacts. I haven't seen many sub-compact EVs in the states beyond the Leaf and the Bolt. I’m kind of excited about the new BmW i3, which will be a more normal 3 series size and shape vs the old i3. I won’t buy it of course, I’ve decided I’m not replacing my i4 before a real self driving car is available.

I can't imagine why NZ doesn't allow Chinese EVs in already like Australia has. I would guess it isn’t really about restriction but rather the smaller size of the market.


We do have Chinese EVs here in NZ, the comment above is incorrect.

Although curiously, Nissan has stopped selling us the Leaf.


At my current 6000 miles per year that would take over three decades. I’ve never owned a car longer than 10 years.

nz politicians figured out where the tap is to control uptake.. in the name of RUC right now it's tuned so non-plugin hybrid is cheapest, this separates out the price sensitive crowd...

The funny part is, given the geographic proximity and free trade relationship with China, New Zealand could become EV-dominant pretty much as quickly as they want. And as the infrastructure allows - is that a limiting factor?

Without tariffs, the excellent and inexpensive Chinese electric cars might be an attractive option.


> massive hydro energy resources

That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.

If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.

It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.

I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).


Going all electric with cars would add ~10-15% of electric demand. That's a bit, but not really a deal breaker, and something Norway would easily be able to offset by adding more wind turbines.

I tried to find info on whether Norway is adding green generation capacity. Closest answer I got is that they have stopped adding onshore wind and solar is still negligible.

Solar and wind is cheap too, no need to attack the Middle East.

> hydro energy resources

What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?

(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)


Not just a river, a river plus either an elevation drop or a drownable valley.

A river winding along a flat plain is not a hydro energy resource. A river in the same valley as your capital city is not a hydro energy resource.


Building hydro energy requires a very specific geography. You can't just take any river and turn it into an efficient hydroplant.

You need both the right geography and a lack of either people or democracy in the place you want to build it. That rules out new large hydro projects in most of Europe.

Norway has really a lots of rivers with lots of potential energy of the water, since it comes from the mountains at high altitude (Fjords).

Some big slow moving river in a flat land on the other hand is not helping you here.


More importantly it's one of the richest countries in the world, and has high taxes but big tax breaks for EVs.

And strongly penalizes non-EVs.

And lots of bad conscious from all the oil.

A planning officer, who happens to share an uncommon surname with the local MP, did just that with an application of mine recently. No site visit, no photos, no respect to the law, just NO.

That provides an easy solution: complain to your MP. At length. And then ask if the planning officer happens to be a relative, as though it has just occurred to you.

And then you might consider talking to the local paper to see if it would make a story. Also the crapper tabloids might even pay for the story.


You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.

I didn't get past the wanky declaration that he listens to classical, listing out dozens of composers.

The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.


Yeah, that's where he lost me too. Strikes me as very pretentious.

He didn't even say "classical", he was circumspect with "that moste illustriouse of musical traditionnes".


The entire thing is written in a curmudgeonly fashion, led by that massive list of musicians.

We get it, you like classical music and Spotify is a poor fit. That's... the article?


For my classical music use case, listening to new releases, Spotify works very well, particularly with the help of 3rd-party services.

I follow several thousand composers and musicians. I then get daily playlist creation by crabhands.com of any new releases by those I follow. I then export the crabhand playlist into my own local database via exportify.net. I then create Spotify playlists of music I haven't heard that I may like as well as the released works I like best. Then I score the works I've listened to and feed that back into the system. So I get a deluge of new releases but play it in an organized fashion.


It's not a long article, and is quite amusing to read. People have such high expectation of free articles on the internet.

Because most of that list isn't classical music

Yes it is. "Classical" without further context means any part of the tradition of Western art music with written score. Classical-era classical music is a subset of classical as a whole.

Well, Charles would just say that you are one of the ones that dgaf

Or someone cueing up well-known pop/dance tunes at a wedding/disco. Last time I was at one they weren't generally firing up symphonies, string quartets then doing a deeper drop of a heavy hitting baroque banger to see the bodies hit the floor.

Glad I wasn't the only one. Love how he goes on to say how he's aware that people are unfamiliar with all those names he just dropped.

The Spotify AI DJ makes some pretty cool sets for me, but I listen to Hyperpop and Outrun type electronic music, stuff like that. A DJ spinning sets of classical music is pretty weird haha. I’d recommend just listening to the Classical New Releases playlist, which is excellent.

It almost feels like he asked an AI to write out a list of composers

Me three. I thought it was an attempt at humor, but I got to the end and didn't find a punchline?

I learned Windows programming from his book, I'm sort of shocked he doesn't seem to have a base-level understanding of how transformer models work..

That, and instrumental music. Seems to believe the set of all music = pop songs + western civilization tradition classical music

¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Author comes off as what days is called “performative man”.

"wanky"

Austraian/New Zealander detected lol


Thats a term thats used a lot in the British isles too, I doubt its an Australasian thing

Specifically one who disliked The Hard Road: Restrung and Metal in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung


It's a great album, but the term was around long before it.

> It's a great album

Sure, leans a bit classical and not the least bit "wanky" (at least IMHO)

> but the term was around long before it.

Wanky? DJ? Classical? Term Of His Natural Life? .. Regardless of the specific etymological chronology you're thinking of, I feel there are non-wanky examples in the broad tent of "classical".


Dear line manager, I will be taking a very long lunch 12-6pm in London's Chinatown then heading back to the office half cut to vibe code

> Where are all the philosopher wannabe billionares?

On Twitter, in my experience. The 'manosphere' is practically all philosopher-wannabe-billionaires.


I doubt that anyone could categorize the manosphere phenomenon as philosophy. Without empathy you can't really have philosophy. Or, at least not the kind that you can take seriously.

It struck me as I was watching the new Louis Theroux Netflix documentary that the manosphere must love Nietzsche.

I don't take them seriously. They do see themselves philosophers though.

It's a really cool idea. Many desktop tasks are teachable like this.

The look-click-look-click loop it used for sending the Telegram for Musk was pretty slow. How intelligent (and therefore slow) does a model have to be to handle this? What model was used for the demo video?


In the demo, I used GPT-5.4:medium accessed through the Codex subscription.


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