Cessna 172s are great if you are learning to fly. But most people using these things for actually getting from A to B will be looking for something with a bit more range, speed, etc. That still might be sixty year old plane but one with a bigger engine; or two of them even. And if you want to go really fast you get something with a turbo prop or even jet engines. The newer ones are a bit more efficient with the fuel but also more in demand and therefore more expensive. You get what you pay for.
My understanding of the aviation market is that there are some bargains to be had with planes that are old but still very servicable. But if you are flying longer distances regularly, you kind of gravitate towards the more expensive ones. Because they go faster, use less fuel, are more comfortable, have more useful load, etc.
The point of a tractor is that is used to do useful work by farmers who earn their living working these things hard. If they break down, work stops until that can be fixed. The value of being able to fix these machines yourself is that you get them back in action quickly. But the value of a newer one is that it presumably wouldn't need a lot of fixing to begin with. And maximizing power while minimizing fuel usage means the job gets done quicker and at a lower cost. And that's what modern manufacturers sell of course.
IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
> IMHO, electric is going to revolutionize farming. Diesel is expensive (a lot more lately). And farmers burn a lot of it. Electric motors are small, reliable, quiet, etc. They have loads of torque. And if you are a farmer, you have plenty of space to harvest your own electricity with solar panels and maybe a wind mill and some batteries. There is a growing amount of high end stuff available in this space but also very affordable low end stuff. And this technology can be very simple and tinker friendly. Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
Yes. But maybe not a 1:1 of current petroleum-powered equipment with an equivalent electric one? Say, crop dusting aircraft are not being replaced by electric powered crop dusting aircraft, but by (electric powered) crop dusting drones.
Could something similar happen for, say, tractors? A tractor is of course an extremely versatile tool, and as long as there's a human driving it there's a tendency towards ever bigger tractors in order to minimize labor/ha. But big tractors are already a bit too big and expensive for many not-huge farms, ground compaction is a problem with large weight etc. Could we see these replaced by a fleet of electrical drones (drones as in autonomous, not necessarily flying) rather than "just" an electrical tractor? Of course, there's a certain minimum power required to pull a plow etc., so maybe not? Of course, autonomous fleets etc. goes a bit against the idea of DIY-fixable. Or does it? A different skill-set than wrenching on an old tractor, sure.
Probably the best reply I've ever received on HN. Thank you. I learned a lot from this comment, particularly around the realities of old planes in practice... and EV tractors(!) That's actually such a brilliant application for electric; why don't they already exist?!
>Buy some old EV batteries wire them up and you can make anything with wheels move. Including really old tractors, pickup trucks, etc. Anything from the largest mining trucks to the smallest lawn mower can already be powered by batteries. And everything in between. With battery cost dropping, there are very few obstacles that prevent adoption left. Mostly import tariffs in the US.
It's not even close to that easy though is it? I've wanted to convert a car to an EV and it seems really complex.
Of course, there is a bit of skill involved and I don't claim to be able to do this. But then, putting together a combustion engine would also require a bit of skill. Lots of parts that need to be fitted together. Hoses, pumps, wires, and a lot of electronics as well with more modern cars.
EVs have less parts. There are some challenges with diagnostics for things like battery management systems. And given the high voltages, it helps if you know what you are doing with electrical systems.
What car? It probably depends on what you want the end result to be. You won't be able to DIY a Porsche Taycan, but basically if you can do an engine swap on an ICE car, you should be able to do a semi-ghetto EV conversion (i.e no fast charging or advanced thermal management, but safe and robust enough to run daily for years). Tons of people are doing it on YouTube.
Defending oneself isnt an unreasonable thing to do. GrapheneOS is entirely funded by donations and receives a lot of donations to this day. Them defending themselves is not an existential risk, the attacks against them are.
Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
That's like saying going to Washington DC at all is "politics."
It'd be bad business stewardship if he didn't; bad for shareholders, ultimately.
It looks silly optically, but it's plain to see that Apple has trump nailed psychologically. And it worked! They knew what was needed to get an administration to support the company in meaningful ways.
Same difference. "I spent millions/billions that could have been avoided because I did not want to appear to degrade myself" doesn't sell very well to stakeholders. The CEO should do what is in the best interests of the company, and in the US when Mr Trump is president, it is in the best interests of the company to bend the knee.
So you think he is a Trump supporter, then? I would have guessed precisely the opposite. My assumption is that the trophy was his way of looking out for the best interests of Apple. In that regard probably a fairly good ROI.
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
He reportedly had to essentially be dragged into a new home, as he was still staying in a small apartment nearby the HQ even after Jobs passed away. Dude just didn't give a shit about anything but Apple.
It seems to be a rule that older models are more expensive than newer ones. The low end models have higher $CPT and worse output. I wonder if the move is to just have one model and quantize if you hit compute constraints
> It seems to be a rule that older models are more expensive than newer ones.
It isn't. Gemini has gotten more expensive with each release. Anthropic has stayed pretty similar over time, no? When is the last time OpenAI dropped API prices? OpenAI started very high because they were the first, so there was a ton of low hanging fruit and there was much room to drop.
If you mean Codex is better at planning, I've heard the exact opposite. I'm told it's a beast if you tell it exactly what you need as it will execute it to the T whereas Claude will push back or do its own thing either because it thinks it's wrong or because it's feeling lazy
gpt-5.4 xhigh is a beast you only wanna unleash on your most complex tasks or spend 30 minutes watching the model reasoning how to do a git commit. For everything else i'd happily use a saner model like sonnet.
I've started hitting Codex quota regularly for the first time the last couple of weeks, so I feel like they might be tightening the screws on the $20/month plan too. Someone paying for Max might have to work at it to hit the quota
Before buying new, aren't there enough tractors from the 60s, 70s, 80s that are still salvageable?
The general aviation world has Cessna 172s from the 50s still going strong; why buy new?
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