Mostly around the length (AFAIK longer than even startup or amazon RSUs) and the initial accessibility. You shouldn't try to prey on your own employees desperation or potential lack of knowledge.

It gets complicated, by that I mean it's for many roles, not just 'IT', also I've never heard how it's actually been 'pitched' so IDK how much people may or may not have been misled. (That said, the mortgage industry even to consumers, regardless of who we are talking about, is rife with complaints about misleading claims, resulting in stuff like RESPA/TLIA->TRID)

> It's a bit weird for it to be mandatory but if you don't want to be on the hook for it, you could just keep the money in a savings account until the term expires.

Yeah, that's the smartest thing to do. But let's also be clear this isn't just an 'IT' thing for the company, some of the roles that have far lower hourly wages get the same 'agreement' and it places very different psychological pressures on folks.

I feel like Klondike, -should- be simple enough with a set of vectors/arrays/lists, the biggest thing is making sure you have the traversal logic right. [0]

[0] - I mean, here's an example in VB.NET, where a lot of the game logic is FBOW integrated into the form logic, but hey it apparently is NET8! https://github.com/DualBrain/Solitaire/blob/master/Solitaire...

At least in certain genres, the use of AI art (or worse, writing) can become obvious to the player, and it winds up breaking whatever level of immersion that existed.

There's also the issue where it causes the 'signal/noise' ratio to go out of whack; Using Visual Novels as an example, the amount of shovelware has increased by at least one order of magnitude.

You can still have a VN with good enough writing, that 'AI Art' can be forgiven; and some devs actually do that to get started, i.e. they are hoping the project gets enough interest and support that they can go ahead and pay for an actual artist.

I've never worked there, I've only had the pleasure of knowing some former employees that were way happier at RKT, and the observation that the most toxic manager I have ever worked under [0] apparently had a pretty good run there after he got booted from our org [1]. What was more striking was, I had a very short stint at an org that tried to 'Emulate' their management style and it was the fastest I ever left a job.

[0] - The kind of guy who's previous wives both left him so hard they didn't even try for custody, so he was having a 'thing' with a different department's manager while her husband was dying of cancer. The creepiest moment was when she brought her kid to the office and the <10 year old kid was dressed up in the same outfit as this 40-50 something dude.

[1] - He eventually got too bold and turned on his 'lieutenant' (who also for a time would dress just like him). Once that dev lead finished the HR 'Training' that they were subjected to, he stopped the behavior of preventing the dev groups from communicating with each other. That cross communication led to a bit of a quiet internal revolt across the whole Dev org.

1. It's actually a loan.

2. If you leave or are terminated at any point for the period, you have to pay back the ENTIRE loan amount.

3. Because it's a loan, if you -do- survive employment through the term, guess what, you now have to pay tax on the 'forgiven loan'.

4. If you don't take it, you don't get hired.

Of course, 1T SRAM isn't really SRAM, but my understanding is it doesn't require external refresh like eDRAM, is a bit easier to fab on-die than eDRAM, and is half the mm2 per Megabit compared to real SRAM (15% more die size than eDRAM)...

- The major Electrical provider has a terrible track record for improving overall reliability of service to local homes. The average outage time is 3x the normal average, and the percentages for rate increases always favor corporate customers vs residential. Yes, Residential often has more 'long tail' cost in outage scenarios but it should be better balanced IMO. but also our grid seems to be a bit stressed and adding that additional stress is a big concern.

- The water usage for these data centers is an unknown, and sure they can do a closed or mostly closed loop but we aren't getting any promises on that. My state is lucky enough to have a LOT of water around it, but we also have awareness about what industrialization has done to those waterways and the ecosystems that live in them. We don't need more problems.

- In fact we actually have an issue where communities have newish data centers, that frankly have ggravating shrill sound at all hours. [0] [1]

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc5XZJfF0kQ

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wDr2dec474

Stuff like disease (i.e. most of the other rules about kosher animal prep including 'inspection',) allergies (shellfish ban), heck even pasteurization (going back to the 'boiling in milk', what are the odds that the milk hit the right temperature all throughout versus only some of it boiling, which in fact could encourage certain bad bacteria to grow, let alone whatever's in the likely uncooked meat being able to feed off the whole thing...)

> Isn't that exactly what hybrid cars (e.g. Prius) are? Extremely efficient gas engine for highway cruising, but insufficient for acceleration, which is aided by electric motors?

Well, it kinda depends. Where Hybrids get the biggest MPG boost is in city driving. The stop and go traffic lets you use Regen braking and go quite some time without the engine kicking back on while still moving forward.

I still don't understand Honda's system enough to speak well on it, but I can speak to THS because it seems to be the cheapest to do and is most proven on the road.

The general parameters for a THS type system on a Toyota Prius or Rav4, or a Ford Maverick/Fusion/Escape is a 2.0L or 2.5L (at least in modern US examples) engine paired to a simple planetary gearset containing a power split device. It is a single speed (At least in the cheap configurations, however that simplicity is possibly close enough to be viable for air usage vs a reduction gear.) That's part of why they tend to have fairly large engines, the valve timing magic gives them at least a bit more HP to not be too bad on the highway.

> but insufficient for acceleration

Going back to the modern cases, the engine is typically sized large enough to give some acceleration even on the highway. Not always great but usually enough.

At least as far as the non-plug-in hybrids, the 0-35MPH can be surprisingly peppy.

The bigger magic (again, at least as far as THS) is it makes it easy to just run the engine at the 'most optimal RPM' for certain tasks, excess energy gets piped to the battery or back out through the system, this does also help reliability tho, because you can then design the reliability of the engine around certain RPM ranges...

Where folks (often) get lazy is the resulting math over what the real bean-counters care about (but are too lazy to check often).

In a past life, I worked on costing models for a Cable/Fiber contract house, to help the company decide 'what was profitable to keep in house' versus 'what do we subcontract' (sometimes that could even mean we just 'rented' a machine and had a qualified operator using it, based on that employee's hourly rate and expected L2R for taxes... so many spreadsheets...)

And from from my 'I don't know all the factors for this but I've seen how people screw up the big ones' view (and frankly, I'm guessing a lot of us have seen and dealt with the same category of 'bad math' around outsourcing IT work...)

An on-prem data center means:

- You need to account for electricity costs - i.e. CA vs midwest electric rates.

- cooling and power backup capability - Smaller factor but real

- personnel cost - e.x. there's probably cases where a smaller org could be better off with 'on-site' server admins that have other roles based on local wages. Kinda case specfic but it's a case.

- whatever the 'space' holding the stuff costs

  - Sardonic take :Hey, let's have another unused meeting room instead! (e.x. In the case of on-prem shops that simply fled to AWS in their migration from VMware)


 - the cost of licensing whatever is running

  - In defense of this, In one of my earliest IT lives, AWS handling the Oracle licensing for a DB was a *huge* win as far as making it as easy as possible to ensure whatever was going on we couldn't have the Oracle licensing folks 'ding' us on whatever infraction occurred between reviews (that could not be understood by the majority of the company, often including the accused. I was never guilty but I saw it happen to others.)

  - OTOH I know lots of folks who just want to be lazy about what they have to document.

Frankly, the orgs that 'might' need that either have their arch set up where they are in cloud, or they are onprem but can scale to cloud if needed in interim.

We might be talking on different levels but when it comes to, on an opposite end of 'Should I use SIMD'... a databases a level of mechanical sympathy at a 'base' level is still important. e.x. row-by-row updates vs batching or bad logic where a 21k entry in clause forgot about unicode rules on columns and breaks an index [0]... is still super important.

[0] - That one is real, thanks lazy bodyshop having their people use copilot and yet, we get the same billable hours, nothing is done faster, and management is too stupid to pay attention...

Not me, but if it was real I could see it filling a lot of fleet type orders.

A couple other companies tried EREVs but AFAIR one was suboptimal (Mazda had one but the motor was so small it was dangerous to use for uphill) and the other was in an expensive German thing.

Where it is challenging is that, AFAIK, a direct driveline (i.e. Honda's system) or close to (THS used by Toyota/Ford/Subaru/others), it is easier to hit a higher Gas-only MPG rating than with an EREV due to the conversion losses on each end.

And, If you compare a BYD Seal 5 DM-i to the Current Prius Prime, AFAIK if you compare euro WLTP numbers the Prime gets better MPG when it switches to gas, and has a competitive electric only range. The Seal 5 DM-I is a little bigger but close enough. The BYD certainly wins on 'price' however it is unclear how much of that is due to a truly simpler design versus labor/material input cost.

Ehh, 3 row minivans are typically more practical. Alas, market forces are a fickle beast.

Well as a Maverick person, I'll say the following as far as 'hmm' about the chart.

For starters, You get it either in a Turbo 2.0 or Hybrid 2.5. The Hybrid 2.5 is an old but very proven design, no direct injection [0]. Also the Hybrid transmission is far simpler than most modern automatics/DCTs.

The Max spec towing Capacity is indeed 4K (with the tow package, which also requires AWD,) however it is uncertain whether an extra 500 pounds would make or break things; Keep in mind that Ford also wants to keep selling 'bigger' trucks like the Ranger [1].

But as far as listing the Hybrid battery as a 'Big Ticket Item' I can't help but chuckle. It's a paltry 1.1Kwh. As far as everyone can tell, as a car part of course it's way more expensive than just buying a home backup battery with that capacity, but at current prices replacement with labor is estimated around 3K and that's still way cheaper than a Transmission or an engine.

-----

All of that said, I think this is definitely trying to hit a certain market, and if it actually launches, and the Engine/Transmission choices are reasonable, that this would be a disruptor, but not necessarily for the consumer market.

This seems to be more targeting the fairly neglected 'low-end' of the commercial truck segment. Specifically the 2 door with "Drop-side flatbed"; IOW the sides drop down.

It's a body on frame; the challenge with the Maverick as a 'Fleet vehicle' is that they are Unibody and total out very easily. Versus with BOF trucks, I once worked at a place where the auto body shop we used was owned by my company's owners... made it cheap to keep things running I guess.

A lot of fleets unfortunately would not find 205 miles a safe enough range for their usages; That's almost certainly why they are doing this 25 gallon tank to get to 600 miles of range.

> transmission work

Eh, If I did get one I'd get the MT. Which I think is the closest to where this is targeting a 'niche consumer'. The "I want a cheap MT truck, I don't want a silly Rotary dial to pick a gear[2]". They are advertising it's 'repairability'; which again seems to be language targeting farmers sick of being locked out, but also the kinds of people who really don't mind doing that stuff.

But again, They are claiming a long powertrain lifetime.

---

Really at the end of it, What they are proposing sounds a lot like a Hilux Champ, Again I'm super curious to see what engine/transmission they plan on sourcing for this.

That's assuming this is a real thing, after all; the last decade has seen lots of cars that end up as vaporware or don't get past this phase.

[0] - Some DI setups result in carbon buildup long term.

[1] - Despite not offering US the Ranger Hybrid that is in EU.

[2] - To be clear I love my Maverick and intend to drive it into the ground. But I also bought in when the first year, the value per dollar is somewhat worse on new models.

> Valhalla can't come soon enough for us.

This will be interesting to see for sure, I think it will raise the bar for competitors as well; .NET GC has lingered in some ways for a while in progressing [0][1], there is a long standing github discussion around a lower latency GC where there is a potential alternative [2] but nothing really signaling that it could be integrated in future as an option. Valhalla might finally put enough pressure on microsoft to do something about the lag in this space.

[0] - The inferred stackalloc stuff on the JIT level is awesome but I don't count that as improvement to actual GC

[1] - Pinned allocs took a long time and we still can't get aligned pinned allocs (have to manually pad instead)

[2] - https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/discussions/115627