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music: Love (and $$$) Will Keep Us Together, Paul Gilbert

Posted on 2026-02-11 by skierpage

Paul Gilbert is an entertaining voluble guitar whiz. I’ve watched a few videos of him, so YouTube recommended “Paul Gilbert – The Process of Translation | AMS Interview”. Lot of talk, but at 6:20 he casually unleashes a fantastic cover of the 1973 chestnut “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tennille (written by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield), which is the greatest damn thing on guitar I saw all last year!

Another lost video

The cover stuck in my mind and I tried to return to this video, but I couldn’t find it for months. Searching DuckDuckGo, Google, and Youtube for “Paul Gilbert glasses and short hair”, “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “1970s covers”, “two guys on couch”, “motorcycle” all failed to find it, but eventually Google AI Mode coughed up this video, with all the elements I remembered .

Great covers but not this one

I need, need, need a recording of Paul Gilbert playing the entire “Love Will Keep Us Together.” I couldn’t find a recorded version of it on Paul Gilbert’s Bandcamp, and it’s not on Setlist.fm’s huge list of songs that Paul Gilbert has covered in shows (but the list is delectable – “Magic” by Pilot,”Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo, “2 Become 1” by the Spice Girls, …😍).

Money talks, but does it record?

So I’ve reached out on the Paul Gilbert subreddit:

I want the whole song, both straight and a heavy shred-rock version with all the motifs turned up to 11, and I’ll pony up $$$$ to make it happen <Futurama Shut up and take my money GIF>. Seriously. How can I contact Paul Gilbert’s management?

We’ll see if “Executive producer: skierpage” happens.

Postscript: AI hallucinates yet again

Google’s AI Mode started hallucinating that Paul Gilbert played this song on the “Rock and Metal School of Music” and the Japanese “Young Guitar Magazine” video channels, and then took a hit of LSD and

The track is officially available on his 2021 album, The 80’s Hits For Rock Guitar, which also includes rock versions of tracks like “What a Fool Believes” and “Go All the Way.”

There is no such album.

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money: fElon Musk’s paper wealth is real

Posted on 2026-02-10 by skierpage

Elon Musk is the richest person in the world thanks to the shares of Tesla, Xitter, xAI, and SpaceX that he owns. He’s forced xAI to acquire Xitter and now SpaceX to acquire xAI in order to hide their losses inside a more valuable company, but his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX provide most of his estimated net worth of an obscene $500-850 billion dollars.

Some people point out that this isn’t real wealth, it’s “paper” wealth. He may own billions in Tesla shares, but if he sold all his Tesla shares tomorrow, that would crash the TSLA stock price, so he wouldn’t rake in the current value of his share of Tesla, $90 billion as of 2026-02-10 (and throughout the rest of this post). So is his wealth just fake “paper wealth” or is it real?

Poor rich illiquid kid

One term for the mismatch between on-paper value and what you can get for something is “realizable liquidity,” but that seems more to refer to the contrast between assets that can quickly be converted into cash and fixed assets like buildings that are harder to liquidate; stocks fall in the middle. Claude.ai calls the stock worth issue a “liquidation discount” or “illiquidity discount” resulting from the “market impact” or “price impact” of dumping a lot of shares.

But there doesn’t seem to be any robust formula for working out this discount, Claude-ai guesses it would be 20-40% for Musk, so in a fire sale he’s only worth $300bn, not $500bn. Large shareholders reduce their positions slowly to minimize the discount, and certain investors are required to file a “10b5-1 plan” with the SEC setting out how they will sell their shares, so they can’t time their stock sales to happen immediately after good news or before bad news. Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have filed such a plan, but maybe he’s secretly selling and figures he’ll get a slap on the wrist for undisclosed stock sales from the convicted orange grifter’s administration.

Give me more shares or I’ll tank my own company.

In the past Elon Musk has got spending money by taking out loans against the value of his Tesla shares. In general rich company owners hate selling stock, because a) they would actually have to pay significant taxes (the horror!), and b) it reduce their control. But to buy Xitter (pronounced as in President Xi of China) he had to actually sell a few billions in Tesla. That plus Tesla issuing and selling more shares over the years (including to Toyota and Mercedes) means Musk only owns ~13% of Tesla shares.

So the thin-skinned troll publicly muses about losing interest in Tesla unless he regains ownership of more of the company. Instead of telling him to go f*** himself and finding a CEO who’ll focus only on Tesla instead of spreading racist tropes and lies on Xitter and dreaming of moon bases and datacenters in spaaaace, the Tesla board is so afraid he’ll leave and the stock will drop that they agreed to a trillion-dollar pay package that will give Musk the greater share of Tesla that he wants (and far more than all the stock grants to mere employees to give them a motivating stake in the company’s future). This is patently ridiculous; if Tesla meets the various targets in the compensation plan, Musk’s existing share of Tesla will be worth a trillion dollars, which is incentive enough to any “normal” executive. But he wants more, always more.

The whole pie is worth less than a slice, but a slice is worth whatever the market says it is

Even if he can’t turn all his wealth into cash money in a week, Musk’s wealth is very real. If a mere $10-millionaire sells $1M of assets, they have 10% less assets. But if fElon sells TSLA stock to raise $100M of cash money tomorrow that would only be 250,000 shares which is a tiny 0.4% of TSLA daily trade volume, and he’d still have 99.9% of his ~$90 billion of “paper wealth” in TSLA stock. He would have to disclose that he’s dumping TSLA stock in an SEC filing which would increase negative sentiment on Tesla… but it seems nothing will pop Tesla’s insane P/E ratio (395 times earning).

Tax wealth!

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art: Santa brings Jhane Barnes beauty

Posted on 2026-01-03 by skierpage

Santa figured out there is an endlessly updating treasure trove of Jhane Barnes shirts on eBay. Here are two stellar designs I received. From a distance the check shirt looks straightforward, but the fibers in each square and of each oval in the other shirt are somehow 3-D, not a flat part of the weave. Her art always reveals more the closer you look.

“Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world…” *(American Beauty)*

Posted in art, design | Tagged Jhane Barnes | Leave a comment

music: the secondhand joy of mashups and AI

Posted on 2025-10-20 by skierpage

YouTube finally got around to recommending Bill McClintock’s mashups to me. A lot of the enjoyment comes from bringing out the strong melodies underlying bombastic metal performances by pairing them with disco/pop/R&B songs; unfortunately, I’m not familiar with most of the Judas Priest/Slayer/Megadeath headbangers forming one half of the mashup.

Surely for the average pop fan “You Make September Fun” by Fleetwood Fire is his magnum opus, absolutely incredible. The way the songs blend is perfect; hearing Maurice White’s (RIP) perfectly-timed “Never a cloudy day, yow!” leading into the chorus feels like it must have been recorded in the same studio.

Commenters often claim “It’s better than the originals!” It’s intriguing that someone gluing two songs together can engender such appreciation. It sounds so good because you bring your familiarity with both originals to the combination. The absence of the expected, replaced by the unexpected but familiar, maxes out the predictable-unpredictable audio pleasure circuits in your brain.

But I guarantee someone unfamiliar with both originals would prefer them to this sensational mashup. Where’s the incredible brass from “September“? Where’s the soaring “belie-ee-ee-ee-eeve” chorus that Christine McVie (RIP) sings on her own song “You Make Loving Fun“? The towering originals put them in your brain, and they accompany the mashup even in their absence.

Have the AI do it, but lazily be filthy

With AI music generators you can imagine a mashup and an AI will fabricate it for you. A guilty juvenile pleasure was Obscurest Vinyl‘s combination of early 1960s pop/R&B styles with filthy lyrics, summed up by their singular “I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again” by the Sticky Sweethearts.

It’s a decent song, elevated by the delicious word “again.” I commented (roughly, since Mr. Vinyl removed all YouTube comments, which were mostly of the form “This was playing at the high school dance and inspired my grandparents to conceive my mom”)

George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to distend their sphincter, again and again.”

Another sickly strong song is Now I Gotta Set a Titty on Fire.’ I not only transcribed the lyrics on Genius as my small contribution to organizing all the world’s knowledge for posterity, I also applied my scholarship-winning Oxford-educated powers of literary analysis to some of the lyrics; click the shaded lyrics to admire my exegesis.

Off-beat lyrics from humans and AI

As you can tell, Obscurest Vinyl seems really angry! I hope writing or prompting lyrics for songs titled “You Look Like You Could Use a F**kin’ Lamp” and even worse are cathartic for him/her/them. They’re unlike the essentially good-natured YouTube channel There I Ruined It which I think uses AI to assist in its mashups. Its greatest achievement is Elvis Presley singing the “I like big butts and I cannot lie” lyrics of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” to the tune of “Don’t Be Cruel”, but it has been cruelly removed from YouTube “due to a copyright claim by a [humorless] third party.”

Update: for now here’s an copy of There I Ruined It’s Elvis cover, and you can still watch a mashup of the mashup in which you can hear Elvis singing “Deep in the jeans she’s wearing / I looked and I can’t stop staring.”

A month after I wrote this in October 2025, AI generated a chart-topping country hit, “Walk My Walk.” As with visual art, I prefer the bizarre stream-of-machine-conscious that early AI generated in the good old days of 2020. Today’s AI can generate convincingly formulaic bro-country lyrics

Been beat down, but I don’t stay low
Got mud on my jeans, still ready to go
Every scar’s a story that I survived
I’ve been through hell, but I’m still alive

but they don’t hold a candle to Rick Astley-bot spitting truths back in 2020 “You wouldn’t get this spaghetti on a guy… Kiss the boat Denny I’m Satan’s pirate arrr”, and the Bob Dylan-besting “You know the rules and so you have to die.”

Old wine in new packaging

Before easy mashups, musicians would actually have to record new versions of songs. There have been easy-listening versions of rock songs for a long time, and everyone in every genre recorded Beatles songs in the 1970s. Ted Templeton (who apparently isn’t the fantastic producer Ted Templeman), recorded Trill it Like it Was by The Templeton Twins with Teddy Turner’s Bunsen Burners, an album of rock songs played by a 1920s tea dance band and double-tracked crooner. It’s amusing for a few songs.

The excellent post-punk singer-songwriter Joe Jackson mashes up his own biggest hit “Is She Really Going out with Him?” I’ve seen him play it in concert as a capella doo-wop, brass band, and a bossa nova swing tune.

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web: awful online shopping part NN

Posted on 2025-05-01 by skierpage

Why is shopping at Amazon so awful? It presents dozens of brands you’ve never heard of, and appallingly bad filtering options. And since 8% of the 1-star reviews are “It broke after X weeks”, let me filter for products by length and quality of warranty! I complained about the brain-dead-ness of its “Rufus AI” but the generally terrible experience applies even without AI getting it wrong.

We bought a Cuisinart Perfectemp cordless electric kettle years ago. Pretty good, but:

The water level indicator is behind the handle, hard to view, eventually gets milky and even harder to read.
The hole that lets the water flow into the indicator gets clogged so the water level doesn’t match the water level in the kettle.
The hole and the water level indicator are impossible to clean.
Shaking the kettle to get the water level to equalize may have caused the kettle to leak from the bottom after years.

Filter fiasco

The separate water indicator. is stupid Just give me a glass kettle so I can see the water level! So let’s go to Amazon and shop for a glass kettle. Search for “electric kettle temperature control”, get over 1,000 results. So use the handy filter to filter for Glass, and most of the results are still not-glass kettles. Useless!

Warranty ought to be a mark of quality

Alright, so I’ll just visually scan for glass electric kettles. There are dozens. Are Brightown, Chefman, Comfee, COSORI, Elite Gourmet, Magic Mill, and NELO reputable companies making quality goods? Who knows? Click on 1-star reviews and there are plenty of people and/or bots paid by competitors complaining that the product broke in X weeks. So which companies stand behind their product with two-year or longer warranty? Amazon usually provides the useless and probably illegal cop-out:

Please contact the seller directly for warranty information for this product. You may also be able to find warranty information on the manufacturer’s website.

Reading more reviews, it seems many people give up and believe after the return period expires, there’s nothing they can do. All products have warranties, and your credit card probably doubles the warranty period. But it seems even reputable companies like Bodun and OXO fob off customers with requirements like “demonstrate proof of purchase to the company you purchased it from.”

On the flip side, with generative AI it’s trivial to make “cameraphone picture of a crumpled receipt for a Cuisinart kettle for $58.75” and even make a “shaky phone video demonstrating that a kettle is broken.” So I have some sympathy for manufacturers trying to stem the tide of returned goods. But companies should want to interact with customers in order to improve their products! Making and selling products is so broken in the 21st century; the gulf between people begging for a “KEEP WARM” setting on the kettle that defaults to OFF and the Chinese factory that cranked out a batch of 5,000 kettles four months ago is vast.

aarke! An exception

Aarke filter granules and glass purifying water pitcher. — Clean water and less plastic, from a real company

We don’t waste money on bottled or canned water, instead we drink filtered tap water. Brita is OK but the plastic pitcher gets scratched and worn, the plastic lid breaks, and throwing a plastic filter in the trash every two months or so is dispiriting. We found aarke selling a glass water pitcher with a stainless steel filter that you refill, thus a lot less plastic. It seems high quality, and the company has actual customer service. I let them know about a typo in the manual, and a human being replied. Amazing!

Unfortunately, aarke’s kettle is double-walled stainless steel (and costs €250, and the excellent 5-year warranty only applies in the E.U. or UK).

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art: Sturgeon’s law at the art fair

Posted on 2025-04-19 by skierpage

For some reason San Francisco Art Fair thinks we’re high roller art buyers (even though we’ve never brought a painting home for more than $500) and offers us “VIP” tickets. (Though this reminds me of the “Las Vegas” episode of the Modern Family sitcom in which Jay Pritchett is conceited to get a room on the “Excelsior” penthouse floor of a Las Vegas hotel, until he realizes there’s a floor above him for “Excelsior Plus” black card members.)

There’s so much art on display by galleries that Sturgeon’s law ensures a lot of great fine art amongst a deluge of art trying so, so hard to have commercial appeal. The AI summary of the latter would be “A circular lenticular artwork made out of feathers, of a tasteful nude diving into a Los Angeles swimming pool.”

The clothes that some people wore for the opening evening were beautiful. It’s rare to see anyone well-dressed in a city where the official uniform is black vaguely-sporty wear. And not just women in dynomite dresses and fabrics; I saw several artsy men wearing pink sportcoats with their Bluebirds, also someone wearing an enormous couture puffy jacket and another wearing an Afghan coat that look liked a custom carpet.

There’s no way I could discern all the artworks that were in Sturgeon’s 10%, let alone give them the attention they deserve, but here are images of some that I noted. Given time, dozens more could and would have seeped in and affected me.
Overall favorite: “Laundromat” Liu Tianlian
Favorite sculpture: “Big Bang” Robert Brady
Favorite abstract: “Just Let Them” Isabelle Beaubien
Honorable mentions: John Belingheri, Georgia Hart, Trenity Thomas.

Liu Tianlan’s big ink and color on silk “Laundromat” at the booth of Yiwei Gallery (Instagram link, she’s not on the gallery’s own web site yet) was KA-POW. It’s the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” squeezed into the movie’s laundromat. Wowzer. No picture does it justice, the 9-foot long painting’s polyptych wood framing (missing from this image) is great. This artwork alone is worth a visit.

"Laundromat" ink and color on silk painting by Liu Tianlian from Yiwei Gallery, 9 feet long

Robert Brady’s “Big Bang” at Donna Seager Fine Arts was my favorite sculpture. I love the yellow and black spots, they remind of John Baldessari.

"Big Bang" wooden sculpture by Robert Brady from Donna Seager Fine Art

Robert Brady’s Instagram feed has a 2-year-old pic of “Big Bang” before it got the ash treatment. They grow up so fast.

"Big Bang" wooden sculpture by Robert Brady in development

Isabelle Beaubien’s “Just Let Them” at Spence Gallery (F07) was my favorite abstract painting. A lot of art at the fair was circular to be different and commercial, but this enormous (120 cm/48 inch diameter) acrylic and resin record has to be that shape. I have no idea how hard it is to execute.

"Just Let Them Be" acrylic on canvas with resin by Isabelle Beaubien from Spence Gallery. 48 × 48 Inches/122 × 122 cm

John Belingheri at Andrea Schwartz Gallery had “Jade”, a striking painting of a green loopy grid. It’s reminiscent of the calligraphic loops of Brice Marden (1938 – 2023) but more a city of undulating connections – like San Francisco. It doesn’t work at all on a screen, this 5-foot square canvas has to be human-sized in the room with you.

"Jade" oil and mixed media on canvas by John Belingheri, from Andrea Schwartz Gallery. 72 x 72 inches

Trenity Thomas at Ferrara Showman Gallery had some strangely flat humorous paintings, this is “Take Me With You”, 2024. What’s with the lemons?

"Take Me With You", 2024 acrylic on canvas painting by Trenity Thomas from Ferrara Showman Gallery. 60h x 48w inches

Also by Trenity Thomas, “To Be Held”, 2023. Another lemon, and look at the dog’s mouth!

"To be Held", 2023 acrylic on canvas painting by Trenity Thomas from Ferrara Showman Gallery. 48h x 48w inches

Georgia Hart at Quantum Contemporary Art paints great thick impasto skies, e.g. “Sligachan, Scotland.” You can’t get that from an AI-generated 2D array of pixels.

"Sligachan, Scotland" oil painting by Georgia Hart from Quantum Contemporary Art. W: 41 x H: 51 cms/16 x 20 inches

Ones that got away

One artist had a great seascape in graphite, another had seascapes made by etching colored paper. “Majestic indifferent oceanic grandeur” is an easy subject to add some heft to your work, but both were very well executed.

AI art is coming

In endless online debates about whether AIs are creative (yes, they are) I point out that a pixel grid that presents an image of an artwork is not a fine artwork that exists in the world! Go buy real art to put in your room and hang on the wall. But robots are coming for “the thing” as well. The 2rt booth (in addition to the commonplace lenticular art) had “Aiden Noir” robotically painted photos, that you can also scan with an app to turn into short panning videos. Also there was a wall with some Augmented Reality Art “paintings” on it. There wasn’t much information about these, maybe they were snuck into the fair to avoid pearl-clutching condemnation from real human artists and the galleries that represent them.

If you’re trying to make commercial art that people want to hang on the wall, an AI that’s ingested billions of images and gigabytes of art theory and critical writing is going to meet your customers’ wants. I love supporting the creativity of human artists – #respectArtists! – but I would also love someone or something to execute the wonderfully inventive set of pixels that Craiyon AI came up with three years ago (when it was just a callow adolescent autoregressive transformer) in actual oil paint on a large canvas.

best image that the open-source AI DALL·E Mini (now Craiyon) generated from prompt "Painting of a black cat with white markings sitting on a chair by Franz Kline" — paint me “Painting of a black cat with white markings sitting on a chair by Franz Kline”!

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cars: they all step up then falter in EVs

Posted on 2025-03-28 by skierpage

The Nissan Leaf was the first mass market BEV in 2010. Nissan built battery factories and assembly lines on three continents to make it.

16 years later, Nissan has one new model in the USA, the Ariya. Meanwhile upstart Tesla is worth $875 billion and Nissan is worth $9.5 billion. But to reassure everyone that Nissan is really going to compete, it announced a new Leaf and

new 2025 Leaf.
And 15 years late, an INFINITI EV. Maybe.

Then from late FY27, an all-new Nissan EV is scheduled to commence production at Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi plant in the U.S. The all-new model will be an adventure-focused SUV. It will be joined in FY28 by a luxury INFINITI EV SUV (inspired by the Vision QXe concept) that pairs the brand’s latest Artistry in Motion design language with a suite of technology features.

Hold on, this gives me déjà vu. An INFINITI EV in 2028? That is 15 years late! Back when Nissan was riding high on the relative success from being early with the Leaf, it had similar big plans:

Infiniti set out to build a truly luxurious electric vehicle that will be worthy of the brand, while not compromising anything that an electric car signifies. A recent report says that the EV is still in the works, and Infiniti confirmed it would see production, but some delays should be expected. “There are some interesting advances in electric technology we hadn’t anticipated when we showed the LE, which, by delaying a little bit, we can incorporate into the car.”

— Andrea Cristea Ultimate Car Blog, July 2013

Those 2013 plans came to nothing, but this time it will be different, honest.

Nissan, Ford, Honda, Toyota, BMW all made a step forward with a decent BEV that got into production, then faltered (and in Honda and Toyota’s case, multiple times with the Honda EV/Fit EV/Clarity EV and two generations of RAV4 EVs). Business school graduates will be writing about their failures to make progress on the new path for decades. I suspect it’s due to open hostility from the managers and engineers in the rest of the company.

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cars: SPAC collapse facts

Posted on 2025-03-23 by skierpage

The electrification of land transportation is inevitable and A Good Thing, but there’s a lot of carnage along the way! I read an article about the problem with SPACs; the article is not specific to EVs, but so many EV companies used a merger with a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company or “blank check company”) as a shortcut to getting listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in order to raise cash and so founders could cash out. That prompted me to assemble a list of all the EV companies that went public in a SPAC. The four companies I mentioned in Mullen, the king of EV stock scams and cars: more EV fiascos at Faraday, Nikola, and Canoo all went public in SPAC mergers.

Merging with a SPAC was promoted as a cheaper and less onerous way for startups to go public (“less onerous” meaning no official SEC disclosure of risks and detailed financial status). The article details how even though a SPAC’s share price typically stays around $10 when it announces a merger target, “the actual value of a SPAC has declined to ~$4-6 due to numerous costs, like merger and underwriting fees paid to bankers, accountants, and lawyers.” I didn’t realize Wall Street already pigged out at the trough before retail investors bought in to the newly-public company.

How are EV SPACs doing?

Arrival, commercial EV maker: bankrupt!
Canoo, only made a handful of pill-shaped vans: bankrupt (thank you grifter CEO Tony F.U. Aquila)
Electric Last Mile Solutions, would-be maker of commercial EVs: bankrupt!
Faraday Future “Intelligent Electric”, maker of a handful of way-overpriced EV SUVs: share price down 99.999% from a nominal $94,173 per share
Fisker, the eponymous car designer’s third attempt at a car company: bankrupt!
GreenPower Motors, Canadian EV bus maker: share price down 97%
Hyzon, would-be hydrogen truck maker: down 99.995% since its 2021 SPAC debut
Lightning eMotors, would-be commercial EV maker: bankrupt!
Lion Electric, EV bus and truck maker: bankrupt!
Lordstown Motors, would-be EV pickup maker: bankrupt!
Lucid, luxury car maker: down 96% from all-time high but a real car maker thanks to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bone Saw
Mullen Automotive, pretending to make EVs while rebadging Chinese EVs: down 99.999…% from a nominal $268,690,500 a share – David Michery rivaling lyin’ Trevor Milton.
Nikola, purveyors of a fantasy of 600 truck stops making green hydrogen refueling hydrogen fuel cell trucks at a cheap all-in price: bankrupt, and never forget lyin’ Trevor Milton “was sentenced to 4 years in prison for engaging in securities and wire fraud in connection with his scheme to defraud and mislead investors.”
Polestar: a real maker of upmarket EVs: down a mere 88% from $13.86 to $1.11 a share.
Proterra, a real maker of battery buses: bankrupt!
REE, a wannabe commercial vehicle maker after no one wanted its in-wheel motors: down 98.74% or a nominal $303 a share)
VinFast, a real car maker selling cars to other parts of a Vietnamese crony tycoon’s business empire: down 95%, sort-of a real car maker selling itself cars
XOS, trying to make EV trucks: down 99.06% since its 2021 SPAC debut

All these companies were pitched as being the next Tesla in the ruinously cash-depleting sector of making expensive electric (or “clean” hydrogen) vehicles. Most startups fail, nearly all new car companies fail. Yet Hyzon and XOS were both briefly worth $two billion dollars!

EV-adjacent SPACs

The above list doesn’t include would-be makers of other kinds of electric vehicles that went public in SPAC merger: motorcycles, scooters, skateboards, unicycles, etc. And dozens more EV-related startups (battery companies, charger makers, charging networks) went public in SPAC deals, including Aeva, ChargePoint, EVBox, EVgo, FREYR Battery, Hyliion Holdings, Li-Cycle, Microvast,Nuvve, QuantumScape, Romeo (acquired by Nikola now bankrupt), XL Fleet, etc. I haven’t researched how all these companies are doing, but it’s safe to assume most are doing badly (I could ask a Large Language Model chatbot to go off and hallucinate a report…)

You don’t have to go public in a SPAC to go bankrupt, but it helps.

Other bankrupt EV companies include:

Arcimoto, would-be maker of tandem two-wheel sort-of-car EV
Bollinger, would-be maker of off-road EVs, acquired by scammers Mullen Automotive
Coda, importer of crummy early Chinese EV to the USA – I have a long memory!
ElectraMeccanica, would-be maker of compact three-wheel EV, acquired by XOS
Lightyear, wannabe maker of expensive solar-powered car
Smith Electric, maker of commercial EVs, originally made UK milk delivery trucks
Sono, would-be maker of a a solar-powered compact car
Volta, would-be EV truck maker

You don’t have to go public to struggle as an EV maker

Lots of other companies never went public or have yet to go public, which limits the amount of money they can raise. That makes it even harder to have the piles of cash you need to write the big checks to actual make cars. Since these companies aren’t public their financial state is opaque, but you can be confident it’s… not great.

Aptera, promising to begin production of a three-wheeled solar-powered weirdmobile for years
Einride, promised a wild-looking self-driving truck but seems to have pivoted to EV freight logistics
Motiv Power, selling a few commercial EVs
Phoenix Motorcars, would-be converters of shuttle buses and flatbed trucks into EVs
Quantron AG, would-be European maker of hydrogen trucks
Riversimple, would-be UK maker of crappy small hydrogen commuter car
Workhorse Group, would-be commercial EV maker, originally AMP Electric Vehicles; it transferred its pickup to defunct Lordstown.

Going public in an IPO is no guarantee

Rivian went through the arduous process of making a proper IPO (initial public offering), which raised a lot of cash. It’s a real maker of upmarket “adventure” EVs that are excellent cars (I rented one for a day to carry 7 tourists around in style and comfort) but it’s lost $billions and loses $tens of thousands on every car it makes.

Way back in the 1990s ZAP imported and tried to manufacture various battery vehicles, including a tiny truck and commuter vehicle: defunct since 2016.

Atlis Motor Vehicles went public and was developing an electric work truck. It looks like AMV went public on NASDAQ Sept. 17 2022 in a “Registration A process brings private shares to the public market” (not a SPAC or IPO). I think they’ve renamed themselves NXU, claim to make innovative battery packs and storage systems, and are once again public.

Cash is king

Supporters of these companies like to cite successful companies that went for years without any profits. But what kills them is running out of cash. To make cars you have to write a lot of big checks, so if the company isn’t profitable just look at “cash and cash equivalents” in its 10-Q and 10-K reports and you get a sense of how close it is to shutting its doors. As I remarked in earlier posts, the way to survive is to not enter production, but instead hype your company and stock.

Elon Musk: “Prototypes are easy, production is hard”, also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.” (You can be a narcisstic right-wing troll spreading misinformation at all hours instead of working for your companies, and still have important insights.)

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design: dimmer light switch de-evolution

Posted on 2025-03-20 by skierpage

Classic white toggle dimmer switch in a white wallplate — Perfection

The electrical industry came up with the perfect light switch over 60 years ago: a plastic thing you flick up to turn on and down to turn off. You can see by looking at it which lights are on and off. You can feel in the dark how to turn one on and off. For dimming, the switch evolved so at the bottom of travel it positively clicks off and the rest of the travel changes the dimming level; you can still see at a glance how close it is to full brightness.

Clueless designers have messed this up for decades. The Lutron Decora switch has a big clean panel, but you can’t see if it’s up or down. Designers made rotary switches (more effort to turn full on or off), and separated the on-off function from the dimmer slider (looks ugly, can’t feel in the dark, more effort for no reward). Then designers made it worse with presets, memory, and columns of tiny LEDs to suggest how bright the light is (I have eyes!! I can see how bright it is). Then, years before smartphones, they added tap and hold functionality.

WTF is this? Can you tell the light’s state from the switch?

Sometimes the switch is now a featureless rectangle, with actions {turn on to last setting, max brightness, decrease brightness, increase brightness, quick off} randomly assigned to {tap, double tap, press and hold, tap and hold, triple tap, stand on one foot and smear peanut butter on switch}. If the light is dim and you want it brighter you wind up tapping and holding like a drunken Morse code operator. I visited a fancy venture capitalist’s high-end home and the light switches in its entrance hall had printed instruction labels next to them!

So many choices, all terrible. There’s only one (#10) that indicates the brightness level

Why does Ariadni (#1 and #4) have two controls?! #2 is perfection! (#3 is in a two-way circuit whose other switch is the dimmer.)

When we remodeled our house we had to fight to get the platonic kind of switch. We got toggle dimmers for incandescent lights but the electrician said the model that we specified doesn’t work with low-voltage lights. So we had a mix of ideal switches and Lutron’s Ariadni switch with a separate dimmer slider (which makes the on-off switch thinner, flimsier, and uglier).

Perfection lost

That was 2006. I recently replaced some more MR16 halogens with LEDs, and they don’t work well with the Ariadni dimmers which are designed for magnetic transformers: most of the travel does nothing and then the LED pops on and barely dims. So once again I tried to get the unimproveable perfect light switch, and I failed. Searching for “toggle dimmer wallswitch” mostly didn’t work, just like my iron search; I scrolled through dozens of results before managing to find actual toggle dimmers by GE and Leviton for sale by Home Depot and Walmart… and both were discontinued.

AI hallucinates help

I asked Claude.ai about this, and it kept suggesting specific light switches using all the terrible designs. I got pretty fed up:

ME: No. I don’t want touch, double-tap, memory, or anything else. And it’s not a “three-way” switch. GE called it a “toggle on/off dimmer switch,” but it was for incandescents and is discontinued. Oh well.

Claude: I understand now – you’re looking for an actual mechanical toggle switch that physically moves through positions for off, dimmed, and full brightness, similar to the discontinued GE toggle on/off dimmer for incandescents.

You’re right that these have become quite rare for LEDs. The older mechanical toggle dimmers worked well with incandescent bulbs because their dimming method (typically using a simple triac circuit) was compatible with resistive loads. LED bulbs, being electronic devices rather than simple resistive loads, require different dimming technologies.

The closest modern equivalents I can think of would be:

Lutron Skylark Contour – has a slide dimmer with a push button at the bottom, not exactly a toggle

Cooper Wiring Devices AI106 – an older model that might still be compatible with some dimmable LEDs

…

Me: I think you hallucinated part AI106 from Cooper Wiring Devices, there’s no such product.

Claude: You’re right, and I apologize for the error. The “Cooper Wiring Devices AI106” I mentioned isn’t a real product – I made a mistake by providing incorrect information.

(Instead of hallucinating a non-existent light switch (code-named “AI“!) to meet my want, a truly helpful AI would have spat out a 3-D design for the right kind of light switch and contracted for its construction in China.)

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web: how sites like Facebook track clicks

Posted on 2025-03-14 by skierpage

tl;dr: don’t click on links to web sites, because they track your web activity and build profiles of you on multiple sites. Instead open a new private/incognito tab and either go to the web site yourself or use the more-privacy-respecting web search site DuckDuckGo.com to search for the specific web page.

How Facebook turns a 30-character URL into 590 characters of tracking information

Esperanza Spalding (Emily’s D+Evolution still my favorite 2000s album) made a Facebook post about her new tour that included the web site link
https://esperanzaspalding.com/
But if you mouse over the link in most desktop browsers which show the URL in the bottom status, or if you right-click on the link and choose Copy link address and paste it into a text editor, the link’s web address (URL) is actually this huge thing:

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspalding.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0GFfm_1kNBGO8_Gj5Jw1yGNg7CcESNuQF_BwID8lNHTPulAv6H0EslEZY_aem_5TmhPsgLAsxp1wYoL52Olw&h=AT3MDVKiM2DFcwX9GNPmFN2eoFP7Al_qnUE95-rD5yu0MPBLkdOYnabANAdpSdtJ8cb6H6KCI8Nt6-RvE-Xg9u1d1afpPlFwIWcB_eUnHbBSzuAP5LDRyXjw-BG7h3GGJxsCpA&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3GgPrSUnTQeXGiptq8As6-BdI4v5mUNBKKmoUnmqp9gHqtwaojHVJuXEcRt0DzR1TWKGZVx3maNMdkLwelWZOI1rAULuMQQXFpiMiLH19bndn2Mqi64ggPmK82XxUEh59CayTdVi2Y2ynCr2tOushkNrrwoDDf9JjyVaQWEr8KVDoVmo72gBkaHm-NzOidIV1ydh9H7WXxqubMK49m7-Xs4-ZqQJjMqUZsm_mpZPXgf377qsWTFs5cRA

If you squint you can see the esperanzaspalding URL in there, but it’s surrounded by a bunch of crap.

What you see isn’t where your browser goes

Point 1: the link text that you see in text on computers and phones is not the URL that your browser goes to when you click or tap the link. This isn’t surprising when the link text is, e.g. best power trio jazz-funk-rock-pop album of all time , but when it looks like a web site address, you might expect to go to that web address. (And this is how spammers get you! The link text can be www.apple.com/getRefund, but the actual link is to a fake login page on a phishing web site.)

So the link you click doesn’t go to her site, it goes to a special Facebook site l.facebook.com, where ‘l‘ probably stands for “Facebook’s Links processing”, with a bunch of parameters (everything after the question mark) that include the actual web site you thought you were going to visit and a bunch more tracking. In addition, Facebook’s web page can do special tracking in JavaScript when you click (or move the mouse at all) and this could add even more crap to the network request.

Advice 1: right-click and copy URLs. It’s harder for web sites to track your menu actions than your normal mouse clicks.

I followed a guide for Firefox to track actual network activity and it turns out Facebook doesn’t dynamically change the URL when you click; the URL that you can, with effort, view is the same one your browser requests.

What is all 591 characters of crap in the URL?

The great and good inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee specified how all the parameters after the question mark have to be encoded: briefly each is separated with & and certain characters are represented specially (e.g. colon ‘:‘ becomes %2F), and usually the parameters are name=value, so we can decode them. I used the JavaScript function uuDecodeComponent() and then put each one on a separate line for clarity:

https://l.facebook.com/l.php
   ?
   u = https://esperanzaspalding.com/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0GFfm_1kNBGO8_Gj5Jw1yGNg7CcESNuQF_BwID8lNHTPulAv6H0EslEZY_aem_5TmhPsgLAsxp1wYoL52Olw
   &
   h = AT3MDVKiM2DFcwX9GNPmFN2eoFP7Al_qnUE95-rD5yu0MPBLkdOYnabANAdpSdtJ8cb6H6KCI8Nt6-RvE-Xg9u1d1afpPlFwIWcB_eUnHbBSzuAP5LDRyXjw-BG7h3GGJxsCpA
   &
   tn = -UK-R
   &
   c[0] = AT3GgPrSUnTQeXGiptq8As6-BdI4v5mUNBKKmoUnmqp9gHqtwaojHVJuXEcRt0DzR1TWKGZVx3maNMdkLwelWZOI1rAULuMQQXFpiMiLH19bndn2Mqi64ggPmK82XxUEh59CayTdVi2Y2ynCr2tOushkNrrwoDDf9JjyVaQWEr8KVDoVmo72gBkaHm-NzOidIV1ydh9H7WXxqubMK49m7-Xs4-ZqQJjMqUZsm_mpZPXgf377qsWTFs5cRA

The first line shows that the request goes to the “page” l.php on the web host l.facebook.com. This isn’t a web page that shows something in your browser, it runs a special program which takes all those parameters and does lots of processing of your request to track everything it possibly can about you on Facebook’s servers, and then tells your browser to go to another site. You normally don’t see any visible output in your browser from this link tracking; maybe if you watch carefully you’ll see the URL in your browser’s location field change.

I’m guessing, but the ‘u‘ parameter is likely the actual URL your click should go to. Note that this passes its own nested parameter fbclid, which stands for Facebook Click ID, Meta explains it as:

a Meta-generated parameter that is passed with the URL of an advertiser’s website when a user clicks an ad on Facebook and/or Instagram. Sharing ClickID can help you attribute more conversions and reach more people, which may drive better ad performance.

So esperanzaspalding.com can use this ID to track how people responded to her Facebook post. I have no idea what the rest of the parameters mean, it’s lots of information that Facebook is sending itself when you click.

Strip everything after the question mark!

In general if you copy the URL of a news story or web page and then paste it into your browser, you can and should remove the question mark and everything after. For example, here’s an MSN link to a news story:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/with-democrats-help-senate-votes-to-avert-a-government-shutdown/ar-AA1AW73B?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=2a12bbe42a494edbb0af4b04b8f38dfc&ei=35

The ocid and cvid are probably yet more tracking IDs, who knows what ei does (“economic indicator” net worth level?).

Advice 2: To remove the tracking, open a private/incognito browser tab, then paste in the URL, then delete the question mark and everything after it. In this example, the URL becomes

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/with-democrats-help-senate-votes-to-avert-a-government-shutdown/ar-AA1AW73B

and only then press Return or click the → arrow to go to the site. But this doesn’t work for Facebook and an increasing number of sites, because the URL you go to is not even the destination web site. If I strip the question mark and everything after from Facebook’s URL for EsperanzaSpalding.com, I just get https://l.facebook.com/l.php, which doesn’t go to her site.

You are in a maze of tracking

Cookies and site data

There are other ways for sites to track you. They can set “cookies” on your browser or store data other data on your computer or phone, such that every request to the same site re-sends all the cookies it has set and data it has stored on your computer. This is yet more tracking, which is why you should browse in a private/incognito window, and regularly clear cookies and other data that sites have shoved into your browser. If you’re just trying to read a web page, there’s no reason for that web site to store any information.

Advice 3: clear cookies and site data. To clear this information a site has shoved into your browser: in Firefox, while visiting the site, click the shield icon next to the location bar and choose “Clear cookies and site data…”; in Chrome, I think it’s click the lock icon next to the URL, select Site settings, and then Clear data to remove the cache for that specific site. You can set Firefox to “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed”, adding exceptions for sites you want to stay logged into or remember your shopping cart: go to Settings > Privacy & Security (about:preferences#privacy) and set this up in the “Cookies and Site Data” section.

Advice 4: browse as much as possible in a private/incognito browser tab. If you browse sites in private/incognito browser tabs, your browser stores less of the information sites tell it to store.

Advice 5: block “third-party cookies.” That’s where one web site tries to set a cookie on a different web site. There is no legitimate reason to do this except laziness from web site developers, and it’s 99.9% of the time used by data brokers and advertising services.

Link shortening, link trackers

And if the Facebook post uses a link shortener like bit.ly , that is doing its own processing to track your information before directing your browser to the actual site you want to visit. I’ve followed URLs (using the command-line tool curl --dump-header - http/complicated/URL?here, more details below) that go through four or more web sites. And every single ad and “share this on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok” button on the original web site (Facebook) can track your mouse movement with JavaScript and send information to a data broker even if you don’t click on the ad or the sharing link.

Advice 6: browse with Firefox and the uBlock Origin ad-blocking extension. It’s a hassle and web sites will break.

So enter web sites or search for them yourself

The only surefire way to avoid nearlly all of this tracking is to open a new private/incognito browser tab, and enter the URL of the web site itself: esperanzaspalding.com Or, if you want to read a particular web page on a site, you can use a search engine that tracks you less. In general links in DuckDuckGo search results just link to the actual web site with a lot less of these intermediaries and tracking parameter malarkey.

TODO: how does Google do it?

Google search results appear to go to the simple URL of the site. Google must be using JavaScript to send HTTP updates to Google.

Appendix: Following what the browser does

A link sends your browser to a particular web site. But for a link tracker like l.facebook.com or bit.ly, instead of it showing you a web page, that web site redirects you to the actual web site by putting special instructions in its response to your browser. You can follow this on the command-line with the excellent curl utility. You enter:

curl --dump-header - 'https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspalding.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0GFfm_1kNBGO8_Gj5Jw1yGNg7CcESNuQF_BwID8lNHTPulAv6H0EslEZY_aem_5TmhPsgLAsxp1wYoL52Olw&h=AT3MDVKiM2DFcwX9GNPmFN2eoFP7Al_qnUE95-rD5yu0MPBLkdOYnabANAdpSdtJ8cb6H6KCI8Nt6-RvE-Xg9u1d1afpPlFwIWcB_eUnHbBSzuAP5LDRyXjw-BG7h3GGJxsCpA&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3GgPrSUnTQeXGiptq8As6-BdI4v5mUNBKKmoUnmqp9gHqtwaojHVJuXEcRt0DzR1TWKGZVx3maNMdkLwelWZOI1rAULuMQQXFpiMiLH19bndn2Mqi64ggPmK82XxUEh59CayTdVi2Y2ynCr2tOushkNrrwoDDf9JjyVaQWEr8KVDoVmo72gBkaHm-NzOidIV1ydh9H7WXxqubMK49m7-Xs4-ZqQJjMqUZsm_mpZPXgf377qsWTFs5cRA'

and, oops!, curl responds

curl: (3) bad range in URL position 339:

because Facebook is perverting Sir Tim’s design for HTTP requests by putting square brackets in c[0]=blahblah without encoding them. We can tell curl to ignore this violation with its --globoff command-line option, and now you can see that site sends a location header that tells the browser where to go:

curl --dump-header --globoff - 'https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspaldingblahblahblah rest of long URL

location: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspalding.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1AHkbuvUzs5O-eggNLo_AYJBT8QW_ENsUyJB99MwLv_anJ6B_x2ZGe-ot8XCTLIw0SYZOTaCz51jjGuG3HB_weYA3G05lh02b1H1V6K4UmRROtpDBPXYi23QM4ZuHQRmn0YqzUfdtP11SJi36hVMCXaFph-5myrQt4vGGEfuswb4qQR_WoBlnGxQvQ

But wait, it’s just redirecting to Facebook’s link processing site again, but with an even longer fbclid parameter! We have to add the --location flag to tell curl to keep following these ^%$#@! redirects. This shows that the second request issues a different header:

refresh: 1;URL=https://esperanzaspalding.com/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJB0VVleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHUAeRu69TOzk756CA0uj8BgmyrIstxiKk_O6bKot3tHPBLVAZuf52tMAKA_aem_O0mc9-kOVUE1oYyShfB9uQ

And now, finally, your browser winds up on the site you thought your click would take you to. Facebook is probably pulling other crap when it detects that an actual browser is making the request.

Posted in web | Leave a comment