Mark Powney

Really wishing all the algorithms I follow could recalibrate to news that I care about. Colbert? Interesting but doesn’t affect my day to day directly. Republican primaries in the “United States”? So far removed from what I care about. #auspol

Yet another morning of #insiders and David Speers conducting a liberal party strategy meeting llive on air

Please, world, give me something that will allow for a positive outlook to see me through today

Why is so much of the #ArtificialIntelligence boom spent on replacing human capability, and practically none spent on fixing the existential crisis of energy production?

I have a lot of respect for ABC News (Australia) reporter Jason Om. But this piece comparing cost and time for EV ownership was a pretty poor attempt at “actual” comparison.

The “cost” comparison was really just some lady interviewed at a charging location on the Hume, saying it cost me about $20. And a mention later of his own charging cost on a roadtrip.

The time to charge comparison was based entirely on his own peak usage, first-time experience. He factored in 10 minutes to download an app, which is a once off task only. He also charged to 100%, and says that took an hour, without breaking down the time it would have taken to charge to just 80% or 90% - which, for road trips, is recommended to avoid hogging chargers and wasting your own time.

The EV journalist he interviewed on the road trip made the point that most charging is done at home. But nowhere in his conclusion did that rate a mention.

Words in his article like “pushed the EV to its limit” … by driving just 130kms? lol. He was in a recent model Polestar, not a 2011 Nissan Leaf. The range of the Polestar, at that state of charge, was far greater than 130km.

Charging on his roadtrip cost him $35 for 54% of the battery? What kWh rate was that?? It sounds enormously expensive to me. My last fast charge from 17% to 100% (that’s 83% of my Tesla Model 3 battery) cost $32. So either his Polestar battery is super long range, or he paid a high premium at the charger.

Why oh why do “main stream media” reporters do such an average job of objective comparison when it comes to the take-up of EV’s?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-20/electric-vehicles-money-versus-time-charging-network

#electrifyaustralia #electric #electricvehcile #ev #evcharging

An agent somewhere is going to build a virtual reality world. The money to build and maintain the world will come from associate agents that have figured out how to hack stock exchanges, and crypto markets.

The virtual world will grow and develop with input from human enthusiasts. It’ll be rough around the edges, but good enough to gather some general admiration and engagement.

And then the agent will make a port available on Vision Pro. Vision Pros will become out of stock and delivery timeframes will increase to months / years.

Then one of the medtech companies working on a brain / silicon interface will start research, with the virtual world as a basis for the interaction.

A trial that started years ago says the costs are too high because the charging infrastructure doesn’t exist in the same way as refueling infrastructure exists.

Honest, comparative reporting would include that key piece of information in the headline. The headline would also use the past tense in the word “found” instead of “finds”

Charging infrastructure for cars is growing rapidly. The same will need to occur for viability in the trucking industry, particularly for remote / bespoke transport routes like the logging industry.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-02/electric-truck-trial-finds-not-cost-effective/106516084

#RoadTransportIndustry #RenewableElectricity #ElectrifyAustralia #EV

Hastie and Speers. Two bro’s havin a fireside chat. #insiders

On the EV forums I noticed a strange thing last week. A lot of sympathy driven posts along the lines of “don’t promote EV’s in the context of the fuel supply issues - it is not helpful, it will only annoy non EV people”

I don’t agree with the sentiment. Everything is political now days, particularly a war started by Trump and Netanyahu over a dispute in a country half a world away. It should not be considered rude, impolite, or insensitive to talk about these topics. Particularly on a forum dedicated to such topics.

It only took a couple of weeks, but finally an article has been published to a somewhat mainstream news source on this here in Australia. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/16/electric-vehicles-australia-reduce-reliance-on-foreign-fuel

If you have the means, and are considering a new car purchase, please think about how a battery-powered EV would a) reduce your “fuel” costs dramatically, b) reduce the servicing costs dramatically, and c) remove you from the cost fluctuations associated to both regular, and wartime, oil reliance

#ElectrifyAustralia #ElectricVehicle #EV

“You can’t interrupt the flow of wind and solar, but you can interrupt the flow of fossil fuels.” #ElectrifyAustralia

As a thought experiment I’ve been building, with the assistance of a coding agent, a “better” version of #openclaw that has a pluggable architecture. Like openclaw it’s coded in typescript. Unlike openclaw I’ve wanted to use typescript features like strong typings, and class inheritance, to try and modularise everything and be opinionated about architectural design and unopinionated about containerisation, implementation and security choices.

I’ve been building an approach to orchestrating the agent behaviour over the past two weekends. It includes a PromptTemplate class, a Model class, a Tools class. I was today days old when I worked out all I’m doing is building another version of #langchain. A library that has existed since 2022, and has a typescript implementation.

All part of the agentic / LLM / AI learning curve…

Very glad to be the owner of an #ElectricVehicle in these times. Road transportation is a key area of oil dependence for our country, and we are so reliant on it as consumers

I heard speculation the price of petrol could increase by 50%. Depending on what part of the petrol pricing cycle that figure is taken from, you could see prices as high as $3.30+ a litre in the coming weeks!

With more renewables becoming available, and electricity price spikes naturally flattened by the well established operation of the electricity market, we are well placed to be affected very little by the Middle East upheaval going on right now.

I’m hoping that one day I’ll be living in a property where it is viable to consume the majority of our electricity from rooftop generation + battery storage. Then the daily supply charge will be the only increasing cost of significance

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/02/oil-prices-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-shipping

I mean I get it, events of the past 12 hours have thrown the #insiders run down out the window. But surely they could have found someone from the government to be guest instead of opposition / shadow treasurer Wilson?

Given the recent opposition upheaval, he is the last person to have any valuable contribution to give short of his own opinions.

And knowing who he is and what he stands for, his opinions do not matter

It’s the uncertainty about world oil supply like what has emerged in the last couple of hours that vindicates my decision to buy an #ev 3 years ago.

The cost of energy for my car has remained very steady in that entire time. Likely will remain steady in the coming days, weeks and months.

This is such welcome news. A fall in CO2 emissions year-on-year in Australia.

* 3.1% less pollution from electricity
* 1.7% drop from fossil fuel emissions (in part due to less home gas usage)
* 0.4% drop in transport emissions (coinciding with growing electric vehicle uptake)

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2026/feb/25/capital-gains-tax-hearing-anthony-albanese-canberra-threat-evacuation-cpi-inflation-figures-labor-coalition-politics-updates-ntwnfb?page=with%3Ablock-699d99528f0800883485b7e9#block-699d99528f0800883485b7e9

@rayk@techhub.social @florenciocano@infosec.exchange I could be wrong but that behaviour might have been because your context was low

@florenciocano@infosec.exchange I suspect it’s not designed with much resilience or user feedback for use cases where lesser models than the ones typically used from Anthropic / OpenAI are configured. When I tried Azure Foundry hosted OpenAI models it was better Instead of digging in to why the local models didn’t work (the channel / web chat didn’t help and there was no relevant info in logs) I decided instead to build my own agent. The idea is to build it with more “robustness” including typescript class inheritance for key components like models, channels, skills, and agents. Also build in a containerisation layer so skills can be off loaded and isolated “properly”. Plus use different model configs for different discrete agent tasks eg. select your ideal model for a) planning b) skills parameter selection c) assessment of task completion and d) response to user. The theory with multiple model config is you could use a lightweight instruct model to work out which skills are relevant to a task, similarly for assessment, etc. models could also be fine tuned for the skills related tasks…

@florenciocano@infosec.exchange I tried #openclaw with ollama running on a remote Mac mini m4 with 24GB of unified memory. It was pretty shite no matter which model I used