Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

It’s not that there’s anything unnatural about water. It’s just not a remedy for anything but dehydration.

Yeah, projects also exist in the real world and practical considerations matter.

The legacy C/C++ code base might slowly and strategically have components refactored into rust, or you might leave it.

The C/C++ team might be interested in trying Rust, but have to code urgent projects in C/C++.

In the same way that if you have a perfectly good felling axe and someone just invented the chain saw, you’re better off felling that tree with your axe than going into town, buying a chainsaw and figuring out how to use it. The axe isn’t really the right tool for the job anymore, but it still works.

C is not how a computer truly works.

If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.

Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There’s tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you’ve still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.

As an aside, I’ve anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.

Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I’d be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.

Oh, yeah.

If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.

If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.

Lead-acid batteries aren’t lithium ion? And the car starter battery isn’t equivalent to that of an EV?

You might as well say that I have trouble starting my gas weed wacker, therefore cars are hard to start.

Right tool for the job, sure, but that evolves over time.

Like, years back carpenters didn’t have access to table saws that didn’t have safety features that prevent you from cutting off your fingers by stopping the blade as soon as it touches them. Now we do. Are old table saws still the “right tool for the job”, or are they just a dangerous version of a modern tool that results in needless accidents?

Is C still the right tool for the job in places where Rust is a good option?

The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.

For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They’ve run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.

It’s less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.

You might be able to do a naked short, though.

Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.

I’ve had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.

Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.

A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.

accident. Noun. something bad that happens that is not expected or intended and that often damages something or injures someone

It’s partly about it being preventable, but mostly about it being expected.

The expected outcome of drunk driving or speeding through crosswalks is hitting someone. It’s preventable by not driving drunk or not speeding.

A careful driver in the Netherlands killing a cyclist in a city center on a 20mph road is unexpected and fairly surprising - that would be a true accident. A drunk driver hitting someone on an American stroad is depressingly normal. It’s hard to call it an accident.

Colloquially, accidents are random events without intention or fault.

That’s why there’s a push to use neutral terms like “crash” that don’t imply that the “accident” was just a random accidental mistake.

And fault is often a bit of a misnomer. Many crashes are the result of bad design, but the courts would never say “this pedestrian fatality here is 40% the fault of whichever insane engineer put the library parking lot across a 4-lane road from the library but refused to put a crosswalk there or implement any sort of traffic calming because that would inconvenience drivers”.

It doesn’t have to be on purpose. Accident implies that something was just a freak occurrence beyond anyone’s control. You can’t fix accidents. You can fix crashes.

If you’re driving negligently - drunk driving, not paying attention, etc then it’s not an accident.

If it’s due to bad road design, then it’s not an accident.

7 million is “retiring doctor” or “retiring Google engineer” rich.

It’s generally considered safe to withdraw 4% of your nest egg the first year, and adjust that for inflation moving forwards. $7 million can sustain a $280k/year retirement. That’s certainly rich, but there’s a world of difference between that and a billionaire. A billionaire can safely spend $40 million a year.

I’m not sure that it does. All the articles I can find word it as something like “has a range of 710 kilometers (441 miles) on a sunny day.”, without actually explaining it. I’m assuming that’s going from 100% charge to 0% charge, plus all the range gained by charging during the day.

They don’t actually say anywhere I can find how quickly it charges.

Also, looking up some other articles about it, apparently there’s a bunch of extra fold-out solar panels in the trunk

If you wanted maximum range, you’d start before dawn, drive most of your battery away, park somewhere all day to use that solar awning for all its worth, then continue driving at dusk.

It’s not that it’s far-fetched. It’s just impractical. Solar panels don’t really generate that much power per square foot. Charging a car with just the roof can take days.

One model of solar roofed electric car on the market recharges ~20 miles per day with the roof.

Charging stations are a way better idea for road trips in electric cars, as is plugging the car in overnight. This is great for a remote hermit, but more interesting for the hack value than a practical option.