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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • EVs don’t need to beat petrol vehicles in every way, in the same way that a sedan doesn’t have to beat a minivan, or a laptop doesn’t need to beat a smartphone.

    a) EVs are getting relatively cheaper every year, while all vehicles are getting more expensive. b) They have range far in excess of what 90% of people use in a day. c) You can rent a vehicles for road trips if you really want to drive non-stop for dozens of hours at a time. d) Cold weather range isn’t too bad, and batteries usually condition themselves now. EV’s have a cold weather advantage in that they don’t need to idle for 10-15 minutes to prevent danage to the engine. e) Charging infrastructure is already ubiquitous, you can plug them into any electrical outlet and charge dozens of kilometers overnight. That’s zero fill-up time. Most residential parking infrastructure already has available plugs for block heaters and such, basically only street parking would ve annoying here. If you regularly drive more than dozens of kilometers in a day, you can get a larger charging plug from residential circuits, like clothes driers and ovens use, for a few hundred dollars, and all but guarantee a full charge every night. f) All else being equal EVs have better torque for towing, and unless the trailer is a giant billboard they don’t effect highway efficiency too much. Most importantly, 90% of people never tow anything.

    EVs have different strengths and weaknesses to petrol vehicles, and the millions of people who commute under 40 miles a day would find an EV cheaper and easier to own. EVs have many of the same weakness as petrol vehicles however, and insisting they have to fill the same niches makes that worse. You don’t need to be reliant on fill stations, or have gigantic vehicles. EVs are best for smaller vehicles anyway, and smaller vehicles are better for roads and people’s safety.


  • Memes can be propaganda, yes, but they need to be something more, otherwise they won’t reach people.

    You can make an image macro of a cat with the text “cucumber bad”, but it probably won’t be very popular. Even then, there’s a history of memes about cats reacting to cucumbers that gives that idea more traction than “Nazis did a nazi”.

    Someone asked “why the downvotes”. I explained “bad meme”.








  • Memory leaks are often difficult to deal with, and many contemporary languages basically encourage them. I know many applications that suffer significant performance issues due to memory leaks, and way too many that simply don’t care about memory footprint.

    A language that treats memory management differently from the start makes all these problems much easier to deal with, if they appear at all. The real question is if the other costs of using the language are worth the somewhat niche performance gains.




  • If the language makes common but dofficult to deal with error impossible, that’s nice. Not critical, but nice.

    If the language introduces easy to make and hard to deal with errors, that’s an issue. Not a deal breaker, but an issue.

    The idea does exist, but it’s stated with way more confidence and finality than it deserves. That’s social media I guess.





  • LEDs are so efficient that even microamps can power them. If your LED driver is cheap, it’ll run on basically nothing, or charge up enough to start for a fraction of a second.

    The microamps come from a hot wire running next to a switched wire behaving as a capacitor when carrying AC voltage, letting microamps leak through. (It’s not required that the light is on the hot side of the switch as I said previously, my bad).

    This can happen if the switch box is a terminal box with hot and switched wires in the same cable, which is rather common. Probably some other configurations too.


  • Honestly, I “upgraded” my phone to the 8 year newer model, and besides the easy numbers like CPU speed, RAM, and storage, it’s a straight downgrade. No headphone jack, slower charging, 50% chance of worse battery life (something slurps like mad sometimes), a hole in the screen, fewer buttons, a bunch of my apps don’t work anymore, fewer sensors, worse case selection, fatter & heavier, and the big G won’t stop pestering me to install malware.

    I still use my old mobile more. It really just needs a new battery and some extra RAM.