A highly insightful book on Japanese culture on what makes people reluctant to be part of society (getting married, having children etc) is "Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation"
Jokes aside, it is enlightening to see how far we have come. Just 10 years ago, seeing a Tesla in SF bay area would be a topic of conversation. Today, I have two Teslas parked in my garage and yesterday when we went for a NYE party, 80% of the attendees drove Tesla (or Tesla drove them ;)
What’s special about driving a Tesla that makes the experience remarkable ? I’ve test driven recent Model 3 and Model Ys and found the experience subpar compared to other EVs: noisy, uncomfortable suspension, lack of parking assistant systems, lack of reliable speed limit recognition and lane keeping assistant system, no matrix headlights or even HUD. Basically every new technology you can have in new mid/high range cars compares to my old 2008 VW Golf is missing on modern Model 3/Ys. I loved the spacious interior, but felt also cheap. The UI of the screen is also very nice and smooth, but I still prefer using Apple CarPlay. People compliment Tesla supercharger network, and I have to admit I’ve never used it, but I also have to say I never had an issue with other HPC networks like Ionity or Fastned in Europe.
Not OP. Have driven over 110k miles in a 2018 Model S, bury me in it, I almost love it more than my family. Value is subjective, of course, but few material possessions bring me as much joy as driving fully electric across the country while the vehicle is on Autopilot (have driven across the US the last 6 years almost exclusively on Supercharger fast charging [1]). I paid for the future and got it, that is value (to me).
(own an S, an X, and two Ys; also have a Cybertruck reservation)
Yes, I understand, but I also can experience the same with other brands of vehicles. Tesla is really no different. Actually, I was not able to parallel park confidently with neither the Model 3 or Model Y due to the lack of reliable USS and front camera.
And for my S plaid, it will beat anything on the road. Any super car or hyper car, it will take in 0-60 and the quarter mile.
The sound system is extremely good.
And the fact that my car has a gpu with steam and wireless controllers is a very cool feature. Playing street fighter in my car on an 18” screen is extremely neat.
Shouldn't you watch it at all times, since it's not reliable? Sounds more like a gimmick to me, just driving the car yourself seems less tiring than constantly hovering over an ai-driven car, being ready to take over in an instant.
If a Camry kicks up a rock and breaks your windshield, can you get it fixed easily?
I'm not being sarcastic in that question: my cousin waited several months for a repair on his Model 3 in the Phoenix metro area with at least 2 dedicated Tesla corporate garage facilities.
Arguably the sole reason the industry has come so far is because of Elon Musk not toeing the industrial complex line, of which clearly has attempted to suppress EV - whether was the status quo administrators-operators who weren't competent or compelled to create good enough disruptive technology - or it was mostly the oil industry attempting to squash it.
I don't predict EVs will completely takeover though, as there is major distrust now of most governments and the one world order that seems to be attempting to form, and the highly dense energy of easily transportation gasoline is an obvious way to not be dependant on an easily controlled-captured power grid.
It seems easier to get an EV charger off grid than a ICE refueling. Gasoline relies on refineries. You can charge your EV from solar panels at your secret hidden mountain lair.
> It seems easier to get an EV charger off grid than a ICE refueling. Gasoline relies on refineries.
That's because you're restricting the ICE to gasoline. I believe you don't need a refinery to produce ethanol from sugarcane (ethanol-fueled ICE vehicles are common here in Brazil); I don't know much about diesel, but you might also not need a full refinery to produce biodiesel.
I'm going to say that a solar panels and some kind of battery are still sound easier than growing and refining/brewing sugar cane into ethanol. To me anyway.
You got that reversed: EVs match well with off-grid / decentralized power generation like solar.
ICE vehicles otoh depend on gas stations & all the infrastructure behind those. Yes they're still everywhere & you have range, but sooner or later you have to visit one. Only exeption are engines that take fuels like plant oils (some diesel engines) or perhaps ethanol.
EVs have bigger capacity than my off-grid house. No way I could keep one charged while also trying to power my house. In the winter my standby generator has to kick on just to keep my house powered. It's not even a matter of adding more panels, just living in the mountains I only get so much sun in the shorter winter days... And that's if I have clear skies and without snow covering the panels
So you have the option to power an EV with solar+propane in the winter. I'm not sure if propane is cheaper than gasoline, but at least it has bulk home delivery and an indefinite shelf life.
Considered how expensive EVs are and since they can’t do simple things like airport return trips, I predict that gas guzzlers still have a long life ahead of them.
I know EVs will get cheaper. But there’s no chance they’ll ever be as inexpensive as the cheap gasoline cars that some people can barely afford today. It’s unavoidable for car ownership to go down on the long run.
It may not be such a bad thing to have more public transport or car sharing schemes though… but in the mean time expect disenfranchised people to vote for populists candidates that go against EV policies, hence slowing down adoption.
The tail end of EV adoption will be a lot longer than people think in opinion.
My guess is 20 years for 2/3 cars to be EVs. 10 years for new cars and another 10 for the second hand market.
It took about 10 years for SUVs to become the de facto car form factor. So I see a similar adoption here.
On a somewhat different note, I have been using iCloud custom domain hosting feature. The spam filtering is horrendous. Anyone else has this problem? I am tired of checking the spam folder everyday and I find legitimate emails almost 2-3 days a week. Of course, I click on not-spam but I think Apple's servers just don't learn very well (maybe due to focus on privacy?)
I’ve definitely seen an increase in Spam filtering issues on iCloud.
I recently emailed a new contact for the first time and their reply to my email went into the Junk folder. How does that happen?
This last week I’ve had two other emails from people that I’ve corresponded with for years go into Junk.
Given how poor iCloud Webmail is - to the degree that it looks like Apple simply doesn’t care about it as a product… at all… I’m not surprised if the internals are being neglected too.
So, I put together a hacked version of this 3+ years ago (Aug 2020) in a few days and was up and running. We used this at my previous company for 3 years, until I decided to transform it into a micro SaaS.
The SaaS took 270 hours so far (so if I had done this in a typical 9-5 schedule, that would've taken me ~6-7 weeks). Sounds like too long, and it is, but considering I knew nothing about BE, FE, db, infrastructure, etc., and that I built it from scratch, completely ditching the previous version I had, it was quite a fun journey!
This reminds me of the kind of hack I came up with, almost 20 years back. I used to work in Bangalore, and now and then, we would have a power outage in the evening that lasts for a few hours. I was single and used to live alone. I did not want to go home from the office and find myself without power. So how do I find out there is power at home? During those days, there were no IOT devices so checking them is that's out of the question. But I did have a landline phone that was powered by electricity and had a replaceable battery as a backup. I used the phone only to connect to the internet. So I just removed the batteries and when the power goes out, my phone wouldn't 't work. So before leaving work, all I had to do was call my landline. If it rings, it means there is power.
Here in Argentina people sometimes leave inside the freezer an ice cube with a coin on top of it, so they can check if the power went off for a long while - because the coin would be lower in the cube even if it froze back.
I used the same trick recently where a long power outage had me staying at my relatives until power was restored. My answering machine doesn't work without power but the phone does so if it doesn't pick up I know the power is out.
Since the central office switch is usually powered by generators I was used to the phone always working even during outages. But I found that the landline phone only stays functional for only a day now. I believe the deployment of fiber to the node means there are battery backups at the nodes that only last that long.
How long was the commute from office to home? Depending on this you still had risks of phone working while at the office, power out when back home, no?
Does anyone know why the VB was named so? it had nothing to do with BASIC language. The wiki page says "Visual Basic was derived from BASIC" but I don't recall it being anything remotely close to BASIC. Or am I recollecting things wrongly? It has been 30 years :)
VB was based on QuickBASIC which introduced structured programming constructs and made line numbers optional. Many BASIC statements, such as PRINT and INPUT, had to be eliminated or changed because they were meaningless in the GUI world. But the fundamentals of Microsoft BASIC as it existed in the early 90s are still there.
I wrote a long form history of Visual Basic[0] awhile back that covers the origin of the product and how it ended up being married to BASIC at Microsoft.
tl;dr: VB started out as a project called "Tripod" (later "Ruby"), written by Alan Cooper (of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" fame) and a small team of developers. It was originally a Windows shell construction set, but Alan sold it to Microsoft where it languished on the shelf for awhile.
Bill Gates eventually decided that he wanted to marry the visual UI building aspect with BASIC and handed the project off to Scott Ferguson and the Business Languages Group, who were maintaining Microsoft's QuickBASIC IDE, the BASIC compiler, and developing a new language engine (dubbed Embedded Basic) for inclusion in a relational database product codenamed Omega (which would go on to become Microsoft Access).
It was BASIC, just one that had evolved quite far from really old school BASIC. I like to probably incorrectly think that AmigaBASIC (also written by MS) was a bit of a half way point between old 8bit BASIC and VB. It did away with line numbers, got a bit more event driven, and added a lot of GUI stuff like mouse handling, windows, menus etc etc etc.
Lots of its features come from BASIC, like "on error goto" (even though it now worked with labels rather than line numbers). It is a more structured kind of BASIC than many of its predecessors, but procedures and functions have appeared in earlier BASICs such as BBC BASIC, or I think later versions of QuickBASIC.
There were a whole bunch of these 'structured' basic dialects in the mid/late-80s that fused Pascal-ish syntax elements with BASIC and made line numbers optional. QuickBasic was a predecessor to VB, of course... but GFA Basic was one I used on the Atari ST, there was MacBASIC on the Mac, AMOS/STOS on the Amiga & Atari ST, etc. etc.
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