1,404 karma · joined March 8, 2013
https://www.truecar.com/best-cars-trucks/fuel-electric/price... https://www.kbb.com/best-cars/best-used-electric-cars-under-...
Complete with random bits of aluminum extrusion for bracing, random leftover cables no one's cleaned up yet, "interim" solutions, and duct tape.
Every web-app or scientific application I've written is merely "rewriting" and stitching together other techniques, libraries, and patterns. I haven't broken any new ground on data encoders/process handling/data analysis, but my work had value.
In this scenario, if ChatGPT provides enough value to reduce my workload and allow me to allocate my effort elsewhere, why is it not a valuable tool, regardless of whether it "creates anything new"?
This same argument can be made against the concept of an IDE. My IDE doesn't create anything new. I used to use Vim with a number of plugins, a terminal multiplexer, and an auto-completion engine.
Why would <insert IDE of choice> improve my workflow? It doesn't add anything new to my existing workflow. But after migrating to my current IDE, the convenience it brought me was significant, even if it didn't add anything new to my setup.
That works out to leaving one team member a full sprint for a deeper heads-down task.
To alleviate some of the extra load on the on-call rotation, we dedicated a decent portion of our sprints to automation for a few quarters, which allowed us to reduce some of the recurring manual tasks and ease the load on the on-call role. Now the on-call person will usually see an average 15hrs of support on the regular (of a 40hr week), down from damn near 35hrs.
That is to say there was about 20hrs of automatable tasks that had been shouldered by one team member for years. When that person left the tasks were placed onto the on-call rotation as a duties as a way to ensure every team member became familiar with these tasks instead of being siloed into a single person (there was a scramble to learn those tasks as this person was offboarded, and a rough couple of months as we skilled up on these).
Your blaming the victim instead of the software.
For some more background info, Essential Radio Astronomy open notes hosted by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory [0] are a great resource as well. This was used as an extra resource in my Radio Astro course. The ERA notes were also later extended into a textbook [1], which I haven't used but have heard it's well done.
[0]: https://science.nrao.edu/opportunities/courses/era/ [1]: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691137797/es...
Am I exercising? Pump up the music, I need jamz! Am I at the store? Play inventory music.
When I was growing up in the 90s, I'd routinely bike many miles away from home and disappear for hours before I came home. Nowadays letting your kids do that is liable to get CPS called on you.
How the heck did we end up here?!
TBH, after having to follow MLA style guides and various other citation styles over my career, I feel like this isn't as out there as you intended! I hated having to put together citations because the rules always seemed entirely arbitrary and never seemed to capture what I thought was relevant info.
It worked for most of us, but politics is creeping into everything and budgets are getting cut all over the place.
They're now old enough that they're becoming netizens of their own and searching for things and learning on their own, but after having to correct a few misconceptions, I've had to sit down with them and explain how they can't trust everything they find in a search and how to perform their own research and validate.
However, getting them to really grasp that while young isn't super easy.
Exactly! So many people fixate on fast charging that they just don't register the magic inherent in your car and home running on the same "fuel".
And having heard from people that cold climates often have outlets like these in place for engine heaters to prevent engine freezes shows that infra for this can easily exist. Though it's probably more investment for 3-7kW capacity at each outlet compared to powering a block heater.
> Does Starbucks charge you a wall outlet fee to charge your cell phone or laptop? At Level 1 it can just be a "courtesy"
Oh I totally agree, but try getting an apartment complex to buy into thousands of dollars in electrical work only to shell out even more money buying "gas" for all their tenants.
My in-law has trouble getting his complex to fix sidewalks let alone do something like installing charging infra and providing electricity. If the $1k estimate was even close for commercial 120v charging infra, you'd still be talking between 10k and 100k in just electrical work.
But that sounds like something that could be easily turned into a market differentiator, so it's not to say it won't happen.
Perhaps tacking on a flat-rate fee to offset costs would be a strong middle ground as well. That concept is something apartments/HOAs are already quite familiar with, what with things like covered parking, garages, and even additional storage space already available as add-on charges in many places.
> Individual outlet metering is expensive and complicates everything, just install boring outlets like we've done for more than a century.
Somewhere in the eventual development of this tech could be something like a complex level charging system where an apartment could meter through the charger, since most modern IoT type chargers track this anyways. That way the infra is still just as simple as a dumb outlet.
> You can do a rough math estimate at Level 1 and just add that overhead to your operating expenses per usual
This pans out at small scale, though I wonder how that pans out in the real world. The sticker shock of running that calculation at "worst case scenario" seems like an issue. With even 100 EVs at worst case using todays numbers (~60kWh capacity per car, $0.15/kWh, full charge daily) that number is nearly $1k per day. Realistically it'll be much lower since that full charge nightly is highly unlikely, but sticker shock is real.
In our analysis at the time, it was an economical supercomputer that could hit our needs. It doesn't have to be the best investment, just a decent one at the time. You seem to entirely discount the fact that sometimes the journey is just as important.
In this case, half the purpose behind the grant proposal was education and outreach engagement. The novelty of using PS3s was enough to get some traction with local highschool students and introduce them to computing topics in new ways.
> The market has moved long past that. The OG Xbox had something to offer that you couldn’t easily get elsewhere, that’s not the case anymore.
And who's to say people experimenting with the PS5 won't be creating something new we'll be talking about in 10 years? These are powerful machines, why artificially restrict what they can do?
Homebrew alone gives people ways to play with hardware they wouldn't normally be able to experiment with.
> A handful of hardcore enthusiasts.
~5k active participants in the Insignia community is more than a handful. Sure, it's not hundreds of thousands but it's not exactly public yet either. And there are thousands in similar communities for the PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii to name a few. Either way, these communities directly demonstrate that jailbreaking hardware does indeed extend a console's lifetime.
There's a massive second-hand market for many general purpose computers. Plenty of people, myself included, buy used hardware almost exclusively.
Beyond that, many people are creating home theater PCs, home labs, home automation systems, arcade cabinets, custom car audio head units, drink robots, and more using commodity hardware. Often times these are reused hardware, which cuts the cost on hardware by a significant margin.
Just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean it's not happening.
If you've ever used Kodi, it started as the "XBox Media Center" project. So Kodi would probably not be what it is today without people jailbreaking the OG XBox so they could use it for a media "PC".
People are still playing Quake Arena, Doom, and other og XBox games on real hw, thanks to jailbreaking. With root access users are able to patch the games so they can be pointed at community servers to replace the deprecated XBox Live servers that used to power the online multiplayer.
Similarly, we're seeing a bunch of games from the last couple of generations that reach out to company servers that are now being shut down. Jailbreaking provides life extension in some of these cases as well.
As for the diverse set of travel, the various DMVs and highway safety groups have done that for us. The average daily drive is under 40mi. When talking about core infrastructure here, assuming a daily drive of 40mi and basing the average charging infrastructure around would go a long way.
If EVs don't fit your life, then don't buy one. Though most people thing they drive much more often than they do, and fixate way to much on this once per week "fillup" charge idea when the daily partial charge is far more viable for the average driver.
With that in hand, I was confident in the health of the EV and made my purchase.
In the future it may very well be possible to do the same home repairs on your EV. We're barely past the first decade of publicly available EVs. A number of early EVs have plenty of guides out there on how to replace and rebuild battery packs on your own, and aftermarket mfgs are starting to produce speed controllers and ECUs for custom EVs.
It's just a new wave of tech, and that too will become normal over time just like ICE cars themselves.
I guess if you're for some reason running your cabin heating the whole time then I suppose you're reducing your range, but that's solved by not doing that perhaps.
There's already been projects to put in chargers on street lights, like this one https://lalights.lacity.org/connected-infrastructure/ev_stat... and this one https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/renewables/conv...
Imagine if every parking spot in an apartment had a slow charger that could charge your car overnight. Simply plug in and activate and it properly charges your apartment.
And now your employer makes it a free perk, or teams up with the electric co. so that you could do the same at work and get charged market rates directly.
Perhaps malls or larger stores provide a similar slow charger without the insane upcharge of Level 2 chargers. Heck, imagine something similar to parking validation. If you make purchases at the store or see a movie or whatever, then you get a code to "validate" your charging so you get the cost (or a portion) waived.
With infrastructure like that, then you only need fast chargers when you travel long distances, such as between states or cities.
I'm sure it'd be more costly for commercial work but a simple home charger infrastructure installation runs around $1k, and that's for a Level 2 (240V) charger. Although that doesn't account for the supplemental meter equipment costs.
A Level 1 charger can recharge say a Nissan Leaf from empty overnight. A single day's drive is far more likely to be at or below 20% of the capacity which is closer to 2hrs. For the average user that would be just fine.
A small number of time-limited slots with Level 2 charger could be provided for convenience, but even just allowing individuals to charge at Level 1 rates while their cars are parked would likely suffice in at least half the cases.
There seems to be this misconception that every EV will eventually need a dedicated fast charger and needs to charge to full capacity in 5 mins. But the reality is that, for a large portion of the driving population, a car tends to sit in place for large amounts of time and a modern 150mi+ range EV rarely get depleted in a day. A Level 1 charger would be more than enough for those people. Especially with public fast chargers available for those unusual situations where you need more charge very quickly.
For those who need more than that, an EV is truly not an ideal vehicle for them.
I've had a water pump die on me within 6 months of buying a 2nd hand car. In nearly 20 years of driving 2nd hand cars I've had more issues with ICE cars I've bought than I have with the two used EVs I've bought.
I think that was when the local print shop either shut down or was too backlogged for my dad to get his business cards done in reasonable time so he used print-at-home business card sheets for a bit to tide him over.
I have a Dell small-business multi-function color laser and it's run like a champ for about 5 years now, with only one round of toner changes in that time. The only downside is that this particular model doesn't support cardstock or any thicker types of paper (~60lbs cover stock max IIRC).
But that's only been an issue a couple of times in the past.
He told me they weren't replaced because the fur killed them, it just wasn't worth replacing the inks since it was so damn expensive. It was always cheaper for him to replace the printer instead of replacing the ink, and because he never held onto a printer for much longer than a year he never bothered trying to keep it protected from the shop environment.
About the only think he ever printed was the occasional door flyer, checklists and general office paperwork, probably a single ream of paper a year at most.
It was easy to use as a presentation, with figures and plots embedded. With controls enabled, you could demonstrate what varying certain parameters would do and pitch proposed cleaning profiles.
I was rather easily able to send a directory and it's notebooks/data sources to colleagues in the water sciences team so they could validate my results on their own (they were luckily also familiar with Python and Jupyter), and caught some minor bugs in the pipeline.
This was all much more collaborative and concise, and I feel Jupyter played a huge part in it.
Once it was done, it and a "final draft" pdf were added to the Docs in the repo and the pipeline was written out into a full application of it's own.
I need a stable system that can tolerate the real world and handle messy inputs without shitting the bed. A new hire that shows they consider their inputs and handle edge cases is a better fit to me than someone who focused on that 80% solution and didn't bother sanitizing inputs and crashes because of it.
PVA glue cures by eliminating moisture from the glue, and the low pressure of the vacuum will serve to accelerate the loss of moisture from the glue.