jgibson

Have you got a specific case for [3]? I couldn't find anything in the original "A Tragic Loss" post that would indicaate that AEB gets disabled when autopilot is off. This is the first I've heard of this behaviour and I'd like to find out more. I was thinking about getting a Model 3...

I think there is more than one. This Audi ad from 2016 shows it driving around with no hands on wheel. They don't get as much press as Tesla, and I don't know how good their system is, but it sure does make a bold implication (although their choice of the "Piloted Driving" name is probably a much safer choice than Teslas.

https://youtu.be/I2j2-DqcPfM

Yeah, I definitely had some of that around, although I think I used the nickel stuff as it was cheaper. Reminds me of this quote:

"The key to motorcycle maintenance is knowing when to use anti-sieze and when to use thread-locker"

As a teenager I stripped nearly all the screws holding the crankcase of my motorcycle together before realizing that JIS was different from Phillips. Didn't help that most of the old steel screws had seized against the aluminium crankcase. After a few unsuccessful attempts with an impact driver, I ended up just welding nuts to the heads, waiting for the heat to soak, then then wrenching them off. Then threw the lot out and replaced them with something sensible - stainless internal hex head screws. I guess the original theory for JIS was that its easier to replace a screw you've mangled then it is to replace the internal thread you stripped by over torquing it.

Not having to constantly make minor adjustments to throttle position to maintain the correct speed is a big bonus for me, both in traffic and out of it. I find I can focus much more on watching my surroundings, and whats happening 500m down the road, rather than constantly looking at the speedometer. This also makes a big difference to how tired I feel after long trips. The same applies to the Lateral Control part of Autopilot, although I use that less.

(To be fair, many other cars provide adaptive cruise control too, but Tesla's is the best I've tried so far).

Gearing. 99.9% of driving happens below 100kph, so you optimize for that. You start reaching the mechanical and electrical limits if you spin up the motors that fast. You could certainly get a lot faster, but you'd lose out on low-end torque. Either that or you put a gearbox in, but that adds complexity + weight.

Tires are definitely still a factor, but regenerative braking reduces the wear on the brakes quite significantly. You also don't have a lot of the "regular maintenance" items like oil changes, transmission fluid changes, coolant flushing, spark plugs, air intake filters, exhaust gas sensors and so on.

I did the same as kid in NZ. No snakes or spiders to worry about, weather is mild, why not?

Now I heel-toe as I'm a dancer, but running is another story

I wonder how much of the liquid/volume ratio is just due to people trying to protect their white carpet...

Wind energy maybe. I would imagine heat is only useful if you have a temperature gradient somewhere.

We have a bunch of testers interfacing with hardware that used to run one big monolithic app that would handle everything from scheduling tests, reporting results, grabbing test artifacts, interfacing with hardware APIs, etc. Rather than move everything over at once, we are splitting out each service and wrapping it in Pyro4, then upgrading them one at a time. We also had a lot of test tooling in legacy java/.net systems, but Pyro4 can wrap those too with (IronPython/Jython)

It works nicely in about 95% of use cases with minimal overhead, but there are some gotchas to be aware of (like all strings being serialized as unicode). If we were architecting the whole thing from scratch, some of it might have made more sense with something like gRPC, but it is still a neat tool to have in your toolbox.

Pyro (the remote object version) is still around as Pyro4 (and in active development, found here https://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/). We found it great for gradually transitioning from Py2 to Py3

Does anyone see an analogy with highly processed, sugary foods? Highly addictive, thought to be miracles of convenience, but ultimately detrimental when consumed in excess, and now we are starting to realise that and demand better. I wonder if society will go through the same rejection phase with attention-seeking media consumption. Or maybe those who grow up with it will be better able to control themselves.

Keep in mind those two solutions are on opposite sides of the world. I found this [1], which gives the projected Snowy Mountain 2.0 proposal in Australia at $250/kWh (AUD, presumably).

Regardless, I don't disagree that pumped hydro can still a viable choice in some places when it comes to large scale, I think South Australia made the best choice going with battery storage, even if driven from mostly political reasons.

The SA govt needed to show the federal govt they were capable of holding their own on their renewable policy, against the federal line of the Snowy Mountain 2.0 pumped hydro. Having something up and going in ~100 days with very few unknown factors (pour concrete, install batteries, hook up to grid), opposed to waiting 5-10 years for a solution from the federal government that hasn't even finished a feasibility study yet, and has so much more risk (geological survey, environmental survey, new transmission lines [0] etc)

The other advantage of battery storage I see is that it is immensely flexible for a rapidly changing market. Underprovision? Just buy more. Overprovision? Truck them somewhere else, lease them to a business with peaky loads, plenty of other options.

[0] http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/4681519/snowy-hydro... [1] https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-c...

Minor typo here, article states $3500 for headlight repair ($6900 for scheduled maintenance)

There used to be, but it was removed after customers found out about it and complained. Now you get a warning and big disclaimer, but it isn't limited.

Source (and plenty others if you google): http://insideevs.com/tesla-remove-launch-power-restrictions/