sjwright

There’s no prospect of batteries acting as base load supply anytime in the foreseeable future. Batteries aren’t even great for peak supply yet. Those big grid-scale battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilisation and a limited amount of useful arbitrage.

If you need a cheap economy car OR travel extreme distances every day OR if you routinely drive at speeds in excess of 150km/h (90mph) OR if you are unable to charge at home, then electric is probably not going to be for you any time soon. But for everyone else, electric wins your categories.

Charging time: ICE cars take about 5 to 10 minutes to detour to a fuelling station. Electric cars take about 5 to 10 seconds to plug in when you arrive at home.

Power-to-weight: Due to instant torque, most modern electric cars feel a lot faster than their numbers suggest. But sure, if you're in the market for an MX-5, pure electric isn't for you.

Cost: You care about power-to-weight so you're clearly not interested in economy cars. If you want high performance and good range, Tesla models tend to be excellent value relative to their 0–100 times. For most people, cost is still quite high, but this is a relatively short-term problem which will solve itself as manufacturing capacity scales up.

Range: Unlike ICE cars, you wake up every morning with a 'full' electric car. The latest models from VW, Tesla etc have ample range for most people. Unless you spend more than half your day on the road, this isn't a concern.

Being Apple-built software, Safari/Webkit will always take advantage of all the hardware accelerated graphics capabilities and optimisations available in Mac laptops.

Firefox/Gecko has an excellent rendering engine but Mozilla has often been late to the party with hardware acceleration on Mac.

It's also worth noting that Safari doesn't necessarily support all the same video codecs as Firefox, so for example Zoom might be using hardware accelerated h264 in Safari whereas in Firefox might use a more advanced codec (e.g. VP9) for which your MacBook might have no hardware acceleration capability. If this is the case, Firefox ought to give users the option to disable support for these non-accelerated codecs when running on battery power.

You're mixing up macOS and iOS. The user is referring to Firefox on a MacBook Pro where there are no restrictions on choice of rendering engine.

You're also mixing up symptoms. If all browsers were forced to use the same rendering engine, you'd see little divergence of CPU/energy usage. The user is seeing a wild divergence—which is what you might expect when browsers are using different rendering engines.

You're also mixing up talking points. People have accused Safari of being many things, but being profligate with CPU/energy usage is certainly not one of them.

Maybe not en masse, but the market for households' second vehicles is still pretty big. I think there's a lot to be said for subcompact electric cars appropriately sized for solo commuting and shopping. It's limitations don't matter so much when the primary car can do all the bussing and long distances.

I suppose the BMW 3 series and Mercedes C-Class aren't products which cater to the U.K. or Euro market either?

Obviously Tesla doesn't cater to the entire Euro market. But to suggest that Telsa has to cater to all segments in order to be taken seriously is a rather weird bar.

That kind of statement is fairly routine from people whose world view presupposes godly origin. The unspoken inference is that there must be some objective source of mattering. Whereas if we're all just material, we're all just dust and nothing ultimately matters. It's a play on our emotions. It feels like things matter to us, so it seems intuitively wrong that things could ultimately not matter.

But it's just wordplay. Things DO matter to me. I can care about the fate of my descendents many centuries hence; or the fate of human civilisation in a few millennia. So what if human civilisation (or any biological life of Earth origin) might not survive after a billion years and nothing "ultimately" matters?

Besides, the way most human religions try to instantiate this "ultimate mattering" seems fairly horrid to me.

Matters to whom?

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

I don't agree. Explicitly permitting Googlebot to continually scour your site for decades—including letting it through the paywalls—also constitutes voluntary sharing of stories.

The distinction is really just a technicality of whether the ongoing relationship is push or pull.

The significant environmental factor is that many planes have been sitting idle for months. This is exceptionally unusual in the life of most airframes. Idle time is an opportunity for parts or fluids to settle in a way they might not otherwise.

For example an extremely slow fluid leak could be “reset” every time the engine is operated. Allow time for fluid to accumulate and suddenly there’s enough fluid where it shouldn’t be, perhaps causing just enough mechanical stress to exacerbate an previously unknown wear point or design flaw present in a tiny minority of copies.

(Of course this hypothetical flaw couldn’t cause catastrophe on first flight, as that is generally an empty plane travelling from long term storage back to the airline’s hub airport. The flaw would have to subtly weaken a part which then fails after multiple rounds of uneventful flights.)

I’m sure when Bowie acted like the famous person, it subconsciously cued other people to treat him like a famous person. Act like a private person and most people will treat you like one. I’m not saying that this is a universal constant, or even the dominant explanation for what Bowie demonstrated, but there’s definitely something to it.

My local neighbourhood has its fair share of nationally known famous faces. I’ve never once seen any of them treated like a celebrity because they don’t act like one.

Not at all. Hope and love don’t need to have any meaning in the wider universe in order for them to have meaning to me.

Serious question—how does the notion of "hope" become any more concrete in the non-materialist view? Perhaps your immortal soul can "hope" that it hasn't been attached to a physical body with a physical brain tumour pressing upon its physical amygdala.

Personally I cannot see how non-materialism usefully solves any criticism of materialism. All the same problems exist, except you're just pushing them back to a different plane of existence where they can be conveniently disposed of with appeals to mysteriousness.

It’s mostly American. We don’t have their kind of credit rating system in Australia.

You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers.

This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.

Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.

It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme.

Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)

> No offence to Scott but I think he's got this all wrong. The NYT piece isn't about Scott

I'd be willing to entertain that hypothesis—but for how they knowingly and defiantly chose to unmask/dox a practising psychiatrist. Not printing names of sources is standard practice in media and to suggest that exceptions must be made in a case like this is dishonest.

By your lights, Scott's name added zero value to the story; printing it demonstrated that the piece was most definitely about Scott.

> the group has a massively over-sensitive to criticism

Misrepresentation isn't criticism. Lumping a diverse group under one label and then using individual traits to infer criticism upon the whole—isn't criticism. You appear to be overly enthralled by group narratives rather than talking about individuals.

> I think there's a debate to be had about the approach of the "Rationalists" and I think the Rationalists are unwilling to have it

An interesting assertion which smells a bit like mind-reading to me. Can you point to any instances where honest, civilised debate of "rationalist" ideas was refused? You can criticise the "rationalists" of many things, but given the proliferation of unedited and undigested conversations they churn out, being unwilling to debate isn't one of them.

(And yes, I realise that prior paragraph offers you plenty of rope: I haven't head the term "rationalist" used much and so I have no idea who you think a "rationalist" is. I have no idea what examples you might unearth. To be clear, I am not asking rhetorically, I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious what source data you used to form this unwillingness to debate hypothesis.)

That's still only evidence of correlation, not causation.

7 years old and lives on as promotional material for someone’s design consultancy. Not worthy of Hacker News IMHO.

Louis Rossman is a moderately competent microelectronics repairer who found his calling as a YouTube entertainer and low-grade anti-Apple meme celebrity. He produces entertainment content where Apple features as 'the bad guy' and many people find it utterly captivating. He is barely qualified to have an opinion about why complex electronics products are made the way they are.

Why would you require the article to suggest this? It’s an uncontroversial consequence of subjecting plastic to a continuous barrage of abrasive forces.

Similarly, if rain is expected, I don’t need the forecast to tell me that rain makes clothes wet.

To imply that adhesives are chosen “just to fuck with” repairers is absurd, paranoid and trivially falsified. The use of adhesives is widespread in the industry and are necessary for effective IP-rated waterproofing of these thin devices.

Consumers wanted phones that didn’t die when accidentally dropped into the bath. Apple, Samsung, etc complied.

Devices are still repairable, you just need knowledge of techniques and replacement adhesives. But now the chances of needing a repair in the first place have greatly lowered. That seems like a consumer friendly win to me.

It is not the same. John Deere is taking predominantly mechanical devices and embedding technology for the purpose of artificially locking them down.

Apple is building devices that are inherently difficult or impossible to service without a supply chain of bespoke parts—and refusing to open their parts supply chain.

> I don't see how it stands up to scrutiny.

That would be premature. Nobody is in a position to know how the "extinguish" portion of the plan will turn out because it hasn't happened yet. All we can say is that the plan looks quite robust in theory and would be a significant coup for Apple if they can pull it off.

Obviously there will always be some unethical operators, but that is true of all major platforms. Apple has the benefit of top-down control and some amount of market incentive to get it right.

> For example, in the web browser ecosystem

...there is precious little to block effective fingerprinting of 99%+ of installs and little prospect of that changing.

Such mechanisms have already existed and never needed OS-level sanction. It’s pretty clear that Apple is employing the strategy of “embrace, extend, extinguish” against tracking and privacy compromising dark patterns. In other words, force developers to use a special API, then give consumers the ability to block it. The current stoush with Facebook is only the most formidable hurdle Apple has encountered so far.

I just can't get myself worked up over systemd. Every in-principle objection I have to systemd also applies to the Linux kernel itself—but orders of magnitude "worse."

Principles aside, in reality, systemd has been a complete non-issue for me and a massive quality of life improvement for Linux as a desktop operating system.

A somewhat disingenuous argument. Debian isn’t physical hardware.

But probably true.

Though the real screw-up was not being more responsive to complaints of faulty hardware. It was unreasonable for developers to expect retail product levels of reliability from the DTK, but it was even more unreasonable for Apple to expect it. Therefore Apple should have expected a high fault rate and been ready with a low friction, no-excuses exchange policy.

To everyone who dealt with faulty hardware, I think Apple should be quietly offering refunds (not just a store credit). But to everyone else, they received the service promised by Apple in full and should be stoked at this surprise $200 return incentive.

You can argue that the $500 price was too steep for a hardware loan, or that Apple should be offering a more generous incentive to return the device. I wouldn't disagree. But it's not like Apple was unclear about this.

https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/36365-67564-DTK-own...

https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*V6If2OIL4W223oGLzT5OrQ.pn...

They didn't pay $500 to buy them. They paid $500 for a time-limited rental. You can argue that the price was too steep for a loan, or that Apple should be offering a more generous incentive to return the hardware. I wouldn't disagree. [2] But it's not like Apple was unclear about this.[0][1]

[0] https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/36365-67564-DTK-own...

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*V6If2OIL4W223oGLzT5OrQ.pn...

[2] To everyone who dealt with faulty hardware, I think Apple should be quietly offering refunds, not just a partial store credit. But to everyone else, they received the service promised by Apple in full and should be stoked at the $200 return incentive.

Why would Apple refund you for a service which you received in full? You got access to the program and a loan of Apple-owned hardware at the agreed price. [2] And now Apple is giving you a surprise bonus as an incentive to return Apple's hardware back to them. Nice.

You can argue that the price was too steep for a loan, or that Apple should be offering a more generous incentive to return the hardware. I wouldn't disagree. But it's not like Apple was unclear about this.[0][1]

[0] https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/36365-67564-DTK-own...

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*V6If2OIL4W223oGLzT5OrQ.pn...

[2] To everyone who dealt with faulty hardware, I think Apple should be quietly offering refunds, not just a partial store credit. But to everyone else, they received the service promised by Apple in full and should be stoked at the $200 return incentive.