supergeek

Every time I head anti-electrification arguments around EVs, heat pumps, etc. it's usually a complaint about grid capacity. I always shake my head, because building more power lines is relatively easy on the scale of climate tech we need to kick all carbon emissions.

Let's brainstorm how to decarbonize fertilizer, or concrete.

That being said I am really glad to see more grid buildup! Especially as more renewables hit the grid. While locally intermittent, on the scale of the entire country they're fairly reliable and predictable.

I find this passage quite amusing:

"Schöfbänker has also cross-haired with his equipment the "KH-11 Kennen" electro-optical satellites that were first introduced in 1976. "They are somewhat similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, but optimized to look down to Earth, instead of studying space," he said."

It's fairly well documented that the Hubble was effectively a US spy satellite pointing towards space, not the other way around. Or at least, it used all of the infrastructure in place to manufacture spy satellites.

Same maximum mirror size, same set of contractors/facilities, etc. It had a very different set of sensors, data systems, and focal range, but more or less demonstrated the US's spy satellite capabilities at the time.

Pretty much every car with frameless windows works the same way. The window rolls down a little bit when you open the door to clear the trim.

Mini, Audi, Mercedes, Corvette, and so on. They all work the same.

The craziest thing is that that single external display can be up to 6k/60hz! Surely for those 21.2 million pixels you could run 2 4k displays at 8.2 million pixels each.

You get back ports, but those base model M3 MBPs only support a single external display. You get HDMI and 3 40gbps thunderbolt ports, but can only use one of them at a time for screens. You need to bump up to the M3 pro models to get multiple external display support.

Agriculture is currently massively carbon intensive and is one of the hardest modern technologies to decarbonize. It relies on fertilizer production that is currently completely reliant on fossil fuels. If this can decarbonize agriculture, that's a massive win for our chances to reach net zero carbon emissions on time.

If I recall correctly, the prius ICE and EV systems are totally isolated and only connected by the road in between the front and rear tires. The ICE runs the front tires and the EV system is hooked up to the rear tires. You mostly charge the battery up by slowing the car down with the rear tires, so you'd need to modify the car with some belts or linkage between the front and rear drives.

A lot of those sensors average the reading over quite some time to avoid false positives. It's possible that the last few miles of road have just enough average slope or contain just enough curves that the sensor averages "low" right at that spot with the speed of traffic.

Read up on the upcoming FAA Remote ID regulations. They were scheduled to go online last Saturday, but were postponed 6 months. They would effectively make it illegal to fly at any altitude without a transponder broadcasting the precise location of the aircraft.

The RC community has been pushing back on the regulations as it ads a lot of weight, expense, and complexity to drones and RC aircraft. There hasn't been any justification given by the FAA as to why these regulations are needed, adding to the confusion. Normally restrictions are put in place after an accident or some incident.

Wing/plane drones are substantially quieter than quadcopter drones. I'm out flying RC with folks all the time and it's genuinely hard to hear an RC plane from more than 100 feet away, and these are handbuilt planes flying for fun.

The bigger benefit of all of that bandwidth is going to be multiple users. If you work from home and have a big family, or just live with a few roommates you're going to be seeing huge quality of service improvements from one person not being able to tank the whole connection.

Yeah, I think that consensus is part of the reason integrated cables took off in the USA. I think the biggest actual contributor was garage parking. Most drivers in the USA are parking somewhere secure where there's minimal risk of the cable being stolen. Whereas lots of EU drivers have uncovered parking or street parking where it's way easier to steal the cable.

Even just having the gas car "city" and "highway" ranges would be a huge step up! Most EVs get much higher than their rated range in the city and lower on the highway, but most drivers are only concerned with highway range.

In the Type 2 spec there is an additional resistor on the control pins of the cord that communicate the current capacity of the cord to the car. That, along with the signaled capacity of the station gives the car the maximum current it can draw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_2_connector

The mode they're asking Tesla to remove isn't included in production cars. It's a development flag found by an outside hacker. This is giving me bad flashbacks to the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee incident where Rockstar got their game rating changed and fines issued for something not accessible in the game

A changing course is one of the biggest impacts of flying outside. You have the wind directly acting on your drone, and you have the wind acting on the gates and flags. Flags will spin around in the wind, double gates will lean, sometimes quite a lot in the wind.

There's a whole skill to feeling the wind on your body and anticipating how the drone will behave. When I feel a big gust of wind I'm going to slow down out on the course to get my bearings.

Gas pumps are larger transactions, so the credit card fees are less of a hit for the business. A level 2 AC charger is about $1 per hour of electricity, so you're taking huge credit card fees for shorter charges.

Most of the apps have some sort of balance that lets you make one $10 transaction and then spend it on a lot of smaller charge sessions.

The main limit is minimum transaction fees. A gas station is usually at least a $20 transaction. Since most level 2 charges are about $1 of electricity per hour, you're paying massive credit card fees for short charges. The apps all support some sort of balance to combine charges into large single transactions.

The biggest difference in the US is the integrated cord. It's about half the total cost and the primary wear item. If we had a spec similar to the UK where the charger had a female J1772 plug and the user supplied the cord we'd be able to roll out a lot more chargers for less money, they'd more consistently work, etc.

The plug can handle similar cycles under the spec, but a lot of residential plugs are not.

Those RV site plugs handle 1-2 cycles daily, but they're more robust, more expensive versions.

A 10kw level 2 charger costs about $2k to install and uses about $1 an hour of power. A 250kw DC charger costs about $50k-150k to install and uses about $30 an hour of power running full tilt. Way lower upfront capital costs and way lower potential for abuse.

In places where people stay for multiple hours, there's a huge argument to install about 25-50 level 2 chargers and make them a free perk instead of one big fast charger. Less complexity, less potential for being blocked or vandalized, etc.

I think the bigger takeaway from this is that the US really fumbled our level 2 charging protocol by requiring the cable to be integrated into the charger.

In the UK the level 2 charger is just a plug and the user supplies their own cable. It cuts cost, cuts down on vandalism, and makes the car side port no longer as important.

Using NEMA plugs instead of smarter level 2 chargers has the big limitation that you need a ton of adapters to support every possible plug type. Tesla sells as set of 8 adapters and it still doesn't include two of the most common RV park plugs: https://shop.tesla.com/product/gen-2-nema-adapters

Exciting! I do a lot of FPV drone racing and it always felt ripe for an AI control to take over. Because the video system is so low quality the course is intentionally very high contrast and almost perfect for a vision system. Along with the relatively limited and constant inputs available.

I will say, flying indoors on a relatively simple track like theirs is a lot easier than flying outdoors on more real world tracks.

It's a bummer that they didn't fly the standardized 2023 multiGP global qualifier track. Then we could rank their AI against every pilot more objectively. You can see that track design here: https://www.multigp.com/global-qualifier/

In this case Tesla has been outstanding in terms of software support. Our 2014 S is still getting updates even though it is now "legacy" according to Tesla. That's nearly 10 years of software support!

We did upgrade the central computer a few years ago to get 4g support, but $1500 felt very cheap for a whole new center screen, a new higher resolution instrument cluster, and a new computer making the whole car run faster.

I'm also not a pilot but, based on a diagram below, it looks like you roll the plane and apply full rudder in the opposite direction. The opposing roll and rudder keep the plane tracking straight but the control surfaces fighting against each other add a bunch of drag to lose airspeed.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2018/july/fligh...

Additionally, Amcrest sells ONVIF compatible cameras that do have a web UI and can connect to any of those NVRs, or a wide number of ONVIF viewer apps on any device you want. They're a bit more expensive, but still dirt cheap compared to more reputable brands mentioned in this thread.

Their own target for 2026 production capacity is 2 million EVs, actual production at that capacity will then be 2027. Tesla's current 2023 capacity is about 2 million EVs per year.

It's about a 1-2 ratio. F-35 costs around $80m and a single predator drone costs around $40m.

Non-competes make more sense when you're working a highly personal job. It's very common for doctors to sign a non-compete saying they can't set up a practice within 15 miles of their employer for some time so that they don't take all of their clients with them when they leave.

Fuel consumption is only a portion of the transportation related emissions. Road construction, vehicle consumables like tires, and car related infrastructure like parking lots and garages all contribute.

There's also some cost to bear with the huge numbers of vehicle accidents and deaths each year from driving.