Posts by Tessier-Ashpool 376 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2016
The price of public EV chargers isn't a big deal for me, because most of my EV miles are powered by my home charger, at a very friendly cost of a fiver for 300 miles. For long journeys away from home, I don't mind paying a bit more, in the same way that I don't mind paying for a hotel room.
However, if you are reliant on public charging, a new EV probably isn't the thing for you at this juncture. It's a bit mad that public chargers attract VAT at 20%, whereas a home charger at much cheaper charging rates attracts VAT at 5%.
It's costing a huge amount of money to build out the ultra rapid charging points. Those costs have to be repaid. Over time, the cost of public charging should drop when the infrastructure has been paid for.
I know there is a word for people who cannot conjure up imagery (aphantasia) or sounds (anauralia) in their mind, but my state of mind is different to that. I can easily visualise things and replay an entire Beethoven concerto in my mind if I wish. What's missing, though, is any kind of inner voice that talks to me.
You may be right! My mind is a peaceful place most of the time. When I hear of people and their inner voices, I would be terrified if something like that happened to me. That's not to say I can't feel agitated - I certainly can. But there's no inner voice to discuss my agitation with me!
For many years, I believed this was the way that everyone thinks, and only found out late in life that inner voices are real things for the great majority of people. You just can't tell by looking at someone.
When I was a child, I read a comic that had a strip called The Numskulls. Little people would run around inside someone's head pulling levers to make the person do things. To my way of thinking, that's not a million miles from having something inside my head talking at me!
Indeed. Intelligence is more than language. My cat is quite bright, and he doesn't verbalise anything at all beyond the occasional miaow.
As for human thinking, I'm one of the small percentage of humans who doesn't have an inner voice. Bear with me if that sounds implausible to you. Most people do have a voice chattering away in their head, so I'm told. But I don't have one. When I tell people this, they often demand to know how on Earth I can think.
I don't need words to think. My thought processes are more akin to parallel processing. Words and symbols are useful for me if I want to serialise or disseminate information going in and out of my head. But I definitely don't need them to think.
I find it rather quaint to imagine that there are creatures zipping around in space and living the sort of humdrum lives we live on the Earth.
No. That's not going to happen. When a civilisation hits a technological explosion, it's like hitting a brick wall. Millions of years of evolution and then BANG. After that, the dominant life on the planet will be AI. The machines will happily live using little power. Biological sentient creatures will die off, a result of their messing about with the environment. The AIs will spend a few thousand years tidying up the mess left behind by the biologicals.
And they won't be flying around in spaceships. When you have an IQ of 10,000, you basically know all there is to know and can work everything out from first principles.
FORTH had to be the maddest language I ever worked with.
With everything being pushed and popped on and off the stack all the time, it was pretty easy to develop flaky code. Many years ago I devised a comms protocol in FORTH for some realtime process control instrumentation. After a week it would fall over with a stack overflow, as a main control loop occasionally failed to pop an item off the stack. Oops. Much headaches and burning of EPROMS to get a fix out.
Maybe their drivers do have automated tests, but it still has to be deployed at the end of the day. If there's an esoteric problem in the deployment process, things could go awry.
I imagine heads are banging together in Crowdstrike wondering how they can/should stagger their updates and have better eyes on the results, so that failures are less catastrophic. Doubtless the updated servers were expected to continue sending telemetry back home. Why didn't something detect the absence of signals to stop the update in its tracks?
I'm out of the business now, safely retired. But I had 35 years of fun working mostly on my own. I got so much done without tedious project managers getting in the way.
However, in the latter stages of my career, I had to suffer the pain of agile and scrum. It was awful. A thorny problem would come along and I, as always, relished the thought of dreaming up an insightful elegant solution or approach. But, no, a directive on high would come to just bang something out every two weeks, fitting all the other tedious agile work around it. It made me so miserable, it was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Road tax was historically cheaper (i.e. non-existent) for BEVs as an incentive for consumers to purchase BEVs, bearing in mind that they are expensive vehicles to buy. The incentive is being withdrawn in 2025.
The top five heaviest cars on the road are not EVs. Should they pay more road tax for road repairs? Roads are designed to carry buses, vans, lorries and all manner of heavy vehicles. Road damage is far from "commensurate", as there are many factors that contribute to poxy potholes on UK roads.
It is is very basic physics indeed if you imagine that a few hundred kilograms additional weight will contribute much to the state of our roads. If you are that worried, you can chip in to charity every time you carry a few passengers in your car.
Road repairs are paid through general taxation. Road tax (or Vehicle Excise Duty to give it its proper name) is not hypothecated, and has not been for many years. The VAT charged on a new BEV likely amounts to more than you will ever pay in road tax for an ICEV.
Hertz aren't dumping their EV fleet. Hertz EVs are mostly Teslas, which are expensive to buy and repair, and have significant depreciation. Hertz bought expensive and sell low. Rental companies sell their stock off after a few years, and the depreciation hit Hertz hard. "We are experiencing the consequence of a material price decline in Teslas and EVs more generally". They are flogging off about 40% of their Teslas, about 4.4% of their total vehicle fleet. Hertz are now focusing on buying cheaper EVs.
"And remember when some phones had lidar/radar in them to help? The market spoke, that didn't last long..."
Loads of iPhone and iPad models since 2020 feature LIDAR. You won't find it on Android devices. But then again, you won't find secure facial recognition on those devices either.
We import quite a bit of electricity. France will make up the shortfall with their extensive nuclear capability. Assuming, of course, our renewable program grinds to a halt. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that we're in a transition. It will take many years to fully switch over to EVs and get renewables into shape. That's why the targets are a long way in the future.
I've written C# code that - despite my best and careful efforts - have occasional spasms when the garbage collector kicks in. Admittedly, my programming was a few years ago, but something else that often cropped up in C# was the obligatory nested using { } construct used to dispose of managed resources. Sometimes you have to do far from the obvious to dispose of managed resources correctly beyond wrapping them in using statements, involving temporary assignment of variables before disposal, and similar tricks. I'd hardly call any of that nonsense "safe". I often called it "yuk".
All cars burn in a similar manner once they are alight. What most people don’t realise is that the bulk of the heat energy produced in a vehicle fire does not come from the fuel or battery. Rather, it is the burning plastic, rubber and other combustibles in the car that supply most of the energy in the fire.
https://lashfire.eu/media/2022/09/2022-08_Facts_and_Myths.pdf
There are approximately 300 petrol and diesel fires in the UK every day. It’s a really common thing, too common for the MSM to report on.
No confusion whatsoever. The gripe here is that domestic cabling isn’t up to it. Well it is, because if you can power an electric shower in your home you can power an EV. As for the equivalence of showering for 3+ hours, the idea is that GRID capacity will increase over the next couple of decades to accommodate. It should also be noted that most showering in the UK already takes place at narrow periods of time in the morning and evening.
I had mine (an old Victorian cottage) updated from 60A to 100A. The DNO did this in a morning for free. It involved them installing thicker cabling from the overhead supply. While they were at it, they gave my house a dedicated phase. Previously, three cottages were supplied on the same phase. Result: no more dimming lights, and loads of spare current capacity, even with the EV charger in place.
Tehran (female undercover Mossad agent in Iran) is quite gripping. A bit like 24.
I've received three free trials of Apple TV, courtesy of buying Apple equipment, but I wouldn't actually hand over real money for it. I have a date in my calendar for cancelling the latest free trial.
As said above, because they can. Apple take a fairly protective stance of software they permit to be installed on iOS. One notable example was the Flash rendering engine, which Apple excised years ago, ostensibly on the grounds that it was a CPU-hungry POS that gave their iPads a bad name. To be honest, I don’t much care, as Apple’s fork of WebKit works pretty well, and when it goes wrong, updates for gazillions of users (who use WebKit for both browsing and other things) are provided. This may well all change if their hand is forced and they are obliged to allow third party rendering engines.
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