So how do you stop then if the batteries are (close to) fully charged? You'd need to shunt that power into a big resistive load, and then dump that heat.
I’ve long wondered why we don’t ditch the friction brakes.
Just have the battery stop charging and report 100% full when it’s only 98% (or whatever) so there is enough capacity for some solid emergency stops in the first few minutes of driving.
Even if you have to resort to the resistor, who cares? It’s not like this is a common scenario
That's fine, until someone charges their cabin up in Truckee and decides to drive down 80 to the central valley (a hour or so drive you can do in neutral).
Regenerative braking also loses a lot of its stopping power at slow speeds. Going from "slowly rolling forward" to "full stopped" takes a lot longer than the instantaneous it is with friction brakes.
Very funny idea. That basically means a carbureted gas engine, or a direct injection diesel with a mechanical governor and mechanically timed injection pumps - can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically.
So, basically '60s Formula 1. Might be fun to watch. We'd certainly see some crazy engine designs and a lot of re-fueling pit stops...
> can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically.
This is not accurate, the first production direct injection gasoline automotive engine was in the 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL. It's true, you probably won't be running piezoelectric injectors without computer controls, but there's nothing preventing direct injection.
But that would make it interesting. How many of the advances we've made in the past 75yrs could be accomplished some other way if you take the computer away? You don't need a computer to accomplish nanosecond timing. Maybe there's a clever analog way to run piezoelectric injectors.
To phrase it maybe a little more provocatively: how would you accomplish the precise timing necessary to achieve spherical implosion? This was possible with analog electronics in 1945. Surely in 2026 we can also build analog piezoelectric fuel injection systems.
To play devil's advocate, this starts to get into the territory of, how do you define a computer? If the analog circuitry is using sensors and passive components to inject fuel at spark at just the right time under varying conditions, "computing" them, one might say...
Maybe "no integrated circuits" might be a finer line.
A stored program computer, that is a device which can run arbitrary programs from storage, is a pretty rigorously defined thing. Like, we all have a pretty clear shared understanding that things like FPGAs and microcontrollers are computers, whereas you can have integrated circuits which don't have these capabilities.
To be clear, I don't think making elaborate analog ICs would be really "cheating" so long as they don't put a generic von Neumann machine on it.
EDIT: to be more clear, what I'd be trying to achieve with a rule change like this is making "computation" a somewhat larger investment in time and difficulty. By and large, at least in my opinion, profligate, non-essential computation has enabled many of the things that have made the sport less interesting. It's also made cars suck a lot. This would impose kind of a tax on those things.
There's an efficiency sweet spot where hardware that people have anyway gets a higher percentage of load.
MacBooks have a lot of memory and a lot of FLOPs. They mostly sit unused all day. Yes, the excess energy use will be higher than a GPU in a datacenter doing the same work, but you have to generate an absurd amount of tokens before the dollar-efficiency catches up with the MacBook.
Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.
So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.
But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.
Of course. My agentic coding containers can only access the internet through a proxy, and I use whitelists to limit from where they can send/receive data. It's annoying in the beginning as the whitelist grows, but in the end really useful information for the agent usually comes from a very limited amount of domains.
> The defining element of a LAN party, however, is the social factor. Playing a game with others in the same physical space, sometimes huddled side-by-side on the same large table, is an intimate affair. Cries of joy and frustration fill the air.
That's really the major thing that made LAN parties so special. Being in the same room is so, so different than online gaming together and hanging out on discord.
It also forces you to compromise when choosing games and maps, because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people. You end up playing games you're not as familiar with (and not as dominant in), so your friends will play your game with you later. This brings you into situations, where the person next to you frantically gives you the crash course in rush build orders while building their own base, making the payoff so much better when it actually works out.
> because you're stuck together for the night. You can't just sit out a game/map if you don't like it, you can't just hop on a different voice channel and play another game with other people.
Probably depends on the size, but even our tiny LANs we had some groups preferring some games, other's preferring others, and plenty of other activities others were doing throughout the LAN. The group that managed the LAN I was familiar with was really into medieval costumes, events and roleplaying, so bunch of chainmail making, clothes making and what not going on at the same time while others play BFV or Starcraft, or people sleeping under the tables.
There's two LAN parties - the small group of friends (4 to 10, say) where you'd mostly be playing the same game, but as it progressed people would drop off or split up (we ended up with one small group playing a Heroes III comp-stomp on hotseat, another watching someone playing HalfLife).
Then there's the larger parties that are closer to gaming conventions, which have so many people that you basically have to have multiple gaming sessions, if not multiple games.
The Prius (and all subsequent Synergy Drive cars) were widely known - from the very beginning - to be extremely fuel efficient ICE cars. As time went on, they universally became known to be both fuel efficient and also absolutely bomb proof.
Both of those things surprised basically no-one, since the direct successors (Camry, Corolla, 4Runner, Tacoma, Hilux) were also already known for being fuel efficient and reliable cars.
The only people who really care about why and how exactly they got so fuel efficient and reliable are engineering nerds - and many of those already knew, the planetary gear set + atkinson cycle engine are a pretty legendary design. They hit it out of the park on the first try, after all.
And as this video shows, explaining the why and how to non-engineering nerds takes a good part of an hour anyway. How do you do marketing with that?
It does to me. I was operating under the misconception that hybrids combined the meant more parts and more maintenance. I said this out loud as a complaint many times in discussions about them and everyone let it drop or conceded the point. Reading this thread it appears I was ignorant that it was more hybrid than I imagined.
I used to think the same before I bought a hybrid (Honda CRV). It is different from Toyota but also a very simple setup (generator + ev at low to medium speeds and direct drive at high speeds). It technically doesn't even have a gear box and no alternator. It has less maintenance items than its ICE equivalent. (Not taking into account the battery replacement in long term)
No, it's already 130M (out of the ~450M in the EU). Wero's predecessor (iDeal, Bizum, Paylib, Giropay) systems are already widely adapted in their countries of origin and will be fully compatible with it, and Wero itself has had a bit of time to pick up new users on its own by now.
I wonder what the hell the problem with naming things is in the AI space. They pretty much all suck at it.
OpenAI came up with GPT 4o, o4, 4.5, 4.1 (which came out later than 4.5 and had a completely different purpose), Microsoft just calls everything a copilot (Github Copilot, Azure Copilot, Microsoft Copilot - all from the same company, completely different things), and Google apparently just picks random words from the comments.
There's a third way: in-roof or roof integrated photovoltaics. Normal panels, but integrated into the roof. Those look amazing. Very popular in Switzerland where some villages have strict aesthetic rules for buildings.
Next best thing aesthetically are full-roof racks, where one face of the roof is 100% covered in panels. Nowadays you just have to select the right panel and you can make it tile the plane perfectly.
The previous owner own my house installed these (it was mandated by law here at the time). About 90% of the time they leak after about 10 years, and mine did. I had to have the installation re-done over the roof.
Building codes on that are going to vary locally. They are doable in most of Switzerland if you plan for it: no sky lights, no chimney (there's setbacks and fire codes for those), ect.
I thought the IFC International Fire Codes were a bit more ubiquitous than they are. Apparently whole roof is possible in a few EU countries. Probably not a good idea for the stick-built houses prevalent in US though
And 400kW isn't really all that much for a sports car. I remember 911 ads from the '80s that boasted "brakes with more than 1000 horse power".
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