jstsch

Two Toyotas. The steering you apply, even with almost no torque, always overrides lane keeping. Super dangerous. No beeps when that happens. Whereas with my Tesla you’d have to force it out of autopilot. Or fight a bit back if the car corrects you for safety.

The regulations are great, in theory. In practice, I've noticed that implementation of the technologies are lacking. So on paper, lane keeping will keep you on the road when distracted. In practice, it does not. You'll be beeped at a million times, though.

I dislike ‘energy religion’. Nuclear is necessary for Europe. We simply can’t heat our homes and power our industry with renewables in winter. At the same time wind and pv can be built up faster and is simply cheap. Hydro where topography and local bio conditions allow it. We need all those technologies, so we can move away from fossil (climate, resilience and depletion).

Set it up myself, mostly. Some specific tasks like bringing three-phase power to the garage and hooking up the breaker box I did with an electrician. But installing an additional circuit inside the breaker box, or putting new conduit up, is easy to do safely yourself. Pre-wired breaker boxes can be configured online and are cheap.

The battery is 16kWh. Effectively around 14kWh, since you never fully discharge. LiFePo4, so no chance of spontaneous combustion like other battery chemistries.

I'd say the months Nov→Feb are tricky, although since I have quite a bit of excess solar capacity there are even in December plenty of days where the battery pulls me through the night.

Charging/discharging from/to the grid is possible, since I have a retrofit inverter (AC to battery), but not doing it yet, have to do a bit more research (dynamic pricing, tax is >50% of the kWh price in NL, etc).

Every installed PV-panel is a dozen barrels of oil (eq.) less CO2 in the atmosphere. Plus, so much fun to generate your own power! Can highly recommend it, even starting small.

It's addictive though. Living in the center of the city (The Hague, NL), with a home battery, I'm now 100% self-sufficient electrically for 10 months of the year.

Same! Set up a DIY home battery system and needed something to communicate with the inverter and battery over RS232, RS485 and bluetooth. Had an old Raspberry Pi-B with 512MB RAM lying around.

Running 3 python scripts as daemons would become a tad heavy and was a bit worried about serial timing. So used Codex to rewrite them in Go. Cross-compiled them, deployed the binaries and they're now running very comfortably on the pi. A few MB of ram per daemon. Making good use of an almost 15 year old device.

especially not to spec torque on terminal connections and botched crimps leading to hot spots

This was indeed my greatest concern. However the battery came with pre-crimped very solid DC wires, and nice push connectors for the battery itself. The battery also has an integrated DC breaker (great!).

The system runs 3KW max, so I just added an additional breaker (with RCD integrated) in the conduit box. In NL this is something a DIY-home owner easily can do themselves :) (just use the right solid/flex stranded cabling for the connectors, etc...)

I will do a write-up in a couple of days. It's all relatively simple, you just have to expect terrible documentation and do a bit of reverse engineering and serial sniffing. I expected the battery to be complicated, but it turned out that the inverter was.

You'll encounter stuff like: manual says use RS485 port on Battery for GroWatt inverter → need to use CAN port on Battery. Meter Port (RS485 [serial] over RJ45) wiring on GroWatt is unknown (A: white orange / B: white blue, cross them over). Dinky RS485 serial → USB converter needs a 120ohm resistor between pins for line termination. Growatt meter port expects a SDM630 meter, not a DTSU666 (hardcoded), so vibe code another emulator. DIP switches for RS232 connection need to be both on the ON position (undocumented). CH340 USB→serial converter for RS232 does not work, but one with a Prolific chip does. Etc. etc. etc :)

Oh, and the biggest one... I was expecting to be able to just send a command, 'charge at 500watts', now... 'discharge at 2000watts'. But no. You have to emulate a power meter and the inverter will try to bring the net power to 0. Fun! :)

Battery prices are getting really low, if you're willing to do some DIY. Just received a 15kWh battery from China. A 'Humsienk'. Combined it with a GroWatt SPA3000TL-BL inverter.

Total price, 1600 euros. So close to the magical 100 euros per kWh. Driving it with some interesting combinations of Raspberry PI's and serial interfaces and custom written Go code, but it works... :)

Yes. Just take a look at this picture of the accident. You can instantly see where the proportions go wrong. Not survivable, even at low speeds.

https://cldnr.prod.webx.talpa.digital/talpa-network/image/fe...

iPhones can still come with Safari installed and used by default, no changes to anyones experience at all.

No, this is not allowed and currently also not the case. When you're setting up a new iPhone, one of the questions during setup is which browser do you want to use.

Anyway, OP can just inform their parents and fix this thing, if that was really the problem.

Yes, the little time we have in our lives, I really want to spend talking with my parents about topics like browser choices.

No, of course, everyone should be free to have the choice to install whichever software they want on devices that they own. E.g. put the phone in developer/hobbyist mode by connecting it with a USB cable to a PC, show some big fat warnings, and then allow all forms of sideloading. But it needs to be like a safety switch.

Then the matter of an informed browser choice. This is simply not a thing most regular people make or care about. Remember the Internet Explorer era? In this case, simply the most recognisable picture gets chosen (e.g. the only company that advertised their browser).

Downvotes for an alternate viewpoint, what is this, Reddit?

As a EU-citizen, I'm not happy with this legislation and enforcement. I choose Apple versus Android, because I want the safe and user friendly ecosystem Apple offers. Otherwise, it makes much more sense to go with Android. Those phones are much cheaper and are very much the same quality-wise (performance, screen, form factor...).

The same goes with iOS on iPad. I'm very happy that my parents can use those devices versus a Windows machine (or even a MacBook) and know that they are pretty much safe from malware.

Even now, I noticed that with the mandatory browser selection screen both my parents independently have moved on from built-in Safari to Chrome (independently), since that was the only browser name they know. And now they are in a much worse position privacy-wise than before. Which is certainly not in the spirit of the GDPR and DMA.

It's methane, so not a big deal (like hydrazine)

Agreed. In my case with a 15" MBP M1 Max and two LG UltraFine 5K's, which I always plug in the same ports, 99% of the time it remembers which display is which correctly. On my 2018 Intel, this was hit and miss. It's obviously not a trivial problem to solve...

This is indeed the main problem. If you have two screens of the same model, the OS is unable to see which is which. This also goes for many USB devices (such as webcams that randomly swap).

Nice article. Wondering though why trading is not done in discrete batches, e.g. 5 second intervals? Trades in the same interval get filled equally or stochastically? Info about trades with that same 5 second batch delay? Is there some (theoretical) market efficiency thing at play? All this HFT feels wasteful and bad for 'regular' human investors.

I really enjoy my second hand 2020 Model 3 LR. Amazing car, never had any issues. If I compare it to my father's 2022 Kia EV6, it's still leagues ahead.

No. They might even be imported from Holland.

Serious answer: it entirely depends on the variety of tomatoes being grown. There are some varieties that have been selected for taste. Typically, they will also have a very efficient supply chain with a super short duration between harvest to packaging to supermarket (packaging at the greenhouse, straight to distribution, to retail). They are typically about three times the price of the cheapest 'bulk' tomatoes (and also have a higher margin, in the end).

The main challenge with fruits, and especially tomatoes, is ripening versus shelf life. A tomato tastes best when it's as ripe as possible. Sweet, fragrant and full of flavor. However, at that very special time, it will burst on the vine or fall apart in your fruit basket within a day. Which is why you'll never find this quality in a supermarket. And why I grow tomatoes in my garden every summer :)

When I renovated my house, I installed such a heat exchanging pipe. It reduces hot water usage (=fossil gas) by about 40% and with my usage payed itself back in about two years. It's not a drop-in replacement, since you should use it only for the shower drain.

Perhaps there should be a way to limit their speed from the user side at least. Maybe I don’t want my teen driving over 65 mph anywhere.

Standard Tesla feature.

Here in NL there are continuous upgrades. Yes, the grid is stretched, and there are spots where commercial (or even additional residential) capacity is not available. But at the same time, the grid is upgraded on all levels, from street to international connectivity. It takes time, but EV's are no issue. Excess solar around noon is.

On number 5, the audio layer, it's indeed terrible. So many glitches and errors. I would love to spend a week hacking the audio code and fixing some issues (by implementing proper mixing):

1) Clicking and popping of alerts and navigation speech (sounds should just overlap, i.e. like a sample based synthesizer)

2) Ensure proper ducking of music from this 'alert channel', music will now double duck when alerts are played in quick succession

3) Mix bluetooth audio (i.e. iPhone notifications) as an additional channel, right now these sounds are silently lost, unless you manually switch to Bluetooth playback. Very confusing.

Oh, and add a subtle alert sound for upcoming traffic camera's ;)

In the end it's a quite simple audio tree with a few parameters, that could be implemented with some very straightforward C++ code.

But I have no idea what the media layer looks like, I can imagine there are a few quite smart optimizations to make for example all the streaming cameras work quickly (e.g. virtual mirrors). So perhaps it's a bit less trivial than I think.

Whilst faster decoding is always useful, most audio decoding can easily happen within the typical output buffer size (e.g. 512 samples at 44.1KHz ~ 12ms). As long as your machine can decode within that timeframe, there is no difference in latency.

Are LLaMA's weights generally available/floating around yet?

Indeed! Nice thing is that two Symfonisk's give you great stereo sound on external speakers. And no soldering inside the Symfonisk, just some connectors to unplug and run the cable out of the bass reflex port, so easy to restore in original condition if you'd want to. So thanks to the magic of these tiny transistor digital amplifiers, in total you'll spend ± 500 euros and have better — and super convenient — sound than quite expensively priced systems.

So if you open up the Symfonisk, you'll find that the cables running up to the tiny tweeter and woofer speakers have a nice flat crimp connector on them.

So simply unplug those (carefully, use tweezers to squeeze the connectors and they'll pop off without friction), and connect those on some cables which you'll run to your speakers. The connectors can be found at your local electronics store.

The speakers you'll be connecting need to have a crossover that you can bypass (typically four connectors on the back versus two, with a piece of metal in between to short them). Total upgrade would be to mount all the electronics inside, but I haven't dared to cut mine open yet