tirant

What do you think is the underlaying motivation?

If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.

My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.

Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.

Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.

Because it’s available to everyone, including kids and elderly, and does not need high upfront payments.

I can just move to Madrid and move anywhere in the city for around 1-2€ per trip without upfront investment of 20.000€ for a car, plus insurance, maintenance, fuel and taxes.

If including tax breaks, New Zealand and Australia are not subsidized in total terms.

But the level of efficiency achieved thanks to the development of technology by private companies is what keeps them efficient around the world.

Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market.

If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.

Just before becoming suicidal some hours later.

That’s exactly what small distributors are for.

I indeed remember too the family of K6 chips and their Super Socket 7 motherboards. They were cheap and affordable, and allowed cpu upgrades to classical Socket 7 motherboards.

The peak of the Super Socket 7 performance CPUs was reached when AMD released the + versions of those chips, the K6-2+ and K6-3+. Those were initially designed for laptops with lower powerconsumption and some enhanced instruction set. But they quickly became common in typical overclockers setup.

I got myself a K6-3+ that I was able to overclock to around 600MHz, probably on an ASUS motherboard.

Back then AMD was fighting so much to get marketshare that you could order for free all types of merchandising from AMD like posters, stickers and CPU badges, and they would even ship it for free from US to Europe. I remember always bringing some to hacker meetings.

That's not at all my observation.

If you take brands like BMW, the EV counterpart is always at around the same price or cheaper.

But if you're even comparing second hand, the balance is falling even more on the EV side. Second hand EVs can be bought very cheaply.

Because they don’t care about profits, they always end up overpaying and taking way longer time than necessary.

And who pays for that? The whole society: Either the government raises taxes, gets more in debt, or they print more money driving inflation up.

The most basic commodity, food, is a great example. The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance and starving people as a consequence. Ultimately killing millions (USRR, China, Korea…)

That means there’s an invisible hand keeping prices up, or basically that the market is not free enough. That’s caused most of the time due to excessive regulation.

Another reason is high demand in locations where offer is limited due to physical limitations. There’s always demand to live in Broadway, and offer can never catch up due to its physical limitations.

Those cars exist but don’t do well in the market. And only when sold by very little money and cheap parts.

People demand connectivity, big screens and lots of software.

I love meat and I love good hamburgers. I’ve tried those Lidl and Aldi alternatives and they were uneatable for me and my family. They have slowly disappeared from the shelves. Only a couple of products remain.

I have never tried BeyondMeat but I’d be surprised that it’s so bad.

And I have eaten many classic vegan burger alternatives based on lentils, peas and chickpeas. They didn’t aim to taste like meat and were actually edible.

They just need to implement a better LLM that is able to deal with all that crap.

At the end we will just have agents interacting with each other.

Why cheaper?

BMW does not focus on providing cheap cars but highly performing ones. So probably the reduction in costs will be used to improve performance, features and perceived quality.

BMW has pretty low margins, like around 7-12% usually. A 10% reduction in manufacturing costs is not much.

That only happens in an open and competitive market. It’s usually governments that block that from happening (tariffs, taxes, unnecessary regulations…)

The main problem with unions in Germany is that they block companies from adapting to changes in the environment quickly. Companies become heavy behemoths and end up suffering from it, which ends up damaging their own employees as well.

SAP is just a skeleton and a library. How processes are implemented on it depends on the company consulting and adapting it to the business using it.

A merge between Palantir and SAP would dominate the market in a way there wouldn’t be any competitor left.

I strongly disagree. The step from the F series to the G vehicles was big, quality improved a lot, specially for the 3 series (F30, F31 vs G20, G21) and the X3 (the G01 feels like a 5 series). The materials, assembly, noises during driving, but specially the driving dynamics and robustness are incredibly high.

It’s also true though that the last wave of G models has improved driving dynamics but cheapened out in interior materials. Peak BMW interiors happened between 2019-2022 with the G01, G30, G05 and iX, i4. Being my favorites the iX and the G01.

BMW also has the best infotainment system after Tesla. And it still integrates well with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

The MAC addresses of all the Wi-Fi clients are broadcasted in plain radio format all over the 2.4GHz. It is trivial.

Same as any other economic system: power is usually concentrated around a very small group of people. In socialism and communism, that concentration typically occurs within the party leadership or central planning apparatus.

However, in free-market capitalism, anyone is allowed to participate in capital formation and accumulation. Ownership is not formally restricted to a political class. Entry into markets is open in principle (unless it stops being a free market), and capital allocation is decentralized through free and voluntary exchange rather than administrative decree.

That does not mean capitalism eliminates power concentration, as Wealth can accumulate and translate into political influence. But the mechanism of power differs: In centrally planned systems, control flows from political authority. In market systems, control flows from voluntary transactions and competitive success.

ICE also degrade over time. Batteries tend to last way longer than internal combustion engines.

I would say BMW had already caught up with Tesla since they released the BMW i4 and the iX.

Both are great EVs surpassing Tesla in some aspects. Probably also the most efficient cars outside Tesla.

It has nothing to do with being realtime. Most mcus are also not running any realtime OS.

What matters here is how dynamic and tightly coupled are the os components. On an embedded system, most of the system and their dependencies are monolithic, without any live updates. The system tends to behave almost deterministically after every reboot.

Education and age are not equivalent to intelligence.

Who defines what voting well is? Or what a good party is?

The observed damage that the UK has inflicted to itself has been caused so far by all the parties that have been in power.

If that’s indeed the case, how do you explain the lack of catastrophe in Japans economy ?

Japans big catastrophe happened in 1990 with the bubble bursting, but that was years before the peak in working age population. Since then, the economy has not improved much but also has remained somehow stable.

We used to tests servers before deploying them to customers and for that we ran intensive CPU software for days.

I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home.

This was 2009, months after the official launch.

We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups continuously running. We could have become easily one of the top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the earth.

It could be worse: you could have bought bitcoin when it started and then have sold it for a profit of $40. ;)