to11mtm

Yeah....

Where folks (often) get lazy is the resulting math over what the real bean-counters care about (but are too lazy to check often).

In a past life, I worked on costing models for a Cable/Fiber contract house, to help the company decide 'what was profitable to keep in house' versus 'what do we subcontract' (sometimes that could even mean we just 'rented' a machine and had a qualified operator using it, based on that employee's hourly rate and expected L2R for taxes... so many spreadsheets...)

And from from my 'I don't know all the factors for this but I've seen how people screw up the big ones' view (and frankly, I'm guessing a lot of us have seen and dealt with the same category of 'bad math' around outsourcing IT work...)

An on-prem data center means:

- You need to account for electricity costs - i.e. CA vs midwest electric rates.

- cooling and power backup capability - Smaller factor but real

- personnel cost - e.x. there's probably cases where a smaller org could be better off with 'on-site' server admins that have other roles based on local wages. Kinda case specfic but it's a case.

- whatever the 'space' holding the stuff costs

  - Sardonic take :Hey, let's have another unused meeting room instead! (e.x. In the case of on-prem shops that simply fled to AWS in their migration from VMware)


 - the cost of licensing whatever is running

  - In defense of this, In one of my earliest IT lives, AWS handling the Oracle licensing for a DB was a *huge* win as far as making it as easy as possible to ensure whatever was going on we couldn't have the Oracle licensing folks 'ding' us on whatever infraction occurred between reviews (that could not be understood by the majority of the company, often including the accused. I was never guilty but I saw it happen to others.)

  - OTOH I know lots of folks who just want to be lazy about what they have to document.

Frankly, the orgs that 'might' need that either have their arch set up where they are in cloud, or they are onprem but can scale to cloud if needed in interim.

Mechanical sympathy is an important passive perk for software architects to cut down the number of reworks down the line

We might be talking on different levels but when it comes to, on an opposite end of 'Should I use SIMD'... a databases a level of mechanical sympathy at a 'base' level is still important. e.x. row-by-row updates vs batching or bad logic where a 21k entry in clause forgot about unicode rules on columns and breaks an index [0]... is still super important.

[0] - That one is real, thanks lazy bodyshop having their people use copilot and yet, we get the same billable hours, nothing is done faster, and management is too stupid to pay attention...

Even as a Maverick owner, I do actually think there's a market for these.

Not me, but if it was real I could see it filling a lot of fleet type orders.

Stellantis almost built one, I think the Ramcharger?

A couple other companies tried EREVs but AFAIR one was suboptimal (Mazda had one but the motor was so small it was dangerous to use for uphill) and the other was in an expensive German thing.

Where it is challenging is that, AFAIK, a direct driveline (i.e. Honda's system) or close to (THS used by Toyota/Ford/Subaru/others), it is easier to hit a higher Gas-only MPG rating than with an EREV due to the conversion losses on each end.

And, If you compare a BYD Seal 5 DM-i to the Current Prius Prime, AFAIK if you compare euro WLTP numbers the Prime gets better MPG when it switches to gas, and has a competitive electric only range. The Seal 5 DM-I is a little bigger but close enough. The BYD certainly wins on 'price' however it is unclear how much of that is due to a truly simpler design versus labor/material input cost.

the proliferation of 3rd rows in midsize SUVs.

Ehh, 3 row minivans are typically more practical. Alas, market forces are a fickle beast.

I'm not up on the Maverick, but the comparison chart for the Slate EV feels pretty misleading

Well as a Maverick person, I'll say the following as far as 'hmm' about the chart.

For starters, You get it either in a Turbo 2.0 or Hybrid 2.5. The Hybrid 2.5 is an old but very proven design, no direct injection [0]. Also the Hybrid transmission is far simpler than most modern automatics/DCTs.

The Max spec towing Capacity is indeed 4K (with the tow package, which also requires AWD,) however it is uncertain whether an extra 500 pounds would make or break things; Keep in mind that Ford also wants to keep selling 'bigger' trucks like the Ranger [1].

But as far as listing the Hybrid battery as a 'Big Ticket Item' I can't help but chuckle. It's a paltry 1.1Kwh. As far as everyone can tell, as a car part of course it's way more expensive than just buying a home backup battery with that capacity, but at current prices replacement with labor is estimated around 3K and that's still way cheaper than a Transmission or an engine.

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All of that said, I think this is definitely trying to hit a certain market, and if it actually launches, and the Engine/Transmission choices are reasonable, that this would be a disruptor, but not necessarily for the consumer market.

This seems to be more targeting the fairly neglected 'low-end' of the commercial truck segment. Specifically the 2 door with "Drop-side flatbed"; IOW the sides drop down.

It's a body on frame; the challenge with the Maverick as a 'Fleet vehicle' is that they are Unibody and total out very easily. Versus with BOF trucks, I once worked at a place where the auto body shop we used was owned by my company's owners... made it cheap to keep things running I guess.

A lot of fleets unfortunately would not find 205 miles a safe enough range for their usages; That's almost certainly why they are doing this 25 gallon tank to get to 600 miles of range.

transmission work

Eh, If I did get one I'd get the MT. Which I think is the closest to where this is targeting a 'niche consumer'. The "I want a cheap MT truck, I don't want a silly Rotary dial to pick a gear[2]". They are advertising it's 'repairability'; which again seems to be language targeting farmers sick of being locked out, but also the kinds of people who really don't mind doing that stuff.

But again, They are claiming a long powertrain lifetime.

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Really at the end of it, What they are proposing sounds a lot like a Hilux Champ, Again I'm super curious to see what engine/transmission they plan on sourcing for this.

That's assuming this is a real thing, after all; the last decade has seen lots of cars that end up as vaporware or don't get past this phase.

[0] - Some DI setups result in carbon buildup long term.

[1] - Despite not offering US the Ranger Hybrid that is in EU.

[2] - To be clear I love my Maverick and intend to drive it into the ground. But I also bought in when the first year, the value per dollar is somewhat worse on new models.

I mean FWIW this looks to me much like the sort of hacks I had to get into last time I worked with Java so I can't really blame you....

Valhalla can't come soon enough for us.

This will be interesting to see for sure, I think it will raise the bar for competitors as well; .NET GC has lingered in some ways for a while in progressing [0][1], there is a long standing github discussion around a lower latency GC where there is a potential alternative [2] but nothing really signaling that it could be integrated in future as an option. Valhalla might finally put enough pressure on microsoft to do something about the lag in this space.

[0] - The inferred stackalloc stuff on the JIT level is awesome but I don't count that as improvement to actual GC

[1] - Pinned allocs took a long time and we still can't get aligned pinned allocs (have to manually pad instead)

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/discussions/115627

Well, when I say resources in this case, I mean UART bandwidth and the overhead of synchronizing that for output.... not so much memory itself (well, unless the overhead of the hackery for whatever 32x does as far as VRAM is worse, not sure if it's another tile engine or one just bangs bits...)

As a semi silly (But also possibly pragmatic, if we want to do this for more than simple 'fun') question... I wonder what it would take for projects like this, to take the video output and turn it into a (possibly not-visually-usable) jankhacked data output stream that could then be decoded?

I mean, there's a lot of hand-waving there (i.e. it would only be output which could complicate ease of using it practically) OTOH it might free up resources?

(I'm not experienced in this hardware level so I apologize if this idea is absolutely stupid/impractical.)

Agree that Compression is not a good option for this; you'd wind up needing to decompress the rows anyway (or spend a good amount of time on trying to use the compressed symbols to detect a dupe, which I feel like would be very dependent on picking the right algo or maybe even a custom one.)

As far as your idea, I think where a lot of the challenge lies in that it complicates a lot of the up-front protocol.

Some of these DB protocols are downright ugly [0], and need to have a very long tail for supporting systems built on older versions. And they can be very finicky thus people are afraid to touch both the DB side and the Driver side.

So, at best you'd need to have a special connect string and then work with driver teams and/or vendors to understand the new format, deal with all of the teething issues, and will have to continue to support the old protocol in your DB code for at least another decade (probably longer for any commercial product.)

[0] - TDS comes to mind, I'm betting TTC/OPI is not fun either.

The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.

Is Ubisoft's Anvil still alive or is it just in an unknown status after they cancelled a few upcoming titles?

That said, Capcom is still doing their own thing via RE Engine...

Not sure about any others...

The point is to emphasize, even exaggerate, low-status negative qualities.

Or, to cite other potentially preemptive design, add enough other absurdity where someone can just say something like "It is obvious nobody would think the real would %person% impregnated Satan".

I think a better case could be made for the Klingons being racist caricatures, since in TOS their look was intentionally based on Asiatic and Mongol people in order to make them seem more frightening and villainous.

In my head-canon TOS Klingons are Russia and Romulans are China.

Reasons for this;

- Star Trek 6 (The whole thing is an allegory for the end of the cold war, right down to Praxis being a stand-in for Chernobyl)

- That fight scene in 'The Trouble with Tribbles' that strikes me as 'feels like a rehashed tale about a barfight between Allied and Soviet soldiers in pre-split post WW2 Germany'

- Romulans being more 'secluded' and more about political and legal intrigue than violence (If we consider Klingon direct violence a stand-in for USSR/Russian 'maybe put in house arrest before we assasinate' vs China's 'throw the rigid legal book at them')

... Depends on where we are looking at in the real-world episode production timeframe.

TNG did still resort to 'caricatures as a default', If we are to be a tiny bit bold and look closer at DS9 and how, if you look at a lot of the other stuff outside 'Far Beyond The Stars'.

What you find is that DS9 is very much about people facing pressure from their culture or background and over time learning there's a better way to do things. So many major and minor characters change over the course and part of it is seeing how hard it is and what it takes for each of them to change. I do think they 'over-used' the Ferengi for this but I get they were trying to target a general level of audience.

IMO it really was a hopeful attempt to recognize cultural versus racial problems. You can't just do a single speech and never visit the hat planet again; you are next to one of the hat planets and instead get a deeper look into their world.

.....

DS9 did over-emphasize the Ferengi change arcs, and while the end fits with other 'themes' (i.e. Bell Riots) it like most other hat changes didn't have huge implications till after what we the viewer would see.

But also I kinda get that whole thing. At the end of the day the Ferengi (whether originally intended or not) became something meant to symbolize extreme laissez-faire capitalism with perhaps a pinch of twisted reversal of other cultures/religions[1] because yeah I'm gonna blame that bit on whoever was in charge or TNG at the time (Was it Rick Berman?)

[0] - To be clear I mean for the sake of this topic; those episodes themselves with the original ending to DS9 frankly capture a lot of the 'hope' that was trying to be conveyed in the face of all the strife...

[1] - The most easy way to lampshade 'required clothing' is to instead do 'required non-clothing'

And indeed South Park has always made a point to have extreme satire that is implausible to help establish that such is parody. [0] The episodes in the last year have gone to extreme lengths to help make the distinction as clear as possible.

[0] - We can go back as far as, I don't think it has been established that Barbara Streisand can in fact turn into a robot...

I mean FWIW Scala has Slick (but then you're dealing with the rest of Scala ecosystem...) and there's Linq2Db on .NET side. Having dealt with all 3 on some level (Slick the least) I would say they are fairly similar in intent (i.e. differences are primarily due to language idioms.)

The happiest middle ground I've found in .NET has been LinqToDb.

It's more of a Micro ORM, -but- has a Linq DSL, as well as DSLs for lots of DB bits. CTEs, Window functions, Bulk copy, 'treat this in memory collection as an input rowset', certain DB Specific bits... and if you need some special sauce to deal with brownfield jank [0] it's very easy to wire-up custom SQL bits into your queries via attributes if needed.

If you use method syntax rather than linq query syntax, you will have minimal surprises with the SQL generated. Typically if it does generate something I didn't expect, I dig in and what it did was indeed both correct and better than what I was trying to do anyway.

[0] - Fun nasty case I ran into on a brownfield project; 'If this number has a decimal point, it is a direct percentage rate. If the number does NOT have a decimal point, it is the FK to a lookup table that has the percentage rate'

Worth noting that the Bretton Woods system was -not- quite what Keynes wanted...

There's also the factor that AFAIK a cost optimal DRAM fab is a bit different than a General purpose IC fab, Again naive level of knowledge here but NAND fabs I think are the closest, but that's also in very high demand.

One could argue that 'politically neutral' could also be a policy they apply to their employees at all levels; i.e. if everyone gets along at the office and does their job, that's really all that matters.

If anything, respecting an employee's personal life privacy seems fairly in-line with the values one would want in a privacy-focused VPN company.

Dated Bobby Kotick? That alone is a red flag...

Correct.

Texas has the 'Lone star Tick' primarily. But in Michigan for example we've had the Blacklegged tick (which is the main species known to carry Lyme in our state...) for a looong time.

until it isn't, i.e. certain rulings over the last couple years...

.... I get what you're saying but I'm saying you need a better minimum for when people are tired [0]

I.e. "I have a mild disability and it would be nice to at least be able to limp home while just having to worry about balance and steering".

Personally? I don't need it, I can pedal fast or pedal long...

But I know people that have achieved much better mobility thanks to the ability to be able to travel a bit easier in my part of the states.

But restating, I'm talking about the bigger picture for adoption. Instead of forcing the pedaling, just wait for people to use it to enhance mobility and when someone inevitably forgets to check the charge level and start putting in some effort they realize... "Hey, that wasn't so bad".

When we think about alternative transportation in the US, we have to remember the starting point:

You are asking these people to give up air conditioning. You can't force them to make actual physical effort right away, they are worried that will make them get even more uncomfortable.

In the states, 10-15MPH throttle limited ebikes/tries/quads[1] would help a lot of people so long as the thing can stop reasonably well around here.

Heck, I'd wager, if someone could come up with a cheap-enough 'e-trike-ish' semi-suitable for grocery getting[2] in the more urban side of american suburbia, they could make a decent amount of sales quick enough given the current concerns around gas prices versus the oversized guzzlers so many people drive 1-2 miles to a grocery store and back with, and the traffic reduction that would result.

But it would Have to have that E-throttle at a decent speed option for the consumers that would make a difference from an environment/traffic standpoint to even dip their toes into.

I want to be clear; I've done proper to heavy commutes on everything between Chicago Schwinns and Tandems, sometimes carrying 30-50$ of 2007 era USD between rack bag and handlebars for grocery trips... I don't need to be won over.

I'm talking about winning over a critical mass. I'm talking about enough people adopting non-car transport that I can feel safe in my suburban shithole[3].

[0] - Again, at least personally, It is impossible for me to keep balanced on any bike I've owned under 5-6MPH... I do have inner ear balance issues however.

[1] - I dream of something along the lines of a Sun Recumbent side-by-side, mid-rear bumper seat with canopy and all... Maybe a little more upright-ish...

[2] - At minimum needs some sort of cooler mount, they can use ice packs etc. If tech gets cheaper you could say 'The delta-V of having a powered cooler is fine because it means we have more weight to balance and make fast stops safer'.

[3] - I am currently trapped between one of the most historically accident prone and one of the most historically deadly accident intersections in the state... Part of the whole 'had to unlock 28MPh assist' thing....

It gets complicated depending on the highway, at least around me.

Heck even some of the non highway roads.

Cause I'm in MI, where we have Michigan lefts, and somewhere between surges of out-of-state transplants and COVID everyone has lost the plot on...

But overall around here, we have lots of 3/4 lane highways.

From left to right on a 4 lane...

Left lane is prettymuch always fastest traffic, with a occasional trucker stupidity around failing to not use the leftmost lane unless part of the actual route.

Next lane on a 4 lane is more faster traffic, possibly more trucker stupidity because typically they are supposed to be in the right two lanes unless there is a split incoming where they have to go left.

Next lane on a 4 lane is all of the wimpy trucks and the freight drivers following state law (i.e. we often have a higher speed limit for 'not-truck' than 'truck')

Last lane, is entering/exiting traffic; may go faster than prior lane at times but is more likely to have slowdowns from people who had at least a quarter mile to see what traffic was and attempt to match speed...

On a 3 lane, it's similar, except trucks in general will stay in the middle or right, but usually the middle.

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Where it gets ugly though, is that my state is Michigan, so we have 'Michigan Lefts'.

i.e. on many roads, to do a left turn you take an intentional turn-around through a median, then take a right back at the intersection.

This normally works but sometimes it means for such roads that the left lane is not in fact the fastest lane overall.

How do people move in the rain

I mean Historically when I did that sort of thing I'd have a change of clothes if necessary, but otherwise I never really minded riding in the rain. Or light snow.

or when they're on their period?

I'm sorry, what? (I actually do have anecdata based answers for this but I don't want to risk offending your sensibilities.)

How do you transmit tons of material on bikes? How do they move multiple small children or being home furniture? What do old and sick people do?

Cool! There's more room on the road for that to happen.

But in general you're implying a dichotomy where none exists.

God forbid a commuter wants to do the speed limit in the righthand lane without being tailgated!

I think the majority of Canada's GWVR limits can be a factor; i.e. outside of Ontario it's less than half what the US limit is for a standard license.

I think also the lower number of lanes on routes like the 401 help, usually[0].

Even though it's been a while, every drive in Canada just felt more leisurely. Speed limits in general are lower, there's more stop signs where they should be.

[0] - Except when a whiskey truck tips over and it's now a 2 hour delay to the next exit...

"E-bike" is pedal assist only/mostly with max speed of 30kph/20mph (only while pedalling) and throttle cuts out at low speeds (7kph: basically just there to get some inertial); treated as just another bicycle (perhaps limit age to ≥14 yo). Everything else is an "e-moto" with the same rules as mopeds and motorcycles.

I'm going to respond to this pragmatically.

Realistically, the current Class 1/2/3 system more or less works.

Class 1 is pedal only, max 20MPH (but lots of bikes are sold as class 1 with lower limits, I think the one I got for my chosen sister is 10, maybe 15 tops.).

Class 2 is Pedal+Throttle, max 20MPH. Again, sometimes the manufacturers will have a lower cap (Wife's e-bike has a throttle cap between 12-15.)

But 7KPH is too little, at least for the US if you want to get more than low rate adoption of E-bikes as a mode of transportation [0]. At bare minimum you need something where the person can maintain balance and it's faster than a brisk walk.

Class 3 is, well I thought it was Pedal-only 28MPH but I think there's some conflicting data and hand-waving. i.e. some claim that Class 3 is 'throttle up to 20MPH, pedal assist up to 28MPH' but last I was aware a Class 3 shouldn't have a throttle.

But again, the confounding factor [0] means that some compromises may have to be made.

The worst part about all of this, is everything was more or less OK, until these e-motos and overpowered e-bikes went on the market, and parents bought them for kids without any thought of risk/etc or even paying attention to the 'offroad use only' disclaimers. I also put it that way because (sadly) if it was just adults getting splattered it would probably just get treated like any other motorcycle/cycling accident as far as actual action.

[0] - As a confounding factor, I'll give the example that in my state, an electric scooter qualifies as an 'electric skateboard' and thus so long as it has a throttle cap of under 25MPH, sure, go nuts unless there's a restriction via muni (e.x. some munis may ban use on roads with a speed limit over X mph) or DOT (e.x. public highway restrictions.)

I've seen 'Close enough' locally.

One supermarket close to me, has a wall of various pre-prepared lunch items and I think there's a deal if you get the soup as well.

Another chain shop has a smaller selection of items... But does have the '5$ cluck' on thursdays, i.e. a pre-cooked hen for 5 USD. Grab a bag of good add-water mashed potatoes or some corn and/or perhaps a veggie, and you can get a proper dinner for at least 2, maybe 3 people out of it for under 15$.