I really don’t think the impact on car culture is that big. There are a LOT of other reasons not to drive a car in the cities. Our company just built a new office building. No additional parking was built (we are renting some spaces in an existing garage nearby but it’s a bit of a walk to the office). I don’t think it’s easy to get new parking built in Oslo. What we did get was a huge bike garage with bike showers. Even though I have an EV and access to parking, I bike to work in summer. Some of my colleagues also bike in winter.
Yeah the subsidies are high, but so are the implicit subsidies for ICE cars. There was a new tunnel construction in Norway where they found they could save millions on reduced ventilation since the impact from EVs had already reduced pollution that much.
I totally think we should reduce reliance on cars more. But Norway is already doing a LOT in that department. The public transportation of Oslo is already ridiculously good for a city that size. (How many US cities of that size has a metro?) We should consider the switch to EVs as a hard requirement to get rid of pollution and increase the energy efficient and long term costs with operating cars in the country. Now that the switch is complete (for new vehicles) we can shift the focus to making biking and public transportation even better. But we will always need cars. An electrician can’t take the bus to get to a job, and most pure office workers I know in the Oslo city do not drive to work already.
“Just before” … this would mean all cars would be required to be self driving and that they’re forced to adhere to the set speed limits. You think this is just around the corner? In a country like Sweden with a lot of snow? Let’s talk about that this when we’re actually close to hitting 100% of self driving cars on the road.
And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.
Feels like the article is overstating the risks of Li-ion. Modern Li-ion battery packs from reputable manufacturers are remarkably safe. An EV with Li-ion is still an order of magnitude safer than an ICE car. Yeah it can take a while for the thermal runaway to dissipate completely.. but it’s not a huge issue. You just have to keep it cool so it doesn’t set fire to other flammable materials (there are inflatable pools firefighter can use to surround the car with water)
Badly made Li-ion packs are a huge risk. But that’s a QA/Certification problem as with anything else (badly made charging bricks are also a risk.. don’t buy them on Temu). There have been CT scans published now showing how big a difference there is in the manufacturing of good and bad cells.
I’ll add a third perspective that’s probably often gone unsaid: I love it on Apple TV, and kinda like it on iPhone and Mac. It definitely needs to be improved though. There are definitely a whole bunch of usability issues, but they shouldn’t be too hard to fix. And Apple has shown willingness to iterate until they get it right. Unlike Microsoft which just moves onto the next thing (the system settings UI design in Windows 11 is fine.. but can they pleeeease just integrate all settings into that UI now.. how many generations of settings / control panes are there in Windows now?)
The huge corner radius is one thing I do wish they reverted in Mac OS.
Yes and no. It's not a good word, but it has generally been defined in a way that wouldn't include any of the steps you mentioned.
One common description is that it includes lots of ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen.
It sometimes also includes ingredients that have been turned into extremely fine powder, and other very heavy industrial processing. My way of thinking of this is: adults shouldn't eat baby food. Some fast food essentially becomes way to easy to absorb.
I think this interview had a really good description about the problems of the "ultra-processed" label.
Some other brands rely on Mobileye for driver assistance. It’s clear from demos that Mobileye is on the same level as Tesla, the difference is that the don’t use end users as beta testers. I suspect that when actual full self driving is possible, other car companies won’t be as far behind as you’d think based on the features Tesla has in their cars now.
I'm going to assert that Tesla's FSD™ does not, in fact work on city streets and highways.
Or, if you want to loosely define "work", Ernst Dickmanns had self driving in the 80s, and put in on the autobahn in the 90s. I'd rather define it more tightly as "statistically at least as safe to be in _and_ to be near, as a human driver".
Tesla claims to have achieved that, but I don't believe them. That's because the data they report 1) omits a fair bit of critical info, and 2) frequently changes definitions. Both serve to make comparisons difficult. If it was clearly safe, I think they'd put effort into making the comparison transparent.
Bear in mind that Musk has been claiming "Full Self-Driving" since at least 2016, and people involved have asserted that he wasn't wrong, he was lying.
Rivian recently moved away from mobileye in their newer models, because mobileye is are far behind and limited. The progression of their new in house driver assistance since then is already proving that was a good choice.
Pumped hydro is just not a valid comparison. I wish people would understand that already… it’s only good for long term storage in certain key geographical regions. Its use case is very limited.
You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.
In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs. The costs for pumped hydro are generally reported with their target application in mind. It’s not as applicable to dedicated short term storage and certainly not applicable to frequency regulation.
It's cute you think short cycles are somehow better in gas turbines and compressors and that you will restart the whole thing constantly to fill short term demands
> In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs.
The comparison is valid; If you want to fill hour to hour demand or add some frequency regulation, an inverter with a bunch of batteries is far, far better than this
> You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.
They are still cycled daily, that's the entire point of them that even worked pre renewables - load up on cheap night energy and unload it with demand. Renewables just flipped that to load in solar peak.
And putting few hours worth of batteries to reduce cycling is beneficial in both of those cases.
Ireland is lucky enough to have several suitable sites, but just one operational: Turlough Hill, which has been running for over 50 years and is in use daily. It's at least as useful in terms of grid stability and (relatively) rapid dispatch as capacity. Output ~0.7% of total daily (~120GWh), ~5% of daily peak (~6GW), wintertime figures. For comparison electricity usage has increased about 8-fold since it was deployed in 1974.
I knew the top result is an ad and is marked, and still didn't notice the mark. I think there's actual research put into making these markings "visible" but not "noticeable". And on my phone only the top result shows that big picture banner taking all the attention while the rest of the "real" apps are presented as one liners. [1]
But what's worse than an ad is that too many times these apps are actually scammy. A whole host of apps with almost identical and misleading names, icons, banner pictures, descriptions, developer names, and so on.
Ok, I search for Netflix and you show me Prime first is one think. But showing me a scam app is a different offense altogether. And it doesn't matter if your phone costs $600 or $1600 you'll get served up to the scammers just the same.
It's not clearly labeled, it is a very small label with white text on a pale blue background in an already very busy UI. It is clearly made to look like a real search result and not an ad. On top of this, the screenshots are clearly made to mislead the user into thinking that this is the officiel Microsoft authenticator app by having a large text saying "Authenticator for Microsoft" and a second screenshot with a "Microsoft" TOTP entry.
This is an example of a company whose financial incentives are in direct conflict with the interests of their users, and so they choose to be complicit in borderline fraudulent auctivities.
>It's not clearly labeled, it is a very small label with white text on a pale blue background in an already very busy UI.
You piled a whole lot of arguments, but doesn't change the fact that it's still clearly labelled. Besides, you only need to notice this box once to be able to tell whether something marked the same way is an ad or not in the future.
You're absolutely right on the real problem: it's allowed to present itself, totally convincingly to the average / naive user, as Microsoft sanctioned.
It’s not an opinion, the law states that ads must be “clearly” labeled as such, so if you disagree and think Apple is breaking the law, feel free to report them to the FTC and see how far you get.
A clear blue ad label!! Is this sarcasm? Your remark is so dystopian, you full accepted this as normal.
Btw, I'm checking now, the label "ad" is not there, it's just highlighted. Or is it that blue tag? I thought that signified in-app ads? Shouldn't the highlight itself have a label? Probably this is some A/B test optimized BS, that tag was the option where most people WRONGLY clicked on the stuff they didn't search for.
When I came from Android I first couldn't figure out why app store search was so bad. Dumb me, expecting the highlighted option to be something most relevant to ME and MY search, no it's most relevant to some paying company and can even be a scam. And you and me can reason through this, but my kids get this BS as well, the grow up with this as normal.
You search for something, you don't get what you search for. This is our normal.
Absolute disappointment on day 1 with iOS.
My next phone will be something like FairPhone with e/OS or Sailfish. Or I'll wait for that Graphene hardware partner stuff to finally be revealed. I'm so sick of this bs. You pay a lot of money for something and they slap you with ads. Same on smart TVs, my Philips Hue system (hundreds, maybe thousands of euros I spend on that), ads ads ads.
Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear".
Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable.
[1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning to my colleagues a couple days ago.
The whole background of the ads are also a light blue, in contrast to the white background of organic results.
I want all the ads to go away, and misleading apps should be removed from the store and certainly not promoted via ads… but I also don’t want ads to be flashing and being annoying in the name of being “clearly” market. Some people won’t notice anything, no matter how obvious.
> I wonder how people would have responded if this were about Android.
As someone who uses both Android and iOS (the dual usage being in large part because I develop software for both) if this were about Android I wouldn't be surprised in the least, but I do find it surprising for Apple to increasingly allow for this sort of thing.
IMO the major positive differentiators Apple has over Google as a phone OS provider are the perception of protecting user privacy and also not plastering ads everywhere. This example weakens both of those perceptions at the same time.
So (for me) its not about Apple being worse than Google when it comes to this stuff, its just surprising they are willing to be as bad.
In any case, I don't have a horse in the race to cheer for. Google's major positive differentiator has been flexibility for advanced users to run what they want with minimal OS interference, and Google has been tamping down on that, so from my perspective both appear to be destroying their previous benefits to meet somewhere in the worst-case (for end users) middle.
It's really not that deceptive. It says "Ad", right there. I can think of about 40 different, more deceptive ways they could have gone. If that was their goal... they failed.
He’s probably thinking of robo taxi self driving. So that would be e.g. Waymo.
I don’t think anyone has better self driving for consumers out atm, but you could argue that’s because other companies are not using their customers as beta testers. I’ve seen demos that may indicate Mobileye has tech that’s just as good if not better. But they don’t release it to end users until it’s fully ready.
I don’t think Tesla has any special sauce, and that when the tech is actually ready for unattended full self driving in a consumer car, other car makers will come out with solutions around the same Tesla. One difference is maaaybe Tesla will be able to update old cars (probably with a hardware update). While I think others will only support it on new cars.
> Tesla will solve self-driving and everyone will be left unable to compete. Also, AI is advancing rapidly and will solve all kinds of problems for society.
But apparently it will not solve self-driving for anyone else but Tesla.
I gave up trying to argue with Tesla fans years ago. They are immune to logic which invalidates their priors.
Going by the Tim Todds interview with Jeff Bezos it seems like BOs approach is very similar in this area. It looked to me that the machines they had there to build NG is set up to produce rockets in large quantities. He talked about their goals with the second stage, and that they’re looking at making a reusable version but that in parallel they’re also doing cost optimisations that may make it so cheap that reuse doesn’t make sense.
Yeah the subsidies are high, but so are the implicit subsidies for ICE cars. There was a new tunnel construction in Norway where they found they could save millions on reduced ventilation since the impact from EVs had already reduced pollution that much.
I totally think we should reduce reliance on cars more. But Norway is already doing a LOT in that department. The public transportation of Oslo is already ridiculously good for a city that size. (How many US cities of that size has a metro?) We should consider the switch to EVs as a hard requirement to get rid of pollution and increase the energy efficient and long term costs with operating cars in the country. Now that the switch is complete (for new vehicles) we can shift the focus to making biking and public transportation even better. But we will always need cars. An electrician can’t take the bus to get to a job, and most pure office workers I know in the Oslo city do not drive to work already.
reply