There are a lot of trucks that never go very far in a day. Many of them are used for "last mile" delivery. They start at a warehouse, get loaded, then go make a few deliveries and head back for the next load. While fast charging is needed, they don't go very far and thus don't need extreme range.
It is a valid question though: how do we get more of the long distant freight onto trains. Followed closely by how to we get existing freight trains to move to all electric instead of diesel electric (I've been told railroads have studied this: if diesel gets to $8/gallon it is cost effective - but I can't find any references to cite and so you should take this "Fact" with some salt)
Fast charging probably isn't really necessary for last mile delivery trucks. They usually work about 8-10 hours a day then spend the majority of their time sitting in a lot or garage. Perfect time to charge them.
yes i conceded that use case a bit bellow, it mostly makes sense in dense urban areas, where access to the grid is easy, and not emitting polution is at a premium. But even then it's a very difficult case to make before eg: electrifying buses, or more generally, decarbonising your electricity supply. If this made sense, musk tried to sell it a decade ago, it just doesn't. A lot of the value is that the majority don't understand the tradeoffs and complication, and just think electric = more green, and it makes for great PR specially abroad.
What China does hardly indicates economic sense, and you can be sure you won't hear about the down sides or failures. They already very agressively hide car lithium fires but they're very frequent. Economics over there are mostly investment driven with a large dose of ideology and vanity, not demand driven. You can see it everywhere including the massive amounts of empty housings for example
Being dependent on (cheap) oil can make economic sense as well. Unless you get cut off all of a sudden. Depending on local energy might make more sense in the long term. also for factor other than the economy.
and you are refuting with even less justification. I told you how to check for yourself if you actually cared about veracity. Best of luck trying to get funding to publish something academic anti-CCP though, but I'd love it if you did. Also this is just a conversation, not an academic debate
This ignores the fact that there are also things that China does better or equal than Western companies. Like robots, solar panels, electric cars (?), AI models, electronics.
They must be good at something, otherwise China wouldn't be where it is.
So flat out dismissing anything from China is not enough of an argument.
Mind you, I'm not saying you're generally wrong, just your "generally" is wrong. ;-)
I'd dispute they do any of those better, they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition. Besides electric cars and solar, it's very debatable wether those will actually be ecological in the end. For ex. they are still opening massive amounts of fossil based electric plants, so the truck that is half battery is actually running on coal anyway. It would take an incredible re-work of the electric grids to accomodate actually transitioning away from thermal cars, including some solution for seasonal storage. If you're impressed by their robots, I don't know what you're looking at, they seem to be ridiculous, not even at the tech level that boston dynamics had decades ago. Finally keep in mind that electric cars are fantastic spying devices, for collecting data, and if you're nefarious, imagine hacking into them. That's why teslas are banned near anything governmental in China. So there is a huge strategic advantage to cornering that market, but not really to save the planet. The AIs are all distilled, USA still leads by far there, and they too are strategic weapons
You're making a lot of assertions without citations here.
If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs.
I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable.
Using public funds to invest in capital expenditure is - outside of the US - considered a wise use of public funds. If the result is a more competitive industry, whether that's ship building (South Korea), steel production (recent UK nationalisation efforts), military hardware (United States), or medical research, physics, chemistry, computing (look at the history of all the G7 there), and so on, and so on... irrelevant.
China has decided to spend it on complex manufacturing that they've been the supply chain for to Western manufacturers for the last 30 years. That's not controversial - it's been obvious this is where they were heading for some time.
First off, I admit I have no idea what the EU and US car manufacturers are doing, their positions for the past decade don't make any sense to me in the electric market. Actually smells like hubris and inertia more than anything to be honest.
I'm not being super academic with citations, but the CCP investments in BYD, to the point it makes no sense to exist without aren't exactly hard to find secrets.
You're not comparing comparable things, in the UK, there is a great deal of expectations of what an employee has as rights for instance. There are extremely rigorous safety regulations that are very onerous. We can debate wether those are justified but it's a very complex topic you're brushing off. Their innovation seems mostly on small iterative gadgets, but look more closely into what they tolerate as self driving and the death it causes, and be sure you want that in the UK for profit margins.
I'm really not against neither subsidies nor artificially inflating one's strategic advantage at all to develop a market and corner the competition. I never said China is wrong to do what it's doing. What I am saying is that its dangerous for us outside of China to buy into it now. Beyond the security implications of chinese robots with sensors everywhere roaming about cities the CCP considers their ennemies, there's just the dependency risk, there's the "how much do you trust the people who fed paint to their babies to handle super dense explosives that cant be put out by water in dense cities", and the basic question, maybe its better to have the lightest car possible, not the most gadgetty with drones and ipads.
So the basic point above "China has more electric trucks therefore it makes economic sense" is helped by none of this
It's trivial to compete if you don't have R&D costs, and don't care about stuff like your employees, regulations or safety, or even sales since you can just use government money (this is not without consequence either). And it's not only about free market stuff, why do you think they're so excited for all countries to use their 5g products for example ? Don't think this is benign.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Chinese policy, but you should probably reread your arguments and check for coherence.
Chinese EV trucks make no economic sense even though they're 30% of China's fleet but also they're only investing all that as a trojan horse even though they use them almost exclusively domestically, plus the old "Asians don't innovate they just copy" canard even though there wasn't much Western IP on electric trucks to copy in the first place and China's battery technology is somehow not Alibaba knockoffs but more performant than Western equivalents (whilst state sponsored Chinese industries remain generations behind in stuff that's actually strategically critical for them to clone via industrial espionage like semiconductors and jet engines)
I really don't see the contradiction, if that 30% was true, which, really... but ok, it still would normal for the CCP to do stupid stuff because they think it makes them look modern or ecological or similar. That's why there's no need for economic sense to explain that development at all. There are also excellent non financial reasons to want to dominate that market. So to circle back, their use of trucks, which if you buy the 30% "omg lol" as they say, is in no way an argument to them making sense, neither economically nor ecologically.
> used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition
If you replace 'public' with 'VC', isn't that the exact same as the US does in Silicon Valley?
They're really not, the tiniest bits have shown with evergreen for ex, all the ghost cities. We don't really see the people who's savings, which with kids is the only "pension", have been demolished, on an individual level Chinese tend to save way more than others, this is gone. There's the demographic issue on top, the famines, that they import 70% of their food, depend on trade which the americans are withdrawing for protecting the routes of, and other unadressed issues because the priority is this investment, the missing population, the utter lack of statistics, even internally. Most likely the biggest factor will be wether they try something in Taiwan next year as they warned.
And opened about 80GW of coal last year alone. That's the only advantage to electric trucks, they can run on coal too, even though you can only carry half the capacity whilst moving the same total weight, it still can make sense, just not economic and certainly not ecological. They sure love people writing articles about it though, and how green and solar they are.
neither of those are true, if they were, remember when tesla wanted to sell trucks like 10 years ago ? if you use electric trucks, half the mass you pay to move around is useless. Also the grid isn't "half coal", the truck doesn't wait for the sun to come out to charge. Which is another cost to transporters: the hours of downtime to recharge. They only make very limited sense in very last mile scenarios in dense cities. Also coal is way worse to burn than petrol, and in China's case, it's mostly bituminous, one of the worst coals in terms of pollution.
Solar is only about 13% of China's power. They have hydro, wind, nuclear and gas too as well as coal.
Their off peak prices have generally been overnight, ideal for truck charging, though they have started having them around noon too like many other nations with growing solar share. Great for a mid shift top-up.
Coal is worse to burn than gasoline, but a car engine throws 80 percent of that away so you have to burn more compared with an efficient EV.
This has all been debated to death for over a decade, MIT has interactive tools to calculate figures, there's really no excuse for not knowing this about a subject you are so passionate about.
I never said anything about green. They don't have oil, they want to be less reliant on oil. Electricity allows them to adapt the mix in a way petrol doesn't.
Not really. I'm deeply disturbed by this kind of thing and our flippant approach to this technology.
I'm trying to prompt an emotion reaction and reflection on that.
If I'm serious, then how does it make you feel? Should I or anyone be creating art experiments like this?
Or what if I just want to play around with this technology, should anyone be allowed to run neural simulations of any creature to satisfy my own curiosity?
Even if you didn't like what I was doing and wanted to stop me, could you? Could anyone?
It's worth thinking about. AI and progress in neuroscience and computational power should allow me to create a whole exhibit in my home of human neural simulations. Maybe god doesn't exist, or maybe he didn't create hell. But one day, perhaps soon, we humans will.
Those are good points. And for a serious answer, indeed we should probably be exploring the ethics of it now. It's just humanity never really did that before unleashing a new tech, so I'm not optimistic, but I wish you success on provoking reflexion. What you're doing now isn't bothering me really but only for a reason of scale, it's one of those balancing dilemnas like abortion, or "is it a pet or food". Ian M Banks' Surface Detail has a harrowing vision of the prolongation of what you're doing (I'm a huge fan). At the moment I'm more disturbed about stuff like those people who played doom on cells.
> Ian M Banks' Surface Detail has a harrowing vision of the prolongation of what you're doing (I'm a huge fan).
I'm aware of the culture series, but never read any of it (I'm not a big fiction reader). That book sounds super interesting though so thank you for the recommendation – I may try to give it a go.
Artificial hells are something I'm very afraid of, and specifically the scenario of being able to prevent someone's death and torture them in ways our physical environment or physical bodies would not permit.
I've argued before if technology ever permits this then people should strongly consider whether continuing to live is worth the risk of one day being subjected to such a fate. Concerningly it seems to me the preferable thing to do once this technology exists is to kill yourself and everyone you care about in a way that maximises the probability that you, and they, will never be revived either physically or digitally.
RSI and ASI could make this a reality much quicker than we anticipate. Versions of the near-future in which this technology is frequently used against humans is an AI doom scenario which imo is very under priced. People talk a lot about existential risk, but AI simply killing us is one of the better outcomes. RSI and ASI in theory should grant us (or the AIs) a full tech-tree unlock, and there's many technologies out there which are worse than those which might merely be able to kill us all.
I worry when I talk about stuff like this people think I'm a crazy person. Hopefully you don't think that.
There already exist today fates and torments way worse than death, so your argument would be true already anyway, unless its really the solace of a timeout that makes it worthwhile. But in reality, for most people with internet access, it's all good right now, and the virtual brain stuff is also just another crime to be dealt with, imperfectly, but I mean, I don't think it'd be hard to get consensus on not doing that and punishing those who do.
I don't think you're crazy, but I do think you're alarmingly depressive. The thing with that illness is that people who have it are completely blind to it. But there are ways out, well worth ones, if you force yourself to get help, you know, rather than create pain in a debatable way. I hope you do, or that I'm wrong.
I mostly agree, but from experience, when you readonly your repository, you encourage a bunch of forks, then people ping you in those based on git blame, and many other out-of-band contacts. But I think that cat is out of the bag anyway.
A terminal is critical software, you type passwords into it, it sees all the output, you need to trust it, so while I'm sad to find out about this project only today, the closed-source is indeed a deal-breaker for me
> you encourage a bunch of forks, then people ping you in those based on git blame, and many other out-of-band contacts
Not that this really addresses the point that you were making, but at least the git blame part is pretty solvable by just using a throwaway email for the commits. If you're already not caring about getting contributions, you could even rewrite history to amend everything to use the new email retroactively!
Nothing inspires trust like a fake email address that will be ignored, and also make sure that you don’t cryptographically sign your commits with a public key that could doxx you
I'm not imposing my opinion, but in my experience, iterm2 is the slowest terminal emulator I know of, so I didn't even bother trying. But overall, I'll add iterm2 to the list, too.
this is not true on my machine, at least for my usual benchmark Doom-fire-zig[1]. on said benchmark, ghostty 1.3.1 runs at about 350fps, wezterm 20260713-212414-b3255666 runs at 415fps, Terminal.app runs at 100fps, iterm2 3.6.11 runs at 80fps.
has iTerm2 improved significantly in the last couple of years? I remember feeling the speedup when I went from iTerm2 to kitty, so that's surprising to me.
AI will be required to maintain the piles of tech crap we've built and that society now stands on. New generations are no longer as tech savvy, pushed toward being simple users and consumers. The rare individuals that develop curiosity for how things work have their work cutout and will need all the tools they can get to dig their way through layers of undocumented, organically grown software and hardware cruft left by "engineers" of lore.
I won't! But I can imagine a Windows developer (well, UTF-16, not UTF-32, but still NULs are everywhere) who might want to put something like that to the database without proper converting.
Also why would you store UTF-32 in text column when SQLite clearly doesn't support it? The docs show there are only methods to pass UTF-8 or UTF-16 text.
only two prongs of which make it through. Usually the regulation as I understand is that it's fine if you can prove the case can never get in contact with anything electric, for most laptops that's just being made of plastic.
Just take an apple charger and a multimeter, try to find a path to ground from the computer side, I'll wait. Plugs have regulations on how they can be built which are different from how they must be connected.
The big recess above the pins is what encases the button of the charger and provides grounding if it includes metal strips. Assuming the charger itself has a metal button.
In the EU a grounded cable has been the default forever (I have a grounded cable from my 2010 MBP which I use as travel cable for my 2021 MBP)
Which makes it non-compliant in the UK, and no doubt elsewhere too. I don't understand how Apple (hardly a small fly-by-night!) continues to get away with it.
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