Thevenin @ Thevenin @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

It mostly depends on speed. Need to go 500km at 70kph? Easy. Most EVs can do that. 500km at 120kph? Not so much. If you need the latter, I'd recommend looking at PHEVs.

(Temperature also plays a role, but it's less significant than speed, especially with all the heat pumps these days.)

Windows 11 needs Secure Boot and/or TPM workarounds, and while Linux is better than it used to be, but it still hates peripherals. Only 5% of Americans work in the tech industry. Fry cooks and forklift operators often lack the education needed to find these workarounds, and are too busy and tired making ends meet to seek out that education.

In the modern corporate environment, most companies would rather replace their machines wholesale than risk unplanned downtime due to unforeseen glitches. They apply the principles of preventative maintenance to IT.

I like Linux (Mint is good stuff), and I believe in what it stands for. But the human desire for simplicity, reliability, and familiarity should never be construed as a lack of virtue.

Anderson v Griswold (this case) is a civil lawsuit that started Oct 30 in CO district court under judge Sarah B. Wallace. This case involved opposing arguments over whether or not Trump engaged 8n insurrection. There was no jury.

Judge Wallace ruled (and CO supreme court later upheld) that Trump engaged in insurrection. The standard for burden of proof in this ruling was "clear and convincing," (see supreme court ruling) which is somewhere between "beyond a reasonable doubt" (the standard for criminal cases) and a "preponderance of the evidence" (>50% chance of the accused being responsible). Clear and convincing evidence is typically used in discrimination and fraud lawsuits.

Trump's latest comments about "vermin," "retribution," "day-one dictator," and "poisoning the blood" have hit Associated Press, NPR, Reuters, and BBC, who have responded matter-of-factly by comparing to it to the rhetoric of Nazis and Mussolini. Mein Kampf got name-dropped more than once.

I am also seeing coverage from CNN, ABC, USNews, USAToday, and NBCNews.

Now, which media you consider mainstream, and what kind of coverage you consider adequate can change the answer. I don't know what they're saying on TV, for example. But when even Forbes runs a front-page article which compares Trump's rhetoric to Hitler's in the first paragraph, I'd say there's no lack of mainstream coverage, and they're not dancing around the issue anymore.

You're not alone there. America's fragile social safety nets and minimal workers' rights mean we're all one bad day away from being in your position.

• Chemo can cost $50k, and FMLA exists (somehow) but only covers 3 months. A cancer diagnosis could easily wipe out six figures of savings.
• Most employers require prompt attendance, so a car crash that leaves you dependent on America's crumbling public transit systems will likely lead to losing your job.
• The GOP is trying to kill off Social Security, so if you ever want to retire, you might have to save twice as much as what's traditionally advised.
• With climate change being what it is, losing your house to a hurricane or wildfire is a much bigger threat than it used to be.
• Economic swings, downsizing, and "k-shaped recoveries" can make jobs vanish or become unsustainable without warning.

Even for the top 10%, saving for these contingencies typically precludes a wealthy lifestyle, particularly for younger people with fewer savings. There's now an entire demographic of (mostly millenial) Americans with traditionally high-paying jobs who still live at or below middle-class aspirations due to saving: HENRY, or High Earner, Not Rich Yet.

This.

Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.

The bugs currently plaguing me include:

• Steam's UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
• Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
• Discord won't share audio during screen sharing anymore.

But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:

• Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
• Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
• Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
• Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
• Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
• Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
• Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
• Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.

For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that's mostly because I'm lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.

The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.

"Help, I can't afford rent!" -> "Buy a house, stupid."

"Help, this software is buggy and unintuitive!" -> "Try using buggier and more unintuitive software, stupid."

Seems like a solid metaphor to me.

The absolute easiest way would be to 3D print the whole thing, leaving slots for steel rods to reinforce the frame.

The cooler way would be to just 3D print the rim and make the back and front plates out of laser-cut aluminum. There are laser-cutting services if you don't have one of your own.

If you don't have access to a 3D printer, you might consider brass. Unlike aluminum, brass can be folded or hammered into shape, so the front and sides of the tablet could be made from one folded and soldered/brazed sheet, with ports and vents cut with hand tools. I wouldn't call this easier though -- you'll need some practice to keep it from looking sloppy.

I'd recommend taking some inspiration from cyberdeck builds and other custom electronics enclosures. https://youtu.be/qzEd50uzdF0?si=6Bk1-QPlVcoNRcVO https://youtu.be/DrqdHVeBkp4?si=1sqfqUsp66He2bS5

To answer the (probably rhetorical) question of what the hell the Biden administration is doing:

The good:

• The US is back in the Paris agreement.
• The IRA put $369b into renewables. While most people know about the individual tax credits for things like residential heat pumps, solar panels, and EVs, the bulk of this went into building the industry itself with ITC and PTC. For example, there are tax credits for everything from building solar inverters to hiring apprentices. There are also special allocations for underserved communities.
• The IIJA (formerly part of BBB, now in the BIL) put $1t into sustainability. Some highlights include $102b for passenger and freight rail, $91b for public transit, $38b for pedestrian/cyclist safety, and $7.5b for fleet EVs (school busses) and the charging for them. There are also allocations for underserved communities, particularly with local pollution cleanup.
• In late 2022, the EU commission president warned that the IRA and IIJA were not just effective, but so much more significant than any other nation's incentives that they were diverting investment from around the globe. They warned that the US could soon have a monopoly on green tech.
• Anecdotally, I work in the energy infrastructure industry, and I'm seeing utilities and cities reinforce their grids at a staggering pace, preparing for the engineering challenges of renewables. It feels like we're in the middle of something big, like people in charge are taking the problem seriously for the first time in my life and making concrete progress.

The bad:

• The Willow oil project. If fully utilized, this enormous drilling operation will increase US emissions by 4%. There is no reason for this move except a cynical vote grab.
• Lease Sale 259. These offshore drilling sites could increase US emissions by 0.7% to 8% depending who you ask. This is believed to be a deal made to secure sen. Mancin's vote on the IRA.
• LNG and oil exports to Asia and the EU. This one's hard for me to quantify.
• Mountain Valley Pipeline. This pipeline should increase emissions by 0.2%. MVP claims it will offset the carbon, but... nah, they won't.

The ugly:

• Biden is all carrot, no stick. He believes that sustainable tech will naturally outcompete fossil fuels if provided enough of a head start. But you and I know fossil capital demands profit from the infrastructure it's built, and there's no way they'll play fair once they start noticing they're losing. We need to be prepared to make enemies.
• Getting leverage to force China to decarbonize is going to be an issue. The IRA and CHIPS act are repatriating industries specifically to reduce China's geopolitical influence, but they're also creating tension with US allies. Instead of focusing purely on domestic production, Biden needs to be building a trade alliance based on climate compliance. But that won't score votes.
• The electoral outlook ain't great. Only 31% of American adults think we should be phasing out fossil fuels completely. Only 37% think climate change should be a top priority. Fully 14% think climate change is a hoax, and another 26% think it's mostly natural. Laws that treat climate change like the existential threat it is simply don't have public support. I'd say this sounds like an outreach problem, but I'm absolutely the wrong person to ask about public outreach.

Tailpipe emissions? No. Round-trip emissions? Yes.

Biofuel sucks CO2 from the atmosphere while the plants or algae grow, then releases it again when the fuel is burned. It's net-zero in the literal sense. They only have a GHG footprint if fossil fuels are used during the processing. In the US for example, during the processing of corn into ethanol, they burn natural gas for heat because it's convenient and cheap. So the GHG footprint of American corn ethanol is approximately the same as gasoline.

Make no mistake, this is a publicity stunt and you shouldn't expect Virgin Atlantic to follow through. But SAF is feasible.

Cost: Currently, according to Argus Media, SAF is around $6.69/gal compared to $2.85/gal for jet fuel. Jet fuel accounts for between 15% and 20% of airline operating costs per US BTS reports. So using SAF would increase operating costs by 22-35%. Given that airfare fluctuates around 20% depending on whether or not it's a tuesday, that's actually not bad at all. (Also, I think the airlines could fully absorb that price increase if it weren't for the deadweight of shareholders, stock value manipulation, and executive bonuses.)

Scaling: Despite how hard America tries, there's only so much used fry oil. Biofuel needs farmland, and there isn't enough farmland to serve the automotive sector. Given typical yields, we would need about 373m acres of biofuel farmland, which is every last inch of unused farmable land the US has. But aviation is a different story. According to the EIA, the US uses 8.81 million barrels of gasoline a day, 2.98 mb/d of diesel, but only 1.5mb/d of jet fuel. That's an order of magnitude less fuel, and an order of magnitude less farmland.

Sustainability: This one's trickier. Biofuel doesn't need to be produced using fossil fuels, but usually is. The US's 893m acres of farmland produce only 10.6% of our GHG emissions. I think the biggest concerns would be increased water, pesticide, and herbicide usage. I am also not sure of the impacts on other nations with different geography or agricultural potential. I am not well-equipped to quantify those impacts.

Some of the chronic problems for 5E mitigated by pacing:

• Short rest / long rest balance. Classes which recharge spells or abilities on a long rest rather than a short rest tend to be noticeably stronger. But if you add just a little time pressure, you'll notice your players take fewer long rests and more short rests, kind of "soft correcting" the problem.
• Martial / caster divide. Time pressure cannot fix this balance issue, but it helps. Martial characters usually do not need to stop as often as casters, so their ability to press on when others are exhausted becomes valuable again.
• Spell duration and ritual casting. Without time pressure, there's no reason to not use ritual casting, and a 10-minute spell is usually inferior to a 1-minute spell. But if your players are moving through a dungeon at a steady clip, that 10-minute spell now easily covers two encounters instead of one, and the group may not want to stop for the ritual casting of a spell.
• The "pile-on" phenomenon. If one player with +6 to athletics tries to lift a DC18 trapdoor, there's a 45% chance of success. But there's nothing in 5E saying a party of 5 adventurers can't just take turns trying the same check. 5x adventurers with +0 to athletics have a 55.63% chance of opening that same trap door. Even worse, there's nothing saying one persistent adventurer can't just repeatedly try an ability check until they succeed. Now, the wizard with -1 strength has a 100% chance to open the trap door (eventually). This trivializes ability checks. Trying to arbitrate why players can't try more than once is possible, but taxing. But if instead you just give them a little time pressure, the players tend to spend their limited time doing things that are more likely to succeed first try, and they're definitely not going to sit around and wait for the guy with -1 strength to beat the strength puzzle.
• The "point-and-click-adventure" problem. Sometimes, players get a little tunnel-vision while trying to solve an obstacle, and they do that thing where they try every object in their inventory like it's Monkey Island. 5E is particularly vulnerable to this because the crunchy ruleset makes players think there's a "right" answer to a problem (with published books, that's often true), but the unstructured nature of the adventures make it unclear what that answer is. This murders dramatic tension and narrative momentum. But with a little time pressure, players will respond to time-consuming distractions by saying, "Gee, there's got to be a better way," and they'll inevitably gravitate towards more intuitive solutions that make sense in the context of the adventure.

I am addicted to bullet points, lol.

There are other chronic problems with 5E that aren't solved by good pacing -- the social and exploration pillars are bizarrely underdeveloped with no gameplay loops and this leaves combat with an over-emphasized role, wilderness survival and overworld travel are such a chore that everybody skips them, stealth mechanics are self-contradictory, crafting explicitly boils down to "the DM makes something up," some magic items are ridiculously powerful/useless for their rarity, the random loot drops are extremely random, the random encounters in the published adventure books are almost exclusively deathmatches, they never should have gotten rid of "out of combat turns," the list goes on.

I would generally categorize these as balance problems (balance between pillars of adventuring is a kind of balance). And I'll repeat that you shouldn't trouble yourself with solving them. If you're used to 3.5, then all you really need to do is follow your instincts for how a D&D session should feel, and don't think to hard about anything I just told you.

Correct, Kandi wasn't involved in this article, it's just another documented example of this kind of behavior.

RPGs are about fulfillment, continuity, pacing, challenge, and balance -- in that order.

• Fulfillment: Listen to what your players talk about before the session starts to get a feel for what keeps them coming back. Sometimes it's plot. Sometimes it's leveling up. Sometimes it's wacky irreverent hijinks. You don't have to be Brennan Lee Mulligan. You may not even need different voices for NPCs. Sometimes, all you need is a bag of chips and a Deck of Many Things and your players will think you're Shakespeare.
• Continuity: Anything important gets written down, and anything written down is important. When you ask a player to write something down, it signals to them what kinds of skills and resources are relevant in the kind of game you're running. For example, I don't tell my players to track how many torches they have, but I do ask them to write down if they've learned a new song or made a new friend -- and just by hearing that, you already know what kind of game I run.
• Pacing: Anything important has a deadline, and anything with a deadline is important. Without getting too specific, a lot of D&D 5E's chronic problems get mitigated if there's just a hint of a time crunch.
• Challenge: Set expectations and stakes for each quest. Try to communicate the anticipated rewards for success, consequences for failure, and risks along the way. This lets the players choose their own level of difficulty and stress, and gives them the agency of abandoning a quest.
• Balance: Honestly... don't think about balance yet. Balance between classes or pillars of adventuring is something only the most experienced DMs can do without getting overwhelmed.

China's system is technically communism in the same way the Bud Light is technically beer.

"No frills" might be a bit gentle.

Judging by other companies with similar outcomes, these are likely products made to meet the minimum legal definition of "vehicle," and usually nonfunctional or minimally functional. The companies that built the "vehicles" often sell them to themselves (or rideshare subsidiaries), cashed in the Chinese tax credit, and immediately discard them. For an example of this in action, see the SEC filings and investigative articles around Kandi's fake sales figures. Also see Out of Spec's Kandi K27 review for what I mean when I say "nonfunctional."

The silver lining is that since the discarded EVs are basically made of tin foil with tiny batteries, it's not as bad of a waste of natural resources as you might expect.

Sodium-ion chemistry, material sourcing, and manufacturing techniques are still in flux. Longevity is still an issue. They're still a breakthrough innovation, not a solved problem.

As it turns out, capitalism is better at driving iteration than innovation. Research into groundbreaking tech is expensive, risky, and the benefits tend to be spread out over entire industries, so private investors find it difficult to capitalize on (read: privatize) the benefits.

There is still investment in optimizing NMC and LFP batteries not because "big lithium" has its hooks in people, but because low-risk patentable iterative improvement is all the private sector is really good for.

This is why, if you dig deep enough, almost every "world-changing" technology you use today has its roots in government research or grants -- microchips (US Air Force and NASA), accelerometers (Sandia Natl Labs, NASA), GPS (US DOD), touchscreens (Oak Ridge Natl Labs), the internet (ARPA), and even the lithium battery itself (NASA). The list goes on, and it gets particularly impressive when you look at medical breakthroughs.

Today, the US DOE has its net spread wide, funding dozens of different battery chemistries. Argonne Natl Lab is working on Na-ion right now, among others. For mostly political reasons, US-funded research doesn't "pick winners," so they won't ever truly go all-in on one tech.

TL;DR: Na-ion batteries are still a breakthrough technology, so expect funding/research from state actors like the DOE or CATL to push it over the line before the private-sector investment floodgates open.

I played the Mystic class, briefly. I made a martial-focused build, and the DPR was very close to Warlocks and Paladins. The nova abilities were effective but expensive, comparable to smites. Using psi points to put the exact amount of oomph I wanted into an ability was a ton of fun and turned into a threat-analysis minigame -- very thematic for an intelligence caster.

Where the Mystic went nuts was the infinite toolbelt. The best way to explain this is through raw numbers. A level 5 Wizard -- the de facto swiss army knife of D&D -- can have 4 cantrips and 9 spells prepared, plus 1-2 freebie abilities. A level 5 Mystic could have 2 talents, 5 disciplines (each with about 4 active options and 1 focus), plus 1-3 freebies.

In other words, a Mystic could have 30 abilities to a Wizard's 15. And it shows. While playing, I quickly realized that I had a solution to every single situation. And as fun as it is to be the guy with the shark repellent spray, it's pretty obviously bad game design.

I think ultimately what I really wanted was an intelligence-based Paladin.

Other mildly interesting details:

• Touchscreen controls for everything. Boo.
• Made in China, but Geely appears to be doing an unusually good job at keeping its manufacturing generally unproblematic. Volvo also independently monitors the material sourcing for their batteries.
• It's very close in size to the VW Golf (EX30: 167x72×61 inches, Golf: 168x71x58 inches). For our friends across the pond, it is hard to overstate how rare vehicles this small are becoming in the US. Out of the 162 new/refreshed vehicles released in the US 2018-2022 (according to KBB), only 14 or so were this size or smaller -- and that's being generous, I'm including things like the Toyota C-HR.
• Volvo dodged the 27.5% tariffs with a rarely-used bylaw: they export more product from the US to China than vice versa, so they don't have to pay the tariffs on the few things they do import.

Since the MSRP of the Core trim comes in just under $35k, the EX30 is eligible for a much wider array of state and local rebates, even though it's not eligible for federal tax credits.

https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/electric-vehicle-rebates-by-state/