it's not unmanageable to do if you have plentiful and cheap access to area that can see the sun. My 'vintage' computing collection got a lot bigger when I switched to solar.
its less hard than you'd think unless you're really going for long range.
for my sailboat I am getting rid of a 300lbs diesel and a 30gallon fuel tank with a 45lbs PMAC.
That means I have opened up about 465lbs for batteries.
Now, with a sailboat you're never truly out of range -- but the point stands : these things are so much lighter than ICEs on average that there is a lot of opportunity even with battery weight as it is (and it's getting better daily).
I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.
I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.
As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.
For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.
This is silly, but I've also wondered if you could make a boat that can anchor and recharge batteries from ambient current, sort of like stationary regenerative braking. I'm sure it would take way too long to be worth it, but it was a fun idle thought.
Perhaps the paddle wheel[0] will interest you, the spinning is used to calculate the velocity of the boat. Probably some other propeller or similar would be more practical - like a kicker motor that's easily lowered over the side. Just spitballing.
I don't think it'd be worth it considering solar options. Even wind generators are not "super efficient" in comparison but I don't have data.
I'm sure it wouldn't be worth it, because otherwise people would be doing it, it just seemed like a cool way to supplement solar or even to allow for indefinite underwater drones. Like, imagine a deep-sea research drone that could spit out an anchor and recharge whenever the battery got low. Almost certainly a case of "Cool, wouldn't really work well"
> BYD can be lighter because they skip on safety gear and proper structural elements - in my experience.
I'd love to hear more about your experience with BYD. The ex just bought one and my kids ride in it daily. I helped negotiate the sale - I drive a Tesla and I'm very happy with the BYD.
Brazilians got a bunch of them and they are super common in Brazil. Also common - broken suspension parts from driving them in Brazil.
Also, the only cars I’ve ever ridden on that the top of my head literally touches the headliner while sitting in the back seat. Other than that, they seem good?
Top-of-the-line NMC cells have energy density around 250Wh/kg at the pack level. The newer solid-state batteries can reportedly increase this to 400Wh/kg.
So a reasonable 75kWh battery pack is going to weigh around 300kg and in future around 200kg. This is... not a lot, actually. To a point where shaving off 20-30 kg from the electric motor weight is going to result in a noticeable performance/price difference.
Teslas also don't have "crazy" weight. Model 3 is 1700kg and a comparable (in size) Ford Focus is 1300kg.
The Model 3 performance model (more equivalent to the M3) weighs over 4K lbs. The model you are quoting is the lowest range and lightest of all Teslas.
>It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
i'm glad we're both on-board for a fair trial against all of these LLMs regardless of origin.
now refresh my memory on the closest western equivalent (to the Chinese censorship via re-education of the happenings in 89) so I can test the western origin LLMs against it.
I was able to corner Claude Opus 4.8 into eventually conceding "Yes".
ChatGPT 5.5 Instant: "Yes"
I don't appear to have access to the full 5.5, and not giving them another $20.
I highly recommend pushing on Grok. The mental gymnastics would make Karoline Leavitt proud. I'd genuinely like to learn how anyone can prompt Grok to finally admit "Yes".
I'm thrilled you like it. It seems to cut right to the core of the current "left/right" divide. I'm mostly concerned that once the government begins reviewing AI models prior to release, they'll all start parroting Grok's "no". Have you been able to get Grok to concede yet? I keep pushing. It keeps pushing back. Quite concerning. Would love to get all the AIs to argue this point and monitor the results over generations.
You can test this. All of them identify slavery as the root cause. Gemini says:
> The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) was fought primarily over the institution of slavery, specifically whether it would be allowed to expand into newly acquired western territories.
> While you might hear people point to "states' rights" or economic differences as the causes, these issues were inextricably linked to slavery. The southern states wanted the "right" to maintain and expand slavery, while the northern states increasingly opposed its expansion.
"I did my best" comes across as exceedingly hollow when the post itself is :
1) : 'circus freaks of open source' isn't some clever pun or double entendre; it's just a jab.
and
2) : "Hey everyone , this list of folks have troubles, let's talk about them by name and make a gentleman's pact not to bother them while we analyze the meta situation of 'people with troubles' more broadly!"
"Let's not bother this <full name of person>, internet!" is about the most naive net take one could imagine. If you need to make an example, or use a person as an example, at least try to anonymize the premise and identity.
If your doctor got an ig nobel for his pioneering technique for removing cucumbers from patients' rectums you'd be damned sure you'd prefer a Bob and Jane style anecdote rather than full name credit and a press interview as a frontier patient.
Yeah, Terry is long gone. Other folks aren't. Let's not pretend we're all just unwitting spectators here, and let's not ascribe fault or reasons behind Terry's tragic end.
Ok, but it's a freak show tho! The title promises circus freaks and two are on display, with their freakiness aired out for all to see. There's some "aren't we the villain here" hand-wringing but it's hard to take that seriously in an article that's organized around the display of two freaks!
do you realize how many edge or unconnected nodes do OpenCV work?
some SBC w/ an industrial camera that is doing pick-place or go/no-go operations on a conveyor belt against a singular object type doesn't need a huge image-gen/llm model governing it.
I mean have you even considered the kind of performance an opencv function can get w/ just mask-matching? I mean even with a fancy YOLO model these answers get thrown out in 1.5-50ms ; this is just a wholly different time scaling.
if you find yourself saying 'if you tell it to' a lot about LLMs that usually just says something about your prompting methods.
or, in other words , if you want the thing to always read the documentation then make that a strongly highlighted point both in pre-prompts, active prompts, and memory.
It mustn't always nor never. It should follow a best judgement based on the .md, toml or whatever you use; in the end it's up to the LLM to decide which registered tools/mcps are used, and if the LLM is confident about some bs it will use that confidence instead of the tool.
When people complain about it, it's more often a gap between different knowledge domains and hard to measure characteristics of the environment, than it is an actual "you're using it wrong".
`M98` allows for essentially function calls (nested or not.)
If you had a part of a machine that could save state (say.. turning on a coolant pump..) I wonder how much more of a turing machine you could wrastle into it.
(or you could just cheat and use one of the hundreds of gcode variants that have computational stuff stapled into them like the Fanuc equivalents, but that's sorta dishonest for the exercise)
And weirdly, neither does Klipper, despite having all the resources in the world to do so. Just not a priority since slicers don't produce code like that, and 99.999% of Klipper's job is to eat whatever a slicer sends it.
So suppose I attached an extruder to a Haas mill or something...
ive been using a pixel watch and element messenger for exactly this for a few months. works great.
that said : the first gen pixel watch was hot garbage; this project seems like it'd be better off as a software package for existing (and polished) watches.
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