I really enjoy how Julia handles images. The abstractions really streamline developing image processing algorithm that are independent of pixel representation. Like so much of Julia, the first time I saw it, my mind was warped. Julia is worth learning if just for all the clever design choices.
If the drive isn't encrypted, is it possible that controllers use some kind of encoding to balance out the number of bits, so that there's not a long run of 0s or 1s?
And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it, you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor children die of preventable causes.
This is just the lazy comment of someone who believes all the right-wing propaganda about government. In my experience, government employees take pride in doing a job worth doing and doing it well.
I don't care about dated looks. I do find MS Office's pressure to use OneDrive frustrating and annoying. Honestly, older UIs for office suite products just feel more direct and responsive than the clever ribbon bars. Excel used to be svelte (25 years ago or more...) Now it feels bloated and clumsy. LibreOffice Calc (same parentage as Collabora Office) feels more like Excel used to feel. Similar complaints about Word.
Hopefully, in coming years, we will see more practically designed EVs that are more affordable. A practical car doesn't need neck-snapping acceleration, every bell-and-whistle and room for a family of six with a dog. I'd like to believe that as batteries cost drop, the incentive to justify the extra cost will drop. Then we can get back to "just basic transportation" rather than a luxury product for the rich. While $31k isn't exactly cheap, the base new Leaf is heading the right direction.
At this point most EVs are exactly the way you describe and Tesla is an outlier.
Look at Hyundai/Kia’s lineup. The Niro, EV6, and EV9 are essentially the three major segments of American car preferences. They aren’t particularly fast or exotic.
They don’t really cost a whole lot more to buy/own than alternatives in the same segment especially on a monthly payment or buying one used, they just aren’t chosen at a high rate compared to gas powered alternatives.
Tesla just used the neck-snapping acceleration to market EVs by cool factor rather than by economics. And that was a smart idea to get people in showrooms.
Cheap crossovers and compact SUVs tend to be >8s. In practice even that makes them sound faster than they are, as they require an aggressive launch and consistent high RPMs to get there.
This has always been true of gas vehicles as well. They're banned for not having some safety feature or otherwise complying with FMVSS or some other regularity body, not because they are "affordable".
The US gave $7500 per car sold in the US to any manufacturer, with the "Buy American" restriction added only in the last two years of the policy.
I'm also curious to hear your source for the subsidies - from what I can see China has spent anywhere from 3x to 5x propping up the domestic EV industry as the US has over the last 15 years. The US had Tesla which almost went bankrupt multiple times despite the subsidies; China has a dozen EV manufacturers, half of whom are on life support now that the government is withdrawing subsidies.
The Chinese spent more money on an absolute basis, yes. They gave less per car, but built > 10x as many cars, so your number of 3-5x sounds about right.
The best source IMO is the commission that came up with the European countervailing duty of 17%.
I think that it is reasonable for the magnitude of Chinese subsidies to be cheaper per-car. Even ignoring any arguments about purchasing power and government aid, I would expect China to spend less per-car simply because the foundational technical problems in building a good consumer EV had already been addressed by the time they got started.
I'm not trying to attack the impressiveness of the Chinese EV industry, because it's going to be an important part of the future. But saying that Chinese EVs are banned in the US purely because they are too good is incomplete. A big part of why they are banned, and why the US and China have such a frosty relationship, is because Chinese trade tactics are not fair to non-state-backed competitors.
Chinese EV development started in 2001. They started from a clean sheet.
Your point about fairness is interesting because that's a position the US has given up on, especially since 2025. The European EV tariffs of 17/34 percent are fair-ish. The 100% American tariffs never were
That is insane. Smaller vehicles are safer at a social level because they do less damage when they hit something - especially a pedestrian. Regulatory bodies should be encouraging them for that reason alone (let alone all the others).
Manufacturers might prioritise the safety of their customers, and people are likely to care more about their own safety than that of others, but regulators should be looking at overall public safety which is definitely improved by encouraging small cars.
The regulatory bodies aren't specifically discriminating against smaller vehicles, they're discriminating against vehicles that haven't proven safety to passengers in crash tests acceptable to the FMVSS. The vehicles may or may not also be missing mandatory internal safety features like airbags in all the right spots, etc.
If Chinese EV manufacturers put their vehicles through these tests, include all the mandatory features, and strip out the forbidden telemetry (certain manufacturers are banned in the US for reporting to the CCP- most notably but not exclusive to Huawei) then they too can be sold here.
If anything is preventing Chinese EVs from the US market, it's almost certainly their electronic components.
This is likely confounded by the dealership model. Dealers have practically zero incentive to sell affordable cars, and especially not EVs that they’ll make almost no servicing money on. Some dealers also stock only a handful of EVs (or none) so they may not even have them to sell in the first place.
It’d be nice if affordable EV models were available from direct to consumer companies. If one could go online and buy a $22k electric hatchback that shows up in your driveway with zero haggling, it’s difficult to imagine it not selling well.
Yes, pretty much. The torque curve also slopes down as rpm increases, so an EV with really weak low end torque will feel really bad on the highway.
Having said that, there are some that are fairly mediocre without being completely terrible. The FWD Equinox EV as well as the FWD EV9 are acceptable to some people, but also pretty slow cars.
One, as you noted, is that electric motors can apply full torque from a stop, increasing perceived acceleration.
The other, and more impactful, is that electric motor power scales with cost much more cheaply than gas motors, so vehicles will oversize their electric motors.
There's a third factor. Ev's need to support fast charging. So they need to do support super high voltages and currents. That's much of the expense of a powerful EV. A powerful motor is relatively inexpensive in comparison.
If you can charge a car in 20 minutes, the battery and some other circuitry can support discharging in 20 minutes, which is an insane power level.
That's not exactly true. There is some shared wiring between the DC fast charger and the motors, but not so much that the powerful motors are "free". The wires that run between the motors and the battery are long.
I think the larger third factor is regenerative braking. That uses the exact same circuitry as powering the motors, and if you want to be able to brake quickly without the brake pads, that's a lot of kW to be absorbed.
Any way you cut it, I agree, it's an insane power level.
A powerful motor needs more copper between the battery and motor and more silicon in the inverter to handle the current. The motor is also heavier. This is all extra cost.
All that fast DC charging requires are cells capable of handling the current.
You don't get a powerful motor for free just because you can fast charge.
My 2019 Hyundai Kona has a 150kw FWD motor. I love my car, but it's power is totally and utterly stupid. I can spin my wheels while going 60km/h and flooring it. It can be downright dangerous in the wet. Thank dog for traction control I need to drive it in 'eco' mode most of the time in order to make the ride feel sane.
I think a motor with half the output would still result in a great ride, but the car would've been cheaper/lighter.
Newer EV's come out with much smaller motors it seems, which makes sense to me.
This is a great example of the "I wonder if I could"-kind of research. It doesn't have to be practical. I doubt the authors intend it as a viable security product. It is the kind of "just playing around" thinking that can sometimes lead to brilliant insights. Keep up the good work.
A handful of the comments are skeptical of the utility of this method. I can tell you as a physical scientist, it is common to make the same measurement with a number of measuring devices of differing precision. (e.g. developing a consensus standard using a round-robin.) The technique Cook suggests can be a reasonable way to combine the results to produce the optimal measured value.
I'm not a physical scientist, but I spend a lot of time assessing the performance of numerical algorithms, which is maybe not totally dissimilar to measuring a physical process with a device. I've gotten good results applying Simple and Stupid statistical methods. I haven't tried the method described in this article, but I'm definitely on the lookout for an application of it now.
I wonder if this minimum variance approach of averaging the measurements agrees with the estimate of the expected value we'd get from a Bayesian approach, at least in a simple scenario, say a uniform prior over the thing we're measuring and assume that our two measuring devices have unbiased errors described by normal distributions.
At least in the mathematically simpler scenario of a gaussian prior and gaussian observations, the posterior mean is computed by weighing by the the inverses of variances (aka precisions) just like this.
To add, for anyone who's followed the link - that's entries numbers 1 and 2, or "Normal with known variance σ²" and Normal with known precision τ", under "When likelihood function is a continuous distribution".
Also, note that the "precision" τ is defined as 1/σ².
It is worth noting that the research that Martinis is being awarded the Nobel prize was largely performed while at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), part of the Dept of Commerce.
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