avar · HackerTrans

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

CYR3S, if we're going to add Roadster and Semi, both of which are allegedly still in development.

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

You already have it. Musk's earliest promise of a $30k price point appears to be an interview in September 2009: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2009/09/25/teslas-elon-musk-on-...

Adjusted for inflation, $30k then is around $45k now. Tesla sells a Model 3 for just over $35k.

It doesn't make any sense to hold someone to a promise like that and not adjust it for inflation. I think you can legitimately complain that he didn't meet the timeline he was aiming for.

avar

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

3YC is the new S3XY.

avar

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

    > This may highlight to some folks abroad
    > the importance of the US's 2nd Amendment,
    > and an armed civilian population

British India, the USSR, East Germany, Francoist Spain, Apartheid South Africa, Communist Romania etc. etc. The 20th century is full of repressive regimes with even more repressive gun laws that fell due to protests etc.

The idea that everyone can show up at the protest with their AR-15, somehow defeat the state's security forces in armed combat, and that the result will be some enlightened republic is an American fantasy, informed by what's at best a selective reading of American history.

If it comes to that you're much more likely to end up under some warlord. Afghanistan and especially Africa are full of people who are well armed and where exactly that's happened more often than not.

avar

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

    > The one thing I'll want is what we'll never
    > get which is just making it easier to delete
    > e-mails in bulk.

This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".

"Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.

But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too".

Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries.

Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.

avar

hace 6 mesesdiscuss

    > Steve Jobs himself envisioned a
    > web app future as the future of[...]

I'm not putting cynical motivations past Apple, but you're reading too much (or too little?) into what Jobs said at the time.

His remarks at the time of the initial iPhone release (with the benefit of hindsight) were clearly because they weren't ready to expose any sort of native API's.

Pissing on you and telling you it's raining was typical Jobs reality distortion field marketing, and not an indication that he actually believed it was raining.

avar

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

    > the novel V2 rocket weapons
    > that killed an average of 2
    > civilians per launch

That's positively humanitarian in the context of WWII. Can you name any other weapon system developed during that war which had such a low civilian casualty rate, adjusted for the money spent on it?

avar

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

    > he also addressed the packing problem, saying[...]

If we're going to take this "packing problem" a tad more seriously, then the notion that someone might spend on the order of $2.5 billion on micro-SD cards for their station wagon (assuming 1TB at $100/card), but isn't in a position to contact an SD card manufacturer to solve this problem for them is a bit absurd.

avar

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

Fascinating, I wasn't aware of that. They still offer an "AWS Snowball", which is 200 TB instead of 100 PB, but around the size of half a full size suitcase instead of a semi truck. You then ship that back and forth.

If you need 100 PB then moving 500 of those around seems a lot easier for everyone involved than managing a special snowflake truck.

avar

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

I tried setting that up, but now the trucker's union is refusing to talk to me, citing concerns that the platters will all spin up due to road vibration, derailing the truck in a ditch due to the cumulative gyroscopic forces.

They remain unconvinced that chatGPT has told me it "should be fine", and have inquired as to whether I don't have better things to do than trying to win increasingly obscure and contrived arguments on HN. Please advise.

avar

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

Actually a shipping container full of micro-SD cards hurtling down the highway has lower overall bandwidth than a 56k modem.

That's because whoever's attempting to load an ideal 400 million micro-SD cards into one will take approximately forever carefully trying to line up even one row of them on the floor of a shipping container, before having the whole thing fall over like dominoes.

And even if they manage that, the whole thing will tumble over once they need to deal with the first row of the container's side corrugation. Nobody at the department of Spherical Cows in Vacuums thought to account for those dimensions[1] not lining up with the size of micro-SD cards.

If they do manage some approximation of this it'll take forever just to drive this down the road, let alone get the necessary permits to take the thing on the highway.

Turns out not a lot of semi truck trailers or roads are prepared to deal with a 40 ft container weighing around 100 metric tons (the weight of one packed to the brim with sand, a close approximation).

The good news is that such transportation gets more fuel efficient the longer the trip is.

The bad news is that the container will arrive mostly empty, as it's discovered that shipping container door panel gaps and road vibrations conspire to spread a steady stream of micro-SD cards behind you the entire way there.

Commuters in snowy areas held up behind the slowly moving "OVERSIZED LOAD!" with a mandatory police escort wonder if it's a trial for a new type of road salt that makes a pleasant crunchy sound as you drive over it.

Finally, an attempt to recover the remaining data fails. The sharding strategy chosen didn't account for failure due to road salt ingression into the container, cards at the bottom of the container being crushed to dust by the weight of those above, or that the leased container hadn't been thoroughly cleaned since last transporting, wait, what is that smell?

1. https://www.discovercontainers.com/wp-content/uploads/contai...

avar

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

    > This is rare enough that I'm pushing the recovery
    > of it up near the top of my project queue.

The reader is left to wonder what the software librarian at the Computer History Museum could have possibly found recently that warrants a placement ahead of Unix v4 in their project queue. A copy of Atlantian Unix from the ancient Library of Alexandria?

avar

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

    > how does Tesla know repairs
    > have been made after a minor
    > accident?

Speculation: It was brought to Tesla after an accident, which inspected it, and quoted a repair price the owner didn't like, so his cousin Bob fixed it, but it's still marked as "HV needs inspection/repair" in Tesla's system?

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Neywiny's comment upthread isn't that you should use these without a BMS, but that the review is relatively less useful because it's stopping testing at a relatively high voltage. E.g. if you search for "panasonic_ncr18650b.pdf" you'll find that Panasonic's own datasheets use a cutoff of 2.5v.

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Some of us enjoy fixing things like these over and above the hypothetically fungible billable hour, and whether you can substitute some time in an evening with a billable hour or three is highly dependent on your employment situation.

But in this case the relevant cost under discussion isn't that of a replacement vacuum cleaner, but what value you assign to your house not burning down due to a crappy 18650 cell, or the anxiety of worrying that that'll happen.

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

This may not be what you're asking, but it's rather trivial if you're setting up an SMTP gateway that proxies traffic to another SMTP that handles the IP address reputation management etc.

E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like piping to mail(1) etc.

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

    > How do you even drain a 3.7V lithium
    > ion battery below 3.3V?

Connect the + and - terminals with an appropriately sized resistor, it'll drain all the way to 0V.

    > My devices that use 18650s will
    > not let them go below that.

Because you're not using the + and - terminals, you're using the + and - supply of a BMS, which is connected to those terminals. For this sort of testing you need to bypass the BMS, which'll have its own voltage cutoffs.

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

You also have the option of building your own battery pack for these, or to disassemble an existing pack and replacing the cells. How difficult that is depends on the manufacturer, but from a quick look at the Neato packs I see it looks relatively trivial.

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

    > Technically it expensive because demand exceed supply.

How prices are determined in general isn't relevant to your claim that something is "very expensive currently because of X".

    > with the war that source was cut off

What war was going on in August 2024 that wasn't going on in September and October 2024?

I don't see why you're insisting on this passive and inaccurate description.

Someone unfamiliar with this might infer that Russia considered Helium a strategic asset and forbade its export, when the reality is that to the extent that your initial claim is in any way relevant to Helium prices, it's the other way around: The EU forbade the import of Russian helium.

avar

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

I'm aware of your and the GP's claim, I'm saying it doesn't survive contact with reality.

If you look at e.g. the per-dose price of insulin it's as low or lower in countries with single-payer universal systems, where someone requiring insulin is never going to have any idea what it even costs, because it's just something that's provided for them should they need it.

In that case it's usually some centralized state purchaser that has an incentive to bring prices down, or a government that has an overall incentive to keep the inflation of its budgetary items down, which ultimately comes down to public elections etc.

In any case, a much more indirect mechanism than someone who'd be directly affected paying the costs associated with the product, which directly contradicts this particular argument.

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