Even when the vehicle is moving and in gear, there's very little actually holding it in gear. Inside the gearbox you've got two shafts, one driven by the engine with geared teeth on it, which meshes with gears that spin freely on bearings on the output shaft. The gears work in pairs, with a brass collar that slides backwards and forwards to lock the spinning gear to the output shaft.
When you put it in first, the brass collar locks the biggest output gear to the shaft, which is driven by the smallest input gear, so you've got a big reduction, and so on - look at the derailleur on your bike, it's the same idea.
There's a semicircular fork that slides on a rod and that rod has notches cut in it, that a ball bearing on a spring clicks into. When you put the gearbox into gear, the click you feel is it jumping into that notch.
But that notch and that pea-sized ball bearing is all that holds it in place!
So you can lift off the throttle a little so the gearbox isn't under tension, push gently on the shaft, and it'll pop into neutral.
If you start it in first gear, you can get some speed up, pop it into neutral, and then if you carefully get the right amount of revs, you can just pop it into second. I don't recommend trying this in a car you plan to keep for a long time, it wears the gearbox quite heavily, but you will be able to do this - with some horrible noises the first few times until you get used to it - and keep your starting and stopping and changing gear to a minimum all the way home, or to a garage.
So now if your clutch cable breaks, you know you can actually get out of the snowstorm and home, or at least somewhere safer.
Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do <this thing>" and then post it up and ask why it doesn't work properly.
But then you've got things like the AI-based animation tools that Corridor Digital used to animate 3D scans of some of the crew's children's toys, to make a Toy Story-like video. It took damn near as long to do as it would have done by hand, because it all still had to be mo-capped and so on, but the results were incredible.
I guess it's similar to how just about anyone can pick up a cheapy flux-core welder and run a seagull-shit bead down a bit of metal, but a very skilled welder could do absolutely pristine work with the same crappy machine.
However, I still don't think it's a good idea to plonk small children down in front of a screen, and have a creepy AI voice read nonsense out to them. While I love the idea of working with the hallucinations of a dreaming computer, because I first read Neuromancer when I was 12 or so and grew up watching things like Blake's 7 with not one but two superintelligent talking computers, the reality is actually not really that good.
No, that would happen if the clutch cable snapped though. I've had this happen on a Vauxhall Astra and a VW Polo (that was actually a hydraulic pipe failing).
No biggie. Just knock it into neutral, brake to a stop, and figure out what to do after that.
Both times once I got it stopped, determined that nothing really bad was happening, and that it was safe-ish to proceed, I just put it in 1st, started it up, and went up through the gears carefully without using the now no longer disengageable clutch until I got home and could look at it properly.
Unscrew the bolts holding the top of the gearbox where the selector mechanism goes, lever the main gear back into place with a long screwdriver, and then use the screwdriver to tap the mainshaft nut around until it's reasonably tight again. Then drive it home where you can fix it properly.
You can build a Citroën 2CV from scratch with entirely new parts - almost - because someone somewhere makes what you need.
About the only mechanical component you can't buy is the gearbox "bucket", presumably because nobody ever breaks those. You can actually get various gearbox upgrades for them which is worth it if you daily one, because the mainshaft nut can slacken off and get you jammed in gear.
Well, I know from my own experience of driving some really quite nice modern EVs they are a far bigger risk to pedestrians than my own car, a 30-year-old Range Rover.
It's really simple.
The Range Rover has you quite high up in the air, and has really big windows with nothing that gets in the way.
The Kia Niro EV that I drive most often has you sitting with your shoulders about level with the bottom of the window, a big long bonnet in front of a steeply-raked windscreen, huge A pillars so you can't see for about 15° either side of the car, and most of your view of pedestrian crossings blocked by a giant "blob" in the upper centre of the windscreen for all the cameras and sensors for things like lane assist.
The only vehicle I regularly use with better visibility of other road users - including pedestrians - than the Range Rover is my bicycle.
The Kia with all its sensors and beepers and flashers and things is like driving a Daimler Ferret through its little periscope.
I don't know how people can drive EVs. They're so stressful.
Those of us who grew up in the 8-bit era would have just typed it in, carefully, in silence, with no-one allowed to enter or leave the room until we were done ;-)
I neither want nor need anything beeping away because it thinks that someone might be driving in the lane beside me, which is what seems to freak the Kias out the most.
I don't want it to suddenly panic brake from 70mph to 30mph because it saw the shadow of the car I'm overtaking on the road.
The Kia Niro EVs I drive at work have something that apparently detects driver fatigue. I don't know what sets it off but it starts beeping at fire alarm levels and makes the huge LCD constantly flash up warnings, usually before I've even left the yard. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn it off or stop it, so you just have to put up with a constant "BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING BING" for the whole journey.
It's very hard to do that when every few seconds some new alarm goes off and some big red flashing warning on the TV screen that's blocking your view of the road comes on.
Both of your points were the very first things I thought reading this.
A Sallen-Key filter is trivially easy to design if you work within certain constraints - a 2-pole Butterworth filter has the feedback capacitor exactly twice the value of the "second" capacitor to ground, if both resistors are the same value. If you pick 10kΩ for both resistors, 1nF for the feedback cap, and 470pF for the cap to ground, then you'll get pretty damn near a Butterworth response (Q of 0.707, maximally flat in the passband and then as fast a transition as possible to the stopband) at around 23kHz.
This is perfect.
And guess what? If you want to scale the cutoff, just scale the component values! If you use 15kΩ resistors you get 15kHz, if you use 22kΩ you get 10kHz, and so on. The minor error in Q will not be audible.
When you put it in first, the brass collar locks the biggest output gear to the shaft, which is driven by the smallest input gear, so you've got a big reduction, and so on - look at the derailleur on your bike, it's the same idea.
There's a semicircular fork that slides on a rod and that rod has notches cut in it, that a ball bearing on a spring clicks into. When you put the gearbox into gear, the click you feel is it jumping into that notch.
But that notch and that pea-sized ball bearing is all that holds it in place!
So you can lift off the throttle a little so the gearbox isn't under tension, push gently on the shaft, and it'll pop into neutral.
If you start it in first gear, you can get some speed up, pop it into neutral, and then if you carefully get the right amount of revs, you can just pop it into second. I don't recommend trying this in a car you plan to keep for a long time, it wears the gearbox quite heavily, but you will be able to do this - with some horrible noises the first few times until you get used to it - and keep your starting and stopping and changing gear to a minimum all the way home, or to a garage.
So now if your clutch cable breaks, you know you can actually get out of the snowstorm and home, or at least somewhere safer.