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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It’s funny. BMW took an opposite approach to everyone else when it comes to EVs. I (mistakenly) thought they would fail.

    Ford, VW, Mercedes, etc. were developing specific platforms for electric vehicles, given that they are different enough architecturally that using the manufacturing processes meant for internal combustion engines wouldn’t be cost efficient. However, after the experiment that the i3 was, BMW decided it was more sensible to just reuse platforms from internal combustion engine vehicles for their new EVs.

    I thought this would be inefficient, besides not taking proper advantage of the packaging wins that an EV architecture allows.

    A few years in, and thanks to their strategy they’ve developed a big range of EVs at a comparatively lower cost. Nobody cares that the i4 doesn’t have a frunk, or that their platform wasn’t purposely designed for EVs. Even if the manufacturing cost is higher, having a smaller upfront cost has allowed them to move faster.

    Kudos to them for their success, even if it comes from playing it safe.




  • The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don’t want iOS’ version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.

    I don’t need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple’s processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel’s offerings are just not competitive and I’m not buying any of them.

    This leaves me with very few options - I’d be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don’t seem to exist.

    And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I’m sticking to that one for now.



  • If only I could install it on the Surface Pro X…

    Damn, they worked so hard to gain goodwill in the last few years and it seems they’ve set out to destroy it in record time.

    WSL and WSL2, Android Apps, working with Qualcomm to get their ARM computers to a credible state, the new Powershell and the push to open source so many things…

    And in the past 12-18 months they’ve been crashing and burning, either backtracking on those things or by starting new initiatives to become scummier and scummier. TPM, Copilot, the ad situation, abusing their position of power with office/teams, the giant safety holes in the Recall feature… But it seems every day there’s something new in the news. It’s never ending.





  • In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

    Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

    To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

    As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).