The 400 km in 5 minutes figure relies on finding a charger that can consistently deliver 1 MW; a prominent UK YouTuber just reported being unable to find a public charger that can consistently exceed 100 kW in all the years he's been testing electric cars.
As much as I think that electric cars are the future - and my next car will be one - there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be put in place and improved before they can reach their advertised potential, just as there was for petroleum-powered cars.
I can't speak for the UK, but with my Model 3 2019 I was charging <10% to 30% @ 250kW (max the car supports) for a good 5+m in Switzerland and Italy already 4 years ago (both at Tesla Superchargers V3 and Ionity 350kW public chargers).
Of course the charger is not the only limiting factor, the grid also needs to support it. If you're in a small town with no big shops/industry, you're way less likely to have 1+MW cables installed, there was never a need for such peak capacity before.
I don’t doubt that’s true in the UK and Europe but this is a Chinese company at a Chinese car expo so I’d imagine that these chargers are popping up all over China.
Maybe one day the rest of the world will catch up?
Exporting their cars to Europe, Australia and New Zealand is a big part of BYD's business model; charging availability in those markets is not a fringe issue for them.
There are more than fifty EV marques competing for market share in China, and as per recent FT reporting, the Chinese government continues to subsidise the formation of new EV manufacturers. These companies have no option other than to be export-led businesses.
For now, most of the 1-MW chargers are located in China, where they have been installed during the last half of year or so.
Therefore there is no wonder that none could be found in UK.
Because BYD and other companies have announced plans to sell such cars in the EU, I assume that they will also promote the installation of such chargers wherever they export their cars.
But I would expect that some years will pass until such chargers could become available everywhere.
That 100kW claim seems pretty unlikely, or maybe it's UK only? Driving long distance in Europe I see the max ~230kW charging of the car everywhere apart from the rare times the charger's broken.
Actually, although UK provision is pretty bad, I got 235kW sustained last week in some small charging station off the M4.
The word "consistently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and most of the limiting will be on the car side for average cars and average chargers.
e.g. a Hyundai Ioniq 5 might charge at above 200kW up to around 45% peaking around 260kW on a 300kW charger then taper down to about 50kW at 80% full.
But that's a relatively good car for charging, many others won't push the older, lower spec chargers that are only advertising 100-150kW to their max (which might actually be from a low of 90 to a high of 175 on the charger side).
Some chargers display whether the car or the charger is limiting the rate as people often inaccurately blame the charger.
This new BYD car, on a standard high speed charger is likely to flatline the existing 350kW chargers up to near 80% in a similar way to how the Ioniq does that on older 150kW chargers.
The avocado meme started in Australia, where avocados are expensive due to their water requirements, and where there’s been a housing crisis for at least twenty years.
It wasn’t the cost of avocados as a raw ingredient.
An opinion columnist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘newspapers’ blamed the decline in home ownership amongst millennials on excessive spending on discretionary food, specifically avocado on toast in cafes.
He suggested that if they cut back on such minor luxuries, they could afford to buy houses.
The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK all have housing and affordability problems, out of the five I can understand the UK but the other four countries I absolutely do not…
What do they all have in common English similar economies and relatively similar governments.
In Australia the root cause is likely policy that rewards rather than penalises multiple home ownership as investment, leading to flow on effects that raise prices and doesn't boost building.
However not all would agree with that and each stake holding group has a different take on things.
eg: The Australian home builders industry group, the HIA, throw shade on increased costs and government fees and push back on other hot takes here:
I lived through my peers struggling to get a single house built or rennovated in early 80's and later and watched finnancial incentives made it easier and easier to get a second, a third, a fourth house just as happens in Monopoly
Hand in hand with that, those people with houses as assets could afford to bid higher against each other for that fifth house .. pushing out those younger and just entering the scene.
It's hard to discount the rapid rise of a landlord class as being a significant factor.
> And the presence of lower-cost alternatives can force non-Chinese brands to have to compete, rather than sitting on their laurels and gathering profits from expensive land yachts as the competition’s prices are inflated by tariffs. This is why the UK is getting Honda’s super cool Super-N, and the US isn’t.
The Honda Super-N EV will also be released in Australia, New Zealand, and other countries in Southeast Asia that were also British colonies: this decision has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with left-hand-drive vs. right-hand-drive.
Is Honda even bothering with a LHD version of the Suoer-N? As far as I can tell, they never bother with left side versions for Kei cars, and just limit them to right side markets. It’s a pity because I always wanted a Daihatsu Copen.
Well, you also see them in the Russian far east which gets a lot of used cars from Japan.
Surprisingly. A lot of eg: aircon ducting, placement of stuff in the bonnet, dash configuration, wiring looms, is all -handed. Certainly doable but it’s a significant burden in both design effort and handling of parts/supply chain/inventory which may or may not justify it.
I briefly worked on doing LHD-to-RHD car conversions and the devil was definitely in the detail.
No no, that's obviously wrong. It's because the sun rises in the East much earlier than the west, it only seems like like they're getting it earlier but it's only because of the way the planet works. And the sun never sets on the British empire is why they'll be getting it.
> Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would work for that meeting; check a box to accept that invitation; etc.
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.
Don’t think of it as work, but of what a human would want to spend time doing. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788736, a commentor describes how his kids love using the “paper computer” prototype he built. They are not working, they are playing and learning and experimenting and creating. Things that humans like to do.
To some degree, that's what one had w/ Apple's Newton Intelligence on the MessagePad --- it was "just" fancy pattern-matching, but mostly it worked, and the UI and implementation were quite good, and it kept me organized all through college.
Mentioning the Newton may be anathema to the discussion (it seems to bring up the usual jokes, etc.) but I was thinking too that the Macintosh (or the Xerox Alto if you like, or the Mother of All Demos) tried to move us in that direction by "skeuomorphising" the computer interface—make it look like the more familiar "real world". The Newton pushed further. It seems to have been on the mind of at least a few people at Apple.
It sounds like the author is on the same track, has the same mindset. And I like.
I am also reminded of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. It is not exactly what the author describes but, if the book had a computer backend, it also divorces the user from the computer interface we have come to know. Perhaps for me some future (better) local LLM within such a book is what I want. A kind of companion I ask questions of…
(I mean I suppose I should just do what was posted a day or to ago to the Ask HN: and put a local LLM behind a messaging app and I could just converse with it wherever I am. Tangent: I am kind of fascinated by the idea of a personal LLM that has context stretching back to my earliest days—were I to have started conversing with this synthetic companion at a young age. Imagine the lifetime of context where the LLM knows my habits, how I've changed over the years. I suppose this is nightmare fuel for a number of you.)
Other copies of the Primer do have a computer backend.
There are basically three versions of the book:
1) The ones developed for a few rich kids. These are partially automated, but backed by gig workers. They get what we might call (if you'll pardon the term) "Actually Indians" AI (augmented by the regular type).
2) The one our protagonist gets. This is one of the books from #1, but the distinctive feature here is that an early gig worker (the book calls these "'ractors" when they're doing this kind of work) the protagonist draws takes a special interest in her and intentionally keeps drawing jobs for her over a period of several years. This continuity and personal care by a single real person is what sets it apart and makes her experience so excellent.
3) The mass-market version that's entirely computerized, no human touch. This version brainwashes a fuckload of kids into becoming the "mouse army", and that's really all we see as far as what it can do: something really bad (if convenient for our protagonist).
The message of the book is 100% the opposite of "automated learning-books are amazing". It's "tech for learning sucks ass and/or is outright dangerous if you rely only on it, and a real human tutor who cares about a kid is the best thing around even in a crazy high-tech future-world".
Charles de Lint had an intelligent book in his fantasy novel _Jack the Giant Killer_ (or maybe its sequel) --- I've tried doing the conversing/chatting thing w/ an LLM a couple of times, but always got annoyed more than amused.
What's the point? LLMs tend towards the mean/average --- I want better in my life and interactions --- it's useful when I need an example DXF or similar rote task, but my current project is a woodworking joint which has no precedent.
Yes, the skeumorphism angle is an interesting one, and one which is surprisingly absent in the _ur_ description of a stylus equipped computing device, the slates/tablets from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ --- this sort of thing seems to be coming back around --- a recent Kindle Scribe firmware update add shape recognition. I'd be _very_ pleased if my new Kindle Scribe Coloursoft could fully become a replacement for my Newton....
I think you're right that the use case for an LLM is still rather niche. It's perhaps still worth exploring though as they may well improve over time.
Regardless, I have still found them useful. Diagnosing the problems with a car is maybe an esoteric example but is still useful.
For many months now I have been working through learning about and implementing a hobbyist analog computer with LLM as engineer-confidant. I already knew the basics of op-amps and analog computing but was surprised at a lot of the new things I discovered only by way of the LLM saying (for example), "Hey, here's a nice way to get your reference voltages…" and the project benefited from it (and I learned about a new chip/device/technique).
Yes, they do work well as a stand-in for the "competent technician with skill in the pertinent art and and fully aware of all prior art" (to use wording like to the patent application standard).
But it's only going to allow you to avail oneself of prior art/techniques.
Because it was a profit making venture for car companies. Suburbs are horrifically inefficient, they survive by the twisted "communism" of cannibalizing the dense urban tax bases to support the sprawling, expensive to service and maintain, isolating flatlands.
Not so fast: I would say that the move to suburbs was initially driven by a thirst for homeownership with luxurious lawns, coupled with electric streetcars and other rail-based transport.
It was only later that the almighty combustion engine and tire companies forcibly replaced streetcars with buses and trucks, that cars began their hegemonic domination of suburbia. The National Highway System decrees didn't hurt, either, but highways were built in the USA with an ulterior motive of national defense.
It also happened during a period where cities were polluted, noisy, and the middle-class housing was largely cramped tenements. Basically all of this has been/is being mitigated these days. City-center housing now looks more like luxury loft living than tenements (though this gives us a big problem with ‘missing middle’ housing where there’s very little housing available that is suitable for families where everything is decrepit slums or luxury 1 and 2 bedroom condos). Pollution has been largely mitigated with catalytic converters and, now, EVs. And electrification helps deal with noise pollution as well through getting rid of engine noise (especially for motorized appliances like leaf-blowers).
Meanwhile, traffic and the stigma around drunk driving (which wasn’t nearly as strong or strictly enforced before the 90s), have quickly taken much of the bloom off the rose of car-dependent lifestyles. I predict the growth of micromobility options will continue to make cities even more attractive as well by improving coverage for areas where transit can’t go and generally improve the throughput of city streets and reduce the space needed for parking cars for people who live within “not-quite walking but feels silly to drive” distance.
The big gap in the US at least is simply a lack of cities! Everything is still concentrated in a handful of legacy urban centers that survived the waves of “urban renewal” and it’s simply too expensive to house all the people who want to live there without turning them into Hong Kong sized megalopolises, which starts to introduce new problems from overwhelming density. “Urban” development patterns need to expand out to more of the country to take demand pressure off the 5 or 6 American cities with decent mass transit.
This comment section will inevitably fill up with comments from people who have exactly the same thing to say, namely, that internet censorship is bad. That opinion has transcended the good-take-bad-take dichotomy: it's entered the pantheon of ideas that are seamlessly dumped into any mildly-related discussion and act as an impediment to any more interesting ideas.
Here's a more interesting idea: because the pornography that's banned by this bill is made mainly in the US and Eastern Europe, and because it's distributed by businesses that are also located outside the UK, the UK has negligible ability to impose regulations that differ from other jurisdictions on the dividing line between legal and illegal pornography. The age verification system was imposable because there are very few websites that span the porn/not-porn divide, but this new bill regulates at too fine a level to enforce.
As with most laws that are "useless in practice", this just opening the door and preparing/numbing the public to laws that will further extent control and censorship on internet and everywhere else.
You are absolutely right! It takes incredible bravery to admit that if we cannot solve the problem in totality then incremental improvements are useless.
Every government is preparing for the Third World War, which requires controlling the information infrastructure to enable domestic counterintelligence operations.
TFA provides insight into what’s going on behind the scenes, and has sparked an interesting discussion. It’s not the nonsense you get on /r/politics, where everyone behaves as though they’re auditioning for the writers’ room on one of those late night chat shows.
That's far too hyperbolic. Abject failures don't lead to state or power collapse. Look at how many wars the Romans lost, and far more catastrophically too.
From the article: "The crisis strengthened Nasser's standing and led to international humiliation for the British—with historians arguing that it signified the end of its role as a superpower—as well as the French amid the Cold War."
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