haha yeah especially this summer! thanks for the feedback. yeah, the region/country aggregation can be a bit off. i'm still tuning the best parameter for each preset.
haha european summers are the best though. long sun hours festivals everywhere. from my travels, i learned the cold countries (well i guess not spain) have the best summer.
If a company wants to sell in the EU, they should comply with EU rules. The market and the regulations are closely linked, you won't get one without the other.
"Annexing neighbour" is clearly a non-goal of the EU. One of the reason of its existence is to put an end to european countries invading each others all the time.
Converting Sun to electricity to power a water heater is suboptimal. The water can be heated directly by the Sun. If you can put a water tank above the solar panel, you don't even need a pump.
From a purely efficiency standpoint, yes, but practically, electricity->heat is a lot cheaper to install. Plumbing is messy, and bolting on a water circulation system to a roof is harder than delivering more joules over the wires.
Having gone through one ice-dam related roof leak in the past, I'm also not thrilled with the idea of superheated liquids hanging out casually above my bedroom while I sleep.
Coming from an optics/electronics background, it's fascinating to see how much debate there is here around whether a design document is useful or not. I don't think any engineer outside software would start a project without writing at least a few paragraphs to make sure everyone agrees on what needs to be built, and that there's no major blocker.
I blame the low cost of iteration in the software world (even lower now with LLMs).
Most dimensions here look like a designer draw curves that looked good, and the person creating the drawing told their CAD software "put a reference point every 0.5mm of this curve".
The mold manufacturer will ignore this part of the drawing, and tell their machine "follow the curve that's in the production file, with tool X at speed Y etc".
Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
> If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.
I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.
We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.
Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.
Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?
The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car.
It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails.
So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for.
Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.
This is testable. The profits of car insurance companies should rise (let’s say substantially) in real dollars as accident payouts decrease as a result of the inevitable dominance of autonomous vehicles.
Not necessarily true, most recently I was working with an USB 3.1 chip that anyone can buy off DigiKey, but I had to call contacts at 4 seperate companies just to get firmware to make superspeed work. We werr just too small of a fish to make the chip vender care.
This is becoming more true as a larger percentage of hardware infrastructure is occupied by the datacenter economy.
Any company doing consultancy in electronics. You're going to have to pay for the time an electronics engineer spend on understanding what you want to do and reviewing your design, plus the consultancy's margin.
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