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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • Honestly the sacrifices they make are pretty reasonable for every day use too. I used ultra cheap Umidigi smartphones for four years as a student and they held up quite well with a huge upside being shockingly good repairability. The biggest downside is the rear camera usually, I wish I had better photos from those times.

    You can get the Umidigi G9 5G for just $99 shipped on aliexpress. Even budget phones under $100 get 8gb RAM, 128GB storage , and 90hz displays now. There really aren’t as many sacrifices as you’d expect, and by the time you spend $200 you even get plenty respectable cameras that would be flagship quality just a few years ago.



  • Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon’s many, many side project misadventures he’s pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

    My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it’s worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.





  • The generics I’ve tried all work but noticably worse. The quality of the bristles is different and it doesn’t leave the same clean feeling. The price of the genuine replacements is stupid and they keep increasing it, but I’ve given up on finding a good quality generic one and just pay the price. They don’t need replacing that often anyway.

    If anyone does know of a good quality C2 compatible replacement please do let me know though.





  • I have a North face shuttle daypack that is exactly the nominal dimensions and conveniently boxy. I’m 90% sure it’s fake though, so going with a ruler to a store or market that sells backpacks is what I’d recommend.

    There is a company making a hard sided suitcase with removable wheels which can fit. I’d strongly recommend against that because the handle will take up so much of the already limited space. And there’s nowhere to put the wheels when they’re removed where it can still fit. Note that Spirit sizers are unofficially 18x14x9 rather than the officially advertised 18x14x8. Frontier’s bag sizers are truly 18x14x8.


  • Over the past few decades it’s become very clear this is needed. The problem is that by making LBOs illegal you are saying that a controlling stake of the company’s stock isn’t the same as owning a controlling stake in the company. So at that point the value of stocks becomes a bit more speculative and likely much less stable. Given that basically the entirety of our economy is built on the stock market I think this is incredibly unlikely to ever happen.



  • The problem is that this isn’t really even trickle charging. Customers would absolutely complain and say it’s not working because it couldn’t charge the battery more than 1-2% in an entire day of sun. EV batteries are 60kWh+ yet getting more than 2kWh/sq meter daily from residential panels is hard for much of the US. Add to that the:

    • weight of panels
    • cost of panels
    • heat trapped in the car from having a roof literally designed to absorb solar radiation
    • fragility of panels (although all these glass roof EVs have that problem already) And it’s really not worthwhile.

    One solution to the apartment street parking problem is adding charging ports to streetlights (they do this in Europe). But for most of US apartments there’s already dedicated parking space so also space for chargers. The unruly size of new vehicles is a much bigger problem in my mind, if there were actual motivation to fix this problem in government it would already be solved through some tax credits.



  • It’s still not a lot of energy though. Some rough napkin math for how far this would get you is below:

    Typical medium size cargo ships in the Panama Canal travel around 25 knots burning 63000 gallons per day of fuel with 5000TEU of cargo. That’s roughly 600mi/63000gal or 1142miles per ton gallon. That Silverado EV somehow weighs 4 tons (totally safe to be driving at highway speeds), so this is the equivalent of roughly 285.5mpg per Silverado. The Silverado is 67mpge on its own, so the ship is just over 4x as efficient (and slower which is ignored here but would impact the vehicle efficiency).

    So using the Silverado’s 450 mile optimal range we can say it has at most an optimistic 7 gallons equivalent fuel in its 200kWh battery. 50 MWH would be enough for a theoretical 1750 gallons equivalent if efficiency were the same. But for the efficiency difference this corresponds to a 4.2x improvement to 7350 gallons equivalent. Therefore this is enough to run that typical ship above for 2.8 hours. So with 65000 tons of cargo in the above ship to do a 200 mile route this ship would need roughly 3x as large a battery. More likely it will just carry ~1/3 the cargo or have charging stops en-route.

    The 19.4km/h top speed of this ship suggests they’re well aware of the extremely limited range this will have for its size and it sounds like the Shanghai to Nanjing route will be pushing it’s limits despite being less than 200 miles.




  • Every other year or so, but only because there somehow keep being better deals. Over the last 8 years mint mobile has been consistently good pricing even for returning customers provided you’re willing to pay for the whole year up front. That’s my baseline. From there other small carriers come along offering unlimited for less and you join for a year or two until they go bust. Right now I’m on Spectrum mobile since it’s free with even the cheapest home internet available to my address (for 12 months).