I too have FSD 13 on my CT and use it for 99% of driving with no issues. I have done a number of long city to city drives (30-100+ miles) with zero interventions. The roads would be 10,000x safer if every car was using FSD, even in extreme edge cases like the original post.
It’s fantastic and Tesla service has been really good for the one issue I had over the last １２ months. My wife bought a Model Y in 2021 so it’s the second Tesla in the house.
I like that you've built a strawman for anyone who might disagree with you. "Oh there aren't any positive reviews they're just fanboys." You may as well write "Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong."
What is PG&Es generation cost vs administrative and legal overhead? The 11% margin isn't a good basis number. How is other states like Texas or Colorado are delivering at 10-12c/kwh ?
I do agree with your sentiment that city bureaucrats may be tempted to raid the energy business to pay for pet projects and other things. This can be protected against by segmenting the energy business into its own protected organization.
> What is PG&Es generation cost vs administrative and legal overhead? The 11% margin isn't a good basis number.
Administrative and legal costs don’t disappear when the city runs it, so why does it matter? When the city runs a utility, nearly all of the costs associated with running a utility still exist.
If your mental model of a city-owned utility is that they’re going to generate power and sell it at cost with no administrative overhead, you’re really just assuming that administrative overhead will be covered by taxpayers.
Electricity rates down, tax rates up.
> How is other states like Texas or Colorado are delivering at 10-12c/kwh ?
Texas produces the most crude oil, natural gas, and also wind generated electricity. A quarter of the entire country’s wind energy generation happens in Texas.
Comparing electricity prices across regions is meaningless. Everything is too different.
The basic argument on Texas seems to be: "Texas avoided 75% of the costs in California by doing everything differently. California can't learn anything from them because they do things differently". That seems like a weak argument. California would have to do things quite differently to get a 75% cost reduction.
It is stereotyping, but it sounds like the sort of state that has a strong regulatory regime that would be quite controlling about what people can actually do. I note the irony that when Texas had a power outage everyone wanted much more regulation to force changes to grid maintenance, but when California spends 4x as much and PG&E skips on grid maintenance everyone throws their hands up because they can't call for more regulation and are out of ideas. The regulation doesn't seem to have dodged the maintenance problems but I'd bet it drives the cost up.
Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.
So they throw Cloudflare in front of it and get defaced yearly. I've worked for companies (thankfully not in a position dealing with the website) that did just that. Somehow they're even still around a decade later. To be fair though that was actually Bluehost, not a VPS.
True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger) offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or more sites in.
Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as users have ability to choose a hosting there will be cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would be worse...
There’s value to users in using a service that’s the same as the software. Trust is worth it to consumers. It’s why many still prefer to take their cars to the dealer rather than an Indy shop
I've had 3 cars totaled by dealers and none totaled by indy shops. One was actually messed up by them beyond repair. One was messed up and they wanted more to fix it well beyond the replace cost. The final one just wanted well beyond the replace cost, and I got it fixed for much much less at an indy shop.
Just find a good indy shop. there's a great one 2 blocks from my house at a gas station. discusses all repairs with you, good on preventive maintenance, 1/4 the price of a dealer. Will tell you what repairs you actually need to do and what you don't. Also easier to schedule and pick up and drop off. I have to wait at the mega dealer near me like 15-30 minutes at drop off and pick up. At least the toyota one will let you defer your car wash instead of waiting for it longer. At the gas station I drop the car in the lot and drop the keys in a mailbox. For pickup I go in any day till 10 and pay like I'm buying an energy drink, grab the keys and walk out to the lot to grab it.
Drum scanning is crazy time consuming and expensive. I shoot hundreds (sometimes thousands) of film photos per year and 99.999% of my scanning is done with a camera and a backlight.
Cross polarised light (to eliminate specular reflection) and a home made vacuum bed is 99% of the way to a seriously pro scanning tool.
A setup like that helped me get through 15k prints in no time with excellent results. The biggest barrier to success was after churning through the 7x5 and 6x4 shots, things got a lot harder with variable sizes of print. It really slowed the process down — and conversely, uniform print sizes made the first 90% of the job almost enjoyable. I averaged one “scan” every 2s.
Not OP, but any macro lens will do the job. You're not likely to be shooting at a wider aperture than f8 given that you'll need some depth of field to spare. (Even if you use a specialised copy lens with a flat field, the film won't be perfectly flat anyway.) So given that you're shooting an imperfectly flat piece of film at a narrow aperture, differences between lenses will be small. I use an ancient f3.5 Micro-Nikkor. These are cheap and plentiful in the second hand market and can be adapted for most cameras.
As far as the camera is concerned, it's a big advantage to have an electronic shutter. The effects of camera shake are magnified with macro photography, and a mechanical shutter can make the results observably softer. I am cheap, so I use an old DSLR in T mode and use a Raspberry Pi to turn on one of those backlit sketch pads for a fraction of a second to expose the image.
To add onto this - I highly recommend you take advantage of light rooms Flat Filed Correction tool, it will eliminate lens vignetting which can cause issues when inverting. This article elaborates https://www.pixl-latr.com/defeating-the-orange-haze-lightroo...
That looks very useful for use with older lenses. With a modern lens, shouldn't Lightroom be able to apply a precise vignetting correction based on the image metadata and the lens parameters?
Tesla has a V2H/V2G (Powershare is the name Tesla uses) available for Cybertruck owners included as part of the vehicle purchase. I am still waiting on mine, despite receiving my Cybertruck almost 6 months ago.
I also have the Ford equipment from when I got my Lightning, however finding a competent installer has been impossible. Right now it's collecting spiders in the corner of my garage.
Do you have anyone that does home battery installations? It should be pretty much the exact same process to install one of these. It may be somewhat new tech, but ultimately it should look identical to battery controller install.
Good! I had to ask. I’ve seen multiple Cybertrucks driving around my neighborhood and I’m pretty certain none of them will ever touch dirt. I hope you enjoy both vehicles!
Can someone smarter than me explain why astronmers can't stick something like this on the back of an existing geostationary platform (like what is used for the XM radio sattelites) and get amazing data out of them? Surely sticking something like this array 100km into space will yield better results without the overhead of a 20 year mission plan like James Webb or Hubble.
Cause it wouldn't give better results. The big advantage of putting telescope in space is that don't have to deal with the movement of the air distorting the image. That doesn't matter when taking pictures of diffuse objects.
The disadvantage is that it is in space, you have to spend 10x or 100x as much making something that can work in space, and you can't maintain it. I bet it would be much better to spend that money making dozens of these around the world, or iterating on the design.
The other advantage is that atmosphere is opaque for some wavelengths. The infrared wavelength that JWST looks in are absorbed. It also helps to be able to cool down the detectors to lower temps. One reason we aren't seeing direct replacement for Hubble is that the big ground telescopes with active optics are as good.
I've always wondered that myself - If the Russians could build and launch sputnik in 1957 and get it around the earth a few times why aren't we seeing a huge number of backyard dad+son duos building rockets to launch their own telescope array. Its amazing that its a 60 year old feat that is still only in the hands of governments and massive corps
The problem is the lack of a "backyard" ICBM program to piggyback off of... the R-7 that the sputnik launcher was based on "was designed with excess thrust since they were unsure how heavy the hydrogen bomb payload would be" (wikipedia.)
1) You need more than just getting to space, you need to go really fast when you get there. So, lots of propellant and a big rocket is needed. So, it's really expensive.
2) Because you're setting fire to a big tube of propellant that then goes crazy fast, you need all sorts of permits and safety reviews to do it
3) Space is hard, so your rocket will almost certainly blow up / fail a couple of times.
All of this means: big budgets and state-level patience and persistence is needed
Rocket science ain't easy. Just because you can build a great telescope does not mean you can build a rocket. Also, I could only imagine the NIMBY revolt when you file your permit plans to build launchpad-38A in your backyard. I hope you don't spend too much time wondering before coming to obvious answers
You might look up the sagas of Rocket Lab and other small launch providers if you're interested in what it takes to put ~200lb into LEO today. It's way beyond dad and son stuff, still incredibly hard, but not so much anymore that you need to be Boeing/Lockheed/SpaceX/etc if not a national agency. This is a recent achievement.
I am no expert, but the things I would worry about:
- cost to get into geostationary orbit might dominate the value/saving of the cheap instrument, so it might be smart to spend more on that
- managing and controlling it might be very challenging
- need to get the data down from it - might create difficulties and costs that kill the value
- heating and cooling in space might kill it
- radiation in space might kill the hardware
- acceleration during launch might kill the hardware
- the payload needs to be stable during launch or there will be an accident
- scientific value might be lower than other missions for similar spend
Not a professional so take this with a grain of salt but my guess would be weight first and foremost. From what I understand geostationary orbit isn’t cheap to get to and each added kilogram increases cost significantly. These lenses while not incredibly heavy are heavy enough to add a fair amount of cost.
I don't think there's that big of an advantage for space-based astronomy here, for visible-wavelength light with large pixel scales, and relatively bright (total luminosity) objects. Because it's done in narrowband filters, it's particularly good at erasing sky noise.
There are... nine main limitations on telescope imagery that I can think of. In no particular order:
First is weather. We can't see through clouds. Most new astronomy is about sources too faint to have been analyzed a hundred years ago, and even clouds that are barely visible to the human eye will drown those out.
Second is various engineering difficulties resulting from differential temperatures in the air in close proximity to the telescope dome, defects in the mirror surface, and limitations to the optical design (you're projecting a spherical globe onto a flat surface).
Third is 'atmospheric seeing' - high-order distortions caused by thermal patterns in the air which change significantly on a tens of milliseconds timescale, ultimately leading to a gaussian blur of the light in long exposures. The lower your altitude, and the more disturbed the airmass, and the more humid this is, the worse this is.
Fourth is sky glow - light pollution from nearby upwards facing lightbulbs, from the full moon, and from the sun at twilight & in the daytime
Fifth is the diffraction limit. A perfectly engineered, spherical-cow-world telescope with a perfect sensor has fundamental optical limits to the resolution it can observe, and optical resolution in arc seconds scales with wavelength / aperture.
Sixth is bright-source confusion and the limitations of your background field. It's very difficult with CCD & CMOS sensors (and even with spherical-cow sensors, the optics present limitations) to image a faint thing next to a bright thing. This is why we have fewer galaxies mapped on the other side of the Milky Way,, and why it can be very difficult to pick up, say, a nebula right next to a bright nearby star
Seventh is light-gathering ability, thermal noise, and readout noise. If you're trying to capture a photon every second, it's going to be very difficult if your CCD is absorbing thousands of photons per second thermally from the surrounding blackbody radiation and the readout circuitry.
Eighth is differential focus. To make matters more complicated, optical resolution is not 'fixed' because focus is not identical in different parts of the iamger; Typically telescopes are optimized for nominal focus at the center of their field, but get a few arc-minutes off of the center and optical resolution goes down. Get a few degrees off and it can go down to un-usability. There are characteristic abberations that crop up, and every optical design that aims for wide fields is a compromise between these abberations.
Ninth is atmospheric windows. Atmosphere absorbs hard UV. And portions of infrared. And portions of radio. To get a full spectrograph of a source, to detect the exotic portions of the EM spectrum that we don't really deal with frequently, you can't do it through atmosphere.
Generally speaking, it's relatively easy with on Earth for professional observatories to reach a point where atmospheric seeing limits your observations more than diffraction or readout noise or field distortions or sky glow or ambient light. It's not easy to defeat bright-source confusion with a larger and larger telescope. Many astronomers have had to content themselves with knowing little about the sky right next to bright sources like nearby stars. The telescope in the article tries to probe this known unknown with numerous small low-res cameras.
Space observatories provide us a small amount (10x?) better surveys because of no sky glow, daytime observations, no weather, etc. They eliminate atmospheric windows and simplify some engineering issues (while complicating others).
Part of the big remaining purpose of space observatories, the thing it's very difficult to do on the ground (we've tried!) is to defeat the atmospheric seeing limit and allow us to use very large telescopes which are relatively simply designed. Light-gathering ability from a source scales with aperture^2, and light-concentrating ability scales with aperture^2, so ideally sensitivity to sources should scale with aperture^4. It rarely does on the ground, because we have to put up with atmospheric seeing. The technologies we've used on the ground to fight atmospheric seeing are extremely limiting, expensive, complex, the subject of an inane number of PhD theses, and only suitable for very small fields.
This goal of survey astronomy is at cross purposes to the telescopes in the article, which aim to get diffuse low resolution impressions of the light near bright objects, defeating problem number 6; They can do this with relatively short exposures over hundreds of sensors, so that none of the electron wells in the sensors ever saturate from being full of too much light and spill over into their neighboring electron wells
