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How to make an EV tire that won’t pollute the environment
  • 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).

  • MultiVersus is a Smash Bros. clone that feels like a smartphone game, spoiled by its monetisation
  • Oh boy. £120 to just unlock the base characters or "dozens and dozens" of hours of grind for each of them.

    We'll see how this goes, but I see this going the way of Suicide Squad. I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.

  • Hiker finds pipe feeding China's tallest waterfall
  • I've found the article here, gone in, and immediately forgot that it wasn't the onion as it didn't sound like something remotely true. Then I was immediately confused about how they'd made the satire look so real, with even fake-pipe photos. That's been a confusing 5 minutes...

  • Framework boosts its 13-inch laptop with new CPUs, lower prices, and better screens
  • That middle paragraph is very misleading. It's Generative AI as a service that is actively harmful to the environment. Having a 15 W chip to do tasks like erasing objects from a photo is not any more harmful to the environment than a GPU that uses 15W. In fact, NPUs can be more efficient at some tasks than GPUs.

    The problem is opening your phone/browser, and being able to call on demand GPT-4 to wake up a cluster of 128 Nvidia A100s operating at around 300-400W each. That's 51.2 kW.

    Now you can draw some positives and negatives from that figure, such as

    • Given that an iPhone 15 Pro's A17 has a thermal design power of 8 W, GPT-4 on the server is about 6400 more energy intensive than anything you can do on an iPhone. 10 seconds of GPT need a similar amount of energy to an iPhone 15 Pro operating flat out at maximum power for 18 hours. Now in those 10 seconds, OpenAI says they "handle multiple user queries simultaneously", but still - we're feeding the machine.
    • 51.2 kW is also roughly how much power a large SUV needs to roll at constant speed on a motorway. Each of those large clusters uses a similar amount of energy to a single 7-seater SUV, but serving many users at the same time. Plus unlike cars, a large portion of their energy usage comes from renewables. So yes, I agree that it's a significant impact but largely overrepresented and we have bigger fish to fry; personal transport is a way bigger issue.
  • Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination
  • Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what's happening.

  • Boeing, NASA say Starliner astronaut launch will move forward despite spacecraft helium leak
  • Assuming for a minute that this is 100% true, for conversation's sake.

    Does that matter? We have here a company with a reputation that is massively hurt by issues in their aircraft and inability to keep a decent quality control, and they think the best way forward is to announce the whole world they're flying a space mission with a leaky spacecraft? Are they actively trying to tank their reputation even further?

  • Microsoft starts bundling Windows 11 with its 'PC optimizer' app in some regions
  • I agree with the philosophy, but not with the approach.

    If you own/make the OS, and you know that the registry can get orphan entries which slow down the system, don't wait for the user to open an "optimisation app" to clean that up. Just make sure the registry is cleaned transparently and in the background.

    This seems to me like a tactic to get less tech-savvy people to accidentally set Edge as their browser and ensure their Ads and Microsoft's tracking is working as the mothership mandates. Worst part is we have evidence to think I'm not being the slightest bit cynical here...

  • Hopper Is a German-Built Three-Wheeler That Unifies the Benefits of E-Bikes and Cars
  • That's a great explanation for why it costs that much, but not for why they think it's a good idea to sell it for that price.

    Other companies first build a prototype and gather investment so that they can build a first 1000 (not 60) units and can reach a price that can be attractive for the market. Or build first a niche, super exclusive product so that the lack of economies of scale doesn't matter as much.

    In here I just can't see the value proposition really. For half the price I can buy something like a Renault Twizy or Citroen Ami with similar size, twice the speed, twice the range, and still zero emissions. Plus I don't have to pedal, and I get a radio. Why would I ever want this?

  • I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty
  • I'm talking about TV ads, magazine covers. General models (not the super-skinny runway models which don't necessarily follow typical beauty standards) or porn (which follows its own set of trends I'd say, like over exaggerated bodies, breast implants...).

    I don't know if it's the best example but I'm talking generally about the difference between people like Jennifer Aniston in 1997 vs Scarlett Johansson in 2020, for example.

  • I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty
  • You don't have to go that far - if you look at 90's female models, or actresses that were considered "hot" at the time, they had a significantly different body type from today. They were a lot skinnier, there was more diet and less gym involved in the female bodies of the 90s and early 2000s.

  • Cyclists blame "utterly ridiculous bike prices" for brands' ongoing struggles
  • I bought a Cube in 2020. I've just checked: the equivalent 2024 model, with pretty much identical components, (but a full 3% lighter!!) is exactly 60% more expensive.

    Yeah, pass. I can wait another 5 years without a new one.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JR
    Jrockwar @feddit.uk
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