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).

No, because in Russia there are no gays according to Putin.

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Were you pronouncing it b-anal?

Well, they’ve already lost £200M on Suicide Squad alone, so here’s to hoping they can continue losing money thanks to their greed.

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.

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…

Bandwidth or “headspace” are my favourites, the second one being almost exactly equivalent to “I can’t be bothered to think about that”.

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.

Which country?

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.

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?

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?

14k for a “car” with a top speed of 16 mph / 25 km/h??

I guess they’ve managed to unify the drawbacks of cars and e-bikes as well.