hraegsvelmir

joined 1 year ago
[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nowhere did I suggest binning it, and I support their eventual transition into being able to leave even hybrids behind. You stated "racing EV’s would be more exciting" and I just pointed out some of the issues that currently prevent it from being more widely adopted and more popular with motorsport fans at large. Otherwise, I doubt you'll find many people to agree that a fully EV Indy 500 was comparable in impact of the event as it exists now if the vehicles could only do 2/3 of the distance with a car capable of less than half the power of the machines it's meant to replace. An F1 car outputs 1000hp, while a Formula E car can do a touch under 500hp. This isn't a knock on them, and I fully expect them to keep improving, but this is an edge case wear current EVs aren't there yet.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 3 points 1 week ago

Wasn't really a competition, just for illustrating a point. I've only passed through Texas for a layover, but honestly, Texas as a state has zero appeal to me. I'd rather just go to Mexico for better versions of pretty much anything in Texas that's remotely interesting to me, while avoiding a fair chunk of the things that make Texas so miserable a prospect to me in the first place.

Besides, Texans might have improved upon nachos at some point, but claiming you have a superior version doesn't invalidate that nachos have already been widely accepted as a Tex-Mex dish. "Nachos are a Tex-Mex dish" is the opening to the wiki article on them, with 8 different citations to back up that claim.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

racing EV's would be more exciting.

Formula-E has been a thing for a few years, and this year notably included a mandate to drastically increase the reliance on the battery units over the ICEs for power in F1. In either case, it's not really there yet, but I'm looking forward to the day that it does get there.

Formula E had (I don't know if it's been rectified since) a pretty significant issue with the batteries just not being able to last for F1 race distances on several tracks. They haven't got the top speed and endurance at those speeds that the F1 hybrids deliver, and because it's a racing sport, you can't just make the battery larger to add capacity without a significant impact on your race pace, nor can they just pop into the pits and patiently wait for a rapid charge to finish topping off their batteries.

That aside, I can't imagine Formula E really manages to deal much better with the major source of pollution and emissions for F1, which is shipping a full track worth of cars, drivers and support crew around the world many times a year. Of course, in that regard, I don't know how many of the Formula E drivers are actual pulling in the sort of money to be owning and maintaining private jets for this purpose, and at least one of the F1 drivers has sold his off. I remember Lewis Hamilton used to get a lot of flack for telling people to go vegan to save the planet while using a private jet 20 odd times a year, and I guess he finally felt silly enough about that contradiction to sell it off.

Edited, realized my comment on F1's new power unit rules was poorly written and confusing at first.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

insecurity about being ‘authentic’

This insecurity about being authentic has pervaded so many things, even absent any real political context. LIke people will suddenly whip out "You know, nachos aren't really authentic Mexican food, they're Tex-Mex cuisine." Okay, what do you expect me to do in that situation, spit it out and go "Ugh, that's disgusting!" Authentic or not, they're still delicious. I totally get pursuing authenticity when you're trying to preserve a culture and are worried it's under threat, but it gets brought into absolutely ridiculous contents, often by people who have no real basis or authority to be the arbiters of authenticity for what they're discussing in the first place as a way to try and make themselves seem more worldly.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

here is an evolution and there is a goal, as you said, to communicate

I would argue that this is just humans attributing intent to a natural process that has none, and is the same sort of erroneous conception as when people say that history has some grand end goal it's working towards. I believe this is amply demonstrated in the lack of success found by Esperanto and similar conlangs that were deliberately constructed in order to be easy to learn for a wide range of people as a neutral lingua franca. If what you claim about the purpose and goal of language were true, these conlangs should have seen widespread adoption and be the most widely spoken languages today, rather than their current status as quirky ideas that are mostly of no interest to people who aren't complete nerds for studying languages.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 5 points 3 weeks ago

I don't know about Latin letters more generally, but at least the issue with the default Latin alphabet, there just aren't enough letters to represent the sounds used in English phonetically. The English language has between 14-25 vowels, depending on dialect and accent, and a further 24 consonants. When the Latin alphabet only has 26 letters, you're naturally going to run into situations where one letter has to represent multiple sounds. With that said, I don't see any reason, aside from the sheer cultural inertia of hundreds of years not doing so, why English couldn't address the issue with diacritics on different letters to achieve the necessary number of unique letters to represent all of the sounds found in English.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 7 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

The point of languages it to be simple and efficient, and they should evolve to that goal eventually.

That's one hell of an assumption to bring to the table. There is no point to language, no end goal towards which they must, or even should evolve. They're a natural creation of humans to facilitate communication, but coming from human beings, they're naturally quite irregular and odd, at times.

I mean, I get it that German isn't a cakewalk to pick up, but you're also complaining about the unreasonable complexity in one of the less morphologically complex European languages. Take a gander at Polish, Icelandic, Basque, or Finnish, and German will probably seem quite charming and quaint with its handful of cases and corresponding forms of the articles.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 9 points 1 month ago

Even if Musk had remained entirely apolitical, I can't imagine the Cyber Truck doing much better without also doing something to address the high profile safety issues with the car and the insane number of recalls issued for it. Even if it had managed to get off to a stronger start, I would still expect people to abandon it in droves once they realized it was an overpriced deathtrap that could crap out on them and leave them stranded at any time.

[–] hraegsvelmir@ani.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would guess it would break it in that people holding out on switching until every game they play is as simple to run in Linux as they are in Windows would probably consider that a deal breaking amount if work compared to staying on Windows.