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It should take around 50 hours to fully charge its batteries under ideal conditions. That is 5 - 10 days realistically. I guess it's impractical considering that it will ferry across the River Plate.

If it can charge while sailing there is no downside. At least as long as a substantial percentage of total charge can come from the integrated solar.

> At least as long as a substantial percentage of total charge can come from the integrated solar

Yes, but that's highly doubtful. It doesn't work for EVs with panels on the car's roof - you don't get significant charge from it. It's far more practical to put the panels on a larger, fixed structure where the vehicles charges daily.

Sources e.g.

https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/ykwd89/w...


When Argentine gets enough solar over-provision, ship owners might make money by charging during negative solar prices.

Any flat surface on a ship that is designed for electric should be covered in flexible solar panels.

Why do this if it can’t fully charge the ship? To offset the costs of charging the ship at port, to provide longer range by providing a lower voltage power source for 12V DC charging (cell phones, iPads, 5w LED lights).

So the commenter is correct, she needs panels and the fact that this isn’t part of the launch shows that they were more interested in being first than practical.


It’s possible adding panels could reduce the range because they’re heavy and so high up on the ship.

Weight won't matter much (you typically only accelerate it once, and the additional drag is small), it is just that the surface area is so small relative to what's needed that it just doesn't move the needle.

From the current top comment on this thread:

> It's made out of aluminum instead of steel. The resulting weight savings make it a bit more efficient. That's something this shipping yard specializes in.

According to that person, weight does indeed matter.


Solar panels are also made from aluminum frames or can be flexible in plastic sheets. The weight is negligible.

Yes, the weight of the hull, which is immense. Compared to that some solar panels probably weigh about as much as the paint. It's still ship, not an aircraft.

Also, thin film solar panels that can be stuck to a flat roof likely weigh less than the small portion of the battery capacity (250 tonnes of batteries total) they could theoretically substitute for.

If you were optimising for mass rather than ease of maintenance you'd probably put them on (despite the relative lack of surface area meaning you still needed to recharge at each end)


Drag is huge for boats, especially in seas and oceans that have tides and currents. Far more than a car... that also have to continuously burn oil to keep their speed, even on freeways.

See my other comment...

Weight matters for handling, particularly CoG and weather. It likely also has an impact on total cargo capacity.

There's also the matter of windage and what impacts that might have on the ship.

To say nothing of the capacity factor and reliability of electronics in a marine environment.


It's not a long range vessel, but it should have a fairly long service life.

Additional weight and complexity on a one off boat would be more expensive than a seperate much more standard solar and battery system on land. And you might be able to get additional value out of selling electricity from an oversized storage.

It's not sensible to draw your system boundaries around the boat by itself; there is significant terminal infrastructure; and even grid electrical infrastructure to consider.


I disagree entirely about complexity. It’s not complex at all.

I don’t draw a boundary around the boat. I see a missed opportunity to power non-drive electronics from a renewable source such as solar.


What exactly is the benefit of having solar panels on the ship? Her accumulators are more than capable of supplying all the electric needs during her ferry trips. Placing 0.002 square kilometer of solar panels on land is cheaper.

Pintegrated panel design,cost, and maintenance can be more expensive than the puchace price of electricity. Putting pannels on regular ground is vastly more efficient.

This is kinda like saying everyone should wear solar hats to offset their home electric bill.


I can suspend my disbelief for the sake of clearly hearing a character who has something important to say.

Yeah, it's typical of Elektrec to interpret anything Tesla-related in the worst light.

I personally fact checked articles about "Autopilot disengages milliseconds before collision" and the one related to Benavides v. Tesla case.

In the first case they jumped to conclusions. In the second case they "forgot" to mention any details that contradict their narrative: that there were two cases separated by years, that the police has received all the information they needed in the first case, that the driver was pressing the accelerator.


My understanding is Fred (Electrek) has been nothing but negative about Tesla since he got upset that they haven't released the roadster yet. Something to do with having enough referral points to get one. It has become his whole identity and it is sad to see.

Pretty sure those comments are tongue in cheek. And it’s not that he’s dying to buy one, Tesla owes him one, and doesn’t have to fulfill it by never making any

HN audience loves to undermine one of the only places actually objectively calling out the mega corps


I wouldn't speculate about his reasons, but many of his articles are objectively bad journalism.

I havent seen an article on that site be remotely positive to tesla in a long time if ever. Its weird, the obsession with Tesla hating.

he also sold all is tesla stock, so I assume there is some incentive too feel better in case tesla fails.

It's not the government, it's the department of justice. To name two: protection of witnesses, protection of state secrets ("the people" is not a person who can keep secrets).

Right, I’m aware of the excuses the government uses to keep secrets.

But on principle, what right does the government have to keep secrets from its own people? I don’t believe we had that button at the founding, it was added somewhere along the way. I’m asking what is the justification for this, and whether in the grand scheme of things that outweighs the principle of the government not being a separate entity from the people.

There are multiple ways to approach witness protection. For example if we have a problem with witnesses being harmed we could make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense. We can probably think of other options besides the government being allowed to keep secrets from its own people.


>I don’t believe we had that button at the founding

Every government everywhere has and has always had state secrets e.g. names of spies.

>make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense.

People still commit capital offenses. This just makes it much easier to get to that witness and get away. We also know from empirical evidence that the death penalty is not useful for deterring crime.

Witness protection is also getting to start over without everyone in your neighborhood knowing you were a criminal. It's part of the deal.


No you are confused. People commit capital offenses for one of two reasons: either because they lack impulse control, or because they don’t think they will be caught.

If we fix the second one, we only have the first group. We can fix the second group, and the remaining first group, while it does apply to capital offenses in general, does not apply to violence against witnesses.

It seems like killing witnesses (after the fact, since witness protection does not intervene during the initial crime being witnessed to protect the witness mere moments after their witnessing) actually requires impulse control, because to do it you need to a) anticipate an abstract threat b) formulate a plan in advance c) carry out the plan. This is why it is typically executed in organized crime by bosses, and not by people engaging in random violence.

I’m not saying no one carries out capital offenses, I’m just saying that no one engages in witness directed violence due to lack of impulse control, they do it because they don’t think they will be caught, and more thorough rules enforcement does address that.

On witness protection making one’s criminal record secret. Okay? One can easily be opposed to that practice. How about we don’t make deals to hide relevant safety information from the public? It seems pretty easy to oppose. Just because the government does it, doesn’t mean it is a good reason. Are you defending the reason, or just stating what is? If you are just stating what is, I don’t see how that’s relevant.


The power/right came from national security legislation written and enacted by elected officials. Because we have a government that works by proxy, it means that the leaders we elect are effectively supposed to represent the people they serve (that's the ideal. Obviously we've fallen WAY short of that).

Pragmatically, I think it's easy to recognize that the government should be allowed to have some secrets from the public. I think the clearest and most extreme example is the details of our nuclear armaments.

But the question of where the line is is a tricky one. IMO, we definitely allow the government far more secrets than it should have.


Should the military publish plans before the battle? Should witness protection programs be public record?

Is there an enemy invader actively performing military operations inside the country? In that case, I believe it’s typical for a nation to suspend its normal procedures, we don’t need our principle to hold in case of active invasion.

Otherwise, just don’t do war. It’s pretty simple. Especially when you have zero need for land.

Witness protection is a compensation for an inadequate and overly soft criminal justice system. If the person calling the hit fully expected to die by hanging for calling the hit, he would not call the hit.


Is the Department of Justice not a part of the government?

It’s not the body which decides whether something is secret. It reactively redacts secrets and its own OIG is empowered to realign that logic.

As of February, it’s sensible to ask if there’s an OIG.


It's a nice naming, fellow language-capable electrobiochemical autonomous agent.


It's all good and spiritual, but it seems that they lost some artistic tools like point-projection perspective during non-that-well-documented ages.


There are so many theories regarding human cognition that you can certainly find something that is close to "autocomplete". A Hopfield network, for example.

Roots of predictive coding theory extend back to 1860s.

Natalia Bekhtereva was writing about compact concept representations in the brain akin to tokens.


> There are so many theories regarding human cognition that you can certainly find something that is close to "autocomplete"

Yes, you can draw interesting parallels between anything when you're motivated to do so. My point is that this isn't parsimonious reasoning, it's working backwards from a conclusion and searching for every opportunity to fit the available evidence into a narrative that supports it.

> Roots of predictive coding theory extend back to 1860s.

This is just another example of metaphorical parallels overstating meaningful connections. Just because next-token-prediction and predictive coding have the word "predict" in common doesn't mean the two are at all related in any practical sense.


Regarding missing heritability: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-good-news-is-that-one-s...

"That is, once you include the rare variants, the amount of genetic variation that “should” exist but doesn’t shrinks to only 12%. Plausibly an even bigger study, investigating even rarer variants, could shrink the gap further, all the way to zero."

Of course, even then heritability will not be 100%.


I don't think the rare-variant hypothesis is taken seriously anymore by practitioners, but feel free to cite.


I think you might be mistaken, but feel free to cite metastudies that support you POV.


Follow cites from here, and then look at the Twitter conversation between Gusev and Alexander Strudwick Young.

https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missing-heritabi...


Thanks. I'll wait for proper meta-analysis.


So when you said "cite anything", you meant...

Oh. Never mind. You rewrote your comment after I provided the cite. Well played.


I clarified implied "anything [that supports your claim that it's not taken seriously anymore]". A proper way to do it is meta-analysis.


Why would you expect me to keep conversing after you stealthily reframed my comment to look like I had answered a different question? If you had anything real to say, you wouldn't have done that.


> Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.

Try to find videos where people actually use it. A handful of 1 minute long promotional and car reviewers' videos. It's mostly a marketing move.


I can't find how it will operate. Will it detect a situation where lines are not painted sufficiently clearly, warn you, and disengage? Or will you need to detect where it begins to operate wonky because lines aren't painted sufficiently clearly and to take over? I guess it's the second. It's hands-off, not eyes-off.

Also, I would like to see a car company that is further down the road of full autonomy clearly describing all the long tail scenarios. It's just impossible.


The current Gen 1s will start beeping at you if they can’t see the lines. If you don’t take over quickly it will start slowing down and beeping very insistently.


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