I was a huge fan of the high-framerate Hobbit films. It made the huge battles much easier to follow and I felt like I picked up a lot more of the details. Such a shame it never had a retail release.
Never mind the battles and action scenes, just any scenes with normal movement of the camera.
There is a lot of panning in the initial scenes of The Hobbit (opening scene is the fall of Erebor). I watched that movie initially with the new higher frequency, and everything was soooo smooth. When I rewatched it, every single time I have to experience the terrible, terrible choppy, hard-to-see-anything lower frequency transformations and I cry. This is the 12st century, and the movies can't even pan across some landscape smoothly?
In that first viewing I saw everything in those caves, it was so easy. Oh how I miss that.
Same. I actually was fine watching 24/30FPS on an older TV, but on the 120Hz screen it just looks incredibly juddery without a little motion smoothing.
It seems to be different for everyone. My wife and her Dad don't even notice the smoothing affect. It drives me and my brother absolutely fucking nuts on the other hand. It makes things basically unwatchable for me, it's so distracting.
> The captain claimed mechanical failure, but hull damage showed signs of an external strike consistent with a supercavitating torpedo.
> The Russian warship Ivan Gren soon arrived, demanded control of the site, and launched flares—likely to disrupt satellite surveillance. Shortly after, the Ursa Major disappeared from the surface. Seismographs recorded underwater explosions, and the ship sank to a depth of 2,500 meters.
I'm fairly certain every auto manufacturer and many non-auto manufacturers are working on it. I doubt they'll be able to patent anything truly important to the process, since others beat them to the market with most of it. Or am I missing something essential?
Remember how everyone kept saying tesla is doomed because any minute now the old OEMs were going to storm in and kill their EV business? In actuality, those OEMs are getting killed by Tesla and Chinese startups. You are making the same argument for autonomy. Old OEMS cannot compete in this space at all. Waymo cannot compete on price with Tesla.
It's a race between how fast Waymo's COGS can decline and how fast Tesla's FSD can achieve actual self-driving. At this moment, given all the evidence available, my inclination is that Waymo is in a better spot.
I don’t think your inclination is unreasonable. Having taken probably like a hundred rides with about an even Tesla/Waymo split in SF, Teslas feel smoother and less robotic, but of course if they felt safety was where it needs to be, they’d be driverless by now.
It’s a bit of a bet. It feels like Tesla is real close, and if they get there, Waymo has no way to compete with Tesla’s manufacturing prowess and vertical integration.
Sure, they're a bit ahead but Mercedes has level 3 self driving and they didnt celebrate killing a bunch of people (and not lowering the deficit) by prancing around with a chainsaw.[0]
I feel like people will be willing to wait until next year for the Alphabet or Mercedes version, but maybe I'm overestimating the average person's attention span or underestimating how far behind the competition is.
When I looked for videos of the Mercedes L3 in action a while ago all I could find were videos showing it doing stuff the Tesla FSD could do easily 5 years ago. Has it improved a lot recently?
I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I'm certainly not an expert.
I can say though that when my brother bought his first Tesla he paid thousands of dollars for FSD, which was supposed to be released "any day now." It's been many years and as far as I can tell it's still not REALLY here (in the sense that most people would mean it).
I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but... The Tesla that he bought originally all those years ago is actually gone now. He had one of the earlier versions of FSD enabled and passed out behind the wheel. Tesla, in their infinite wisdom, decided that if you let go of the wheel for too long they should just completely disable the self driving (at least in that version). So naturally when the driver became incapacitated it just disengaged self driving completely and let the vehicle drive straight into a tree as "punishment" for daring to let go of the wheel for too long. Nobody was hurt, but the vehicle was totaled. It could have been much worse though.
It's such an obvious design flaw. "Driverless 2000 pound missile hurtling down the highway at 55 mpg" is the one failure mode you would think they'd avoid at all costs, rather than using it as the safety fallback. When people talk about how great Tesla engineering is I just kind of shrug.
This is completely made up and/or your brother lied. Teslas always came to a slow stop if no driver attention was detected. Originally just slowly stopping in lane, now actually pulling over.
I really, really doubt FSD is the limiter of European sales. It's pricing and competition. The US car market is laughably uncompetitive, with most manufacturers opting to make luxury landboats. It's easy to compete when all your competitors refuse to introduce an EV under, like, 50 grand.
Absolutely. I know a couple of their early adopters in the EU and they were ashamed to drive their cars once that mess started. They've all since sold them (at massive losses).
Which cell technology to use depends on the application. Tesla actually uses BYD blade batteries in some of their vehicles sold in Europe. The main issue with prismatic cells is that to be safe, they must be made with LFP chemistry, which hurts energy density. LFP is also worse at charging/discharging when cold, though battery management software mostly solves that.
Cylindrical cells make sense for higher performance NMC and NCA chemistries, as they can be cooled more easily (coolant lines can run in the voids between cylindrical cells), and any single cell failure is less likely to cascade to other cells. Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair, but nowadays cells are welded together instead of bolted, so that's no longer an advantage.
> The main issue with prismatic cells is that to be safe, they must be made with LFP chemistry, which hurts energy density
This is obviously untrue. Tons of other chemistries have used prismatic cells with good safety as well. You think Macbooks and iPhones use LFP or cylinder cells?
> Batteries with cylindrical cells were easier to repair,
It can be just as easy to repair a prismatic battery as a cylinder battery. It all comes down to the layout of the battery. And as you mentioned, how the battery is constructed, if the battery is structural, etc.
Since this is a discussion about electric vehicles, I thought it could go without saying that I was talking about batteries in such vehicles, not batteries in consumer electronics that are 1,000 times smaller.
To use an analogy: If someone stores a gallon of gasoline in a single-walled plastic container, that's probably OK. But storing 1,000 gallons of gasoline without certain safety measures is unsafe. So it goes with battery capacities.
My point was about cylindrical cells with higher energy chemistries like NMC and NCA. Rivian uses cylindrical cells for their non-LFP batteries. Lucid uses 2170 cells. As far as I can tell, those three (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid) are the only US car manufacturers who have not had battery recalls due to fire risk.
GM, Hyundai, and Nissan all used pouch cells with higher energy density chemistries, and had recalls due to battery fire risks. Ford also recalled tens of thousands of their plug in hybrids due to battery fire risks, though they haven't found a solution yet beyond limiting the max charge of the battery. These batteries are also NMC pouch cells.
I'm sure it's physically possible to make safe, reliable pouch or prismatic cells using higher energy chemistries, but so far it has been risky for those who have tried.
But it still is untrue even in the discussion of electric vehicles. Tons of EVs have been made safely with chemistries other than LFP with prismatic cells. In fact most non-LFP EV batteries are pouch or prismatic, not cylinder.
Yep. Prismatic cells have poorer packaging-to-material ratio (circles are optimal). They offer better thermal properties, but thermals are not the main limiting factor anymore.
And the US automakers tried prismatic cells before. Chevy Volt used them in 2012!
Chevy sells EVs with prismatic and pouch cells. I don't recall any they've widely sold that used cylinder cells. Most automakers use prismatic cells on their cars, even non-LFP variants.
Also GM had to replace batteries in 142,000 Chevy Bolts & Volts due to fire risk, so I'm not sure that should count as an example of a successful use of non-cylindrical, non-LFP batteries.
It's more complicated. You can't pack the battery at 100% anyway, because you need cooling. Cylindrical cells are also more rigid, so they need less supporting material, or they can even be a part of the support structure itself.
This indeed the “just one more lane bro” solution. What you are missing is how utterly destructive to the urban fabric and disgusting freeways are. Take a stroll next to one sometime.
I live within earshot of one and there's a freight rail even closer. Sure it's loud but the way it causes "the wrong kind of people"[1] to self select to not live here is great for my stress levels.
[1]the kind who have so few problems that freeway proximity makes it high on the list of things that inform where they choose to live
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