intrepidhero

No. The assumption is that charity and government have roughly equivalent efficiency. Both government and charities have (wildly varying) overhead and government agencies may enjoy economies of scale that charities do not. Yet another area of the world that contains a surprising amount of detail.

I had a similar thought while designing my dream programming language but I also wanted automatic currying and I couldn't figure out an ergonomic way to have both.

Now I'm gonna go read your blog series.

At my first house I built garden beads in the back yard about 4 feet from the house, each with an 8 foot tall trellis for peas and beans. Seeing that lovely green wall outside the window in the summer was the absolute nicest window treatment I've ever had.

I built a simple kivy app a few years. Working with kivy and testing on my (linux) dev machine was great. Even side loading to test on my phone using the kivy launcher wasn't too bad. The pain point was that building APKs that the play store would accept was an ordeal and then when they change requirements you have to hope the kivy folks update their build tools in time to recompile with a new version of the NDK before google delists your app.

A split 48/12 system makes a lot more sense. Run the heater/heat pump, power steering, coolant pump, etc on 48V and keep entertainment and controls on 12V.

I hadn't connected the dots that all the various pumps (and fans) have to switch from mechanically connected to the engine via the accessory belt to electrically driven. That's a fair point.

Why would a car need a 48V system for accessories? In general the things a car's 12V system powers have gotten less power hungry over time (LED's, heat pump) and in particular, an EV loses the highest power electrical device on the 12V bus, the starter. The typical equipment used for the entertainment and control systems are going to be much more available with 12V supplies, just because that's the industry standard.

Obviously the traction system is using much, much higher voltages.

The article cites "complexity" of the wiring harnesses, which is nonsense. The wires might get a little smaller, but not by a lot. Like I said, the 12V bus in an EV isn't driving a bunch of high power stuff. (Is it? Am I missing something?)

The one place I can imagine it helping is for driving inverters so you can provide AC outlets for laptops, power tools, etc.

A phone (or a video) call has no more overhead and is no more of a bother than walking over to someone's cube for a chat. I understand that it feels like more to a lot of people but I don't think it is, objectively, more of a bother for either party. If you need the back and forth interactivity to clarify your question then do it.

Your trick with a shared doc is also a great idea and has two additional benefits. 1. The act of writing is an extra step to help you clarify your question. 2. The question and answer are now documented for the future. Both big wins versus a quick chat that then needs to be written down.

Maybe you're trying to make the point that for very complicated systems with many failure points, the reliability of a single component is less impactful than redundancy and there is some truth to that but I must point out that risk vs cost calculations are definitely happening in both industries you mention.

Triple redundancy is not a thing in general aviation while, for some systems, it is in commercial. That's a risk vs cost calculation.

Semiconductor manufacturers do risk vs cost calculations through the entire development and manufacturing process. Source: I've worked in semiconductor, doing those calculations.

But when the robot uprising comes our killbots will be unstoppable terminators and their killbots will explode the first time they encounter a set of stairs.

One of the most useful classes I took in college was a freshmen level philosophy class that I took because I needed 3 more credits of gen. ed. and it was at a convenient time. The prof spent the entire first lecture on this seemingly obvious concept:

If your ideas aren't clear, your writing won't be clear either.

It was like fireworks went off in my head. The realization that unclear writing (prose or code) was a signal that something was missing in my mental model, that there is a continuous feedback loop between the work I'm setting down and the ideas that I'm refining, became the foundation of all the work I've done since, from system design, to troubleshooting problems, to exploring my internal self.

That kind of clarity, where I knew the thing I was learning was going to be important was rare even in technical courses from my chosen field. But a lot of classes that felt "useless" at the time turned out to have important effects, seen only in hindsight.

> best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word: "no"

This is going up on every vertical surface at the office.

The number one use case of `for` in shell scripting is over the output of `$(ls .)` And I immediately run into a problem with filenames that have spaces and then I discover that a stringly typed language has lots of sharp edges.

I fall back on `for filename in os.listdir():`