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April 2019: https://www.youtube.com/live/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9220s

There are probably even earlier statements from him against lidar...


Yeah it's BS. Tesla uses lidar where it makes sense: They have a small lidar fleet to collect ground truth depth data for better vision estimation. This part is long solved.


> why John no longer does public presentations(as people keep stealing his unfinished ideas)

That's your opinion or you have a source for that?


he said it in a video, i think it was in the recent wookash podcast. although you might fing a short clip of the segment somewhere.


The idea of languages "stealing" ideas from each other is not something anyone building a language cares about. I'll just charitably assume you've completly misinterpreted something he said.


> documentation clearly states that it's UB to violate them

Only in "fast" mode. The developer has the choice:

> Compilation has two modes: “safe” and “fast”. Safe mode will insert checks for out-of-bounds access, null-pointer deref, shifting by negative numbers, division by zero, violation of contracts and asserts.


> The developer has the choice

The developer has the choice between fast or safe. They don't have a choice for checking pre/post conditions, or at least avoiding UB when they are broken, while getting the other benefits of the "fast" mode.

And all in all the biggest issue is that these can be misinterpreted as a safety feature, while they actually add more possibilities for UB!


Well, the C3 developer could add more fine grained control if people need it...

I don't really see what's your problem. It's not so much different than disabling asserts in production. Some people don't do that, because they rather crash than walking into invalid program state - and that's fine too. It largely depends on the project in question.


> It's not so much different than disabling asserts in production.

Disabling asserts would be equivalent to not having them at all, while this feature introduces _new_ UB. In "fast" mode it's equivalent to using C's `__builtin_assume` or Rust's `std::hint::assert_unchecked`, except it's marketed with a name that makes it appear a safety/correctness feature.


Then look at the the average and compare with France. Germany causes 6 times more Co2 stemming from energy production.

The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).


> The energy mix in Germany leads to a situation where electric cars are dirtier than diesel (for the first ~200000 km / 125000 miles driven).

Renewable share of electricity production is about 56% so this claim is not at all credible.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-nearly-5...


Citation needed. I don't belief a word of this.


It's just one piece of the puzzle. The cost for Co2 certificates is a more major reason. Starting 2027, hedge funds can buy these certificates which will be the nail in the coffin. It's basically Bitcoin on steroids with the difference that people buy Bitcoin out of free will, while the industry is forced to buy these certificates which get more scarce over time.


Anyone can already buy those certificates - but as its an artificial market where rules can be changed politically it's actually way more resistant to such things than regular markets, so if those hedge funds feel like they want to lose some billions they can certainly do that. There is a large enough stockpile of certificates + leeway when to submit them that any short term market squeeze will just be dealt with politically.


This argument, namely that politics can lower the price (by emitting extra certificates) when it gets too high, contradicts the whole reason for the mechanism in the first place: They claim a free market can find the right price better than politicians. But then they interfer anyway?

The price will rise much larger than a dumb, fixed increase-schedule would. Because the "market" wants it's profit.


> Because about 99% of the time the garbage collect is a negligible portion of your runtime

In a system programming language?


Whether or not GC is a negligible portion of your runtime is a characteristic of your program, not your implementation language. For 99% of programs, probably more, yes.

I have been working in GC languages for the last 25 years. The GC has been a performance problem for me... once. The modal experience for developers is probably zero. Once or twice is not that uncommon. But you shouldn't bend your entire implementation stack choice over "once or twice a career" outcomes.

This is not the only experience for developers, and there are those whose careers are concentrated in the places where it matters... databases, 100%-utilization network code, hardware drivers. But for 99% of the programs out there, whatever language they are implemented in, GC is not an important performance consideration. For the vast bulk of those programs, there is a much larger performance consideration in it that could be turned up in 5 minutes with a profiler and nobody has even bothered to do that and squeeze out the accidentally quadratic code because even that doesn't matter to them, let alone GC delays.

This is the "system programmer's" equivalent of the web dev's "I need a web framework that can push 2,000,000 requests per second" and then choosing the framework that can push 2,001,000 rps over the one that can push 2,000,000 because fast... when the code they are actually writing for the work they are actually doing can barely push 100 rps. Even game engines nowadays have rather quite a lot of GC in them. Even in a system programming language, and even in a program that is going to experience a great deal of load, you are going to have to budget some non-trivial optimization time to your own code before GC is your biggest problem, because the odds that you wrote something slower than the GC without realizing it is pretty high.


> Whether or not GC is a negligible portion of your runtime is a characteristic of your program, not your implementation language.

Of course, but how many developers choose C _because_ it does not have a GC vs developers who choose C# but then work around it with manual memory management and unsafe pointers? ....... It's > 1000 to 1

There are even new languages like C3, Odin, Zig or Jai that have a No-GC-mindset in the design. So why you people insist that deliberately unsafe languages suddenly need a GC? There a other new languages WITH a GC in mind. Like Go. Or pick Rust - no GC but still memory safe. So what's the problem again? Just pick the language you think fits best for a project.


There's plenty of application-level C and C++ code out there that isn't performance-critical, and would benefit from the safety a garbage collector provides.


Right, does `sudo` net benefit from removal of heap corruption, out of bounds, or use after free, etc errors that GC + a few other "safeties" might provide? I think so!


Yes, plenty have been done already so since Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, Cedar, Oberon, Sing#, Modula-2+, Modula-3, D, Swift,....

It is a matter to have an open mindset.

Eventually system languages with manual memory management will be done history in agentic driven OSes.


"Agentic driven OSes"? Sounds like AI hype babble.



What does this have to do with system languages with manual memory management going away?


Swift, by design, does not have GC.


Chapter 5,

https://gchandbook.org/contents.html

It would help if all naysayers had their CS skills up to date.


RC is a GC method and the least efficient one.


It's the most predictable and has much less overhead than a moving collector.


Only when we forget about the impact of cycle collections, or domino effects stoping the world when there is a cascade of counters reaching zero.

The optimisatios needed to improve such scenarions, are akin to a poor man's tracing GC implementation.


I didn't forget. That's predictable. It happens when the application code does something, or stops doing something, as opposed to the moving collector just doing it at random times.


Germany pays about the same each year: Wind is turned off, but the investors get their guaranteed profit from the tax payer. Meanwhile wind is aggresively expanded. They even go so far to now build wind in the south of Germany and then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies...


Why wouldn't you build wind turbines in Southern Germany? "Generally less wind" does not mean "wind power is infeasible", which it is absolutely not. There are fewer good spots, but that's why, say, the state of Bavaria aims for less than one fifth of the total capacity than the state of Lower Saxony, despite being almost twice as large.

It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)

Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.


I wrote aggressively expanded. It doesn't make sense to build wind in a region where it's only profitable due to subsidies.

> Wind power is so cheap

Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)

France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.


Electricity prices are only very tangentially related to production cost. As you say yourself, grid costs are a factor.

> France has lower electricity prices

France has incredibly high subsidies for nuclear power, and it's still not enough. And their newest power plant cost 20 billion just in construction for a paltry 1.6GW, and to even begin new ones they need to subsidy them with 100€ per MWh (which is about thirty-three times the subsidies wind power recieves in Germany).

If anything, France is a nice example of how it's maybe nice to /have/ a fleet of nukes, but Germany does not have them nor do they have the time to build up reactors. Even if there were politicians interested in paying for them (because the free market sure isn't).


France doesn't have high subsidies for nuclear. EDF financial reports are public, please don't spread misinformation. In fact they have an additional tax for it called arenh.

You could consider nationalization a subsidy(albeit it wasn't) but that was a one off 9bn payment. Germany spent double of that last year alone on EEG ren subsidies and still had highest household prices in EU.

German wind gets about 70€/MWh.

New french nuclear CFDs aren't clear. Fla3 doesn't have cfd and has a prod cost of 90-120€/MWh. But that's a failed project which got delayd and had supply chain issues. If EPR2 will have the same problems - yes, it'll cost similarly. Otherwise it'll be cheaper, like eg building a unit in 10y instead of 20


Well the whole clean energy transformation in Germany has a tax payer burden of 3 trillion or more till 2045. Frances nuclear plants didn't even receive 1 trillion of subsidies in total since their existence (according to my quick research). But let's say France and Germany are even in subsidies or France pays slightly more: I thought it's about Co2? Again: France has 1/6 of the Co2 emissions compared to Germany. Just by that metric it's a colossal failure!

When you say Germany can't just build nuclear plants now you are right. But the solution can't be to expand solar and wind, while destroying coal and nuclear plants - which is what they do. The last minister for these matters had the unironical idea to shutdown industry when the renewables don't produce. The idea was to move from a demand driven industry, to a supply driven industry. Total madness. The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.


You're mixing up historic costs with current costs. As an illustration: the moon landing cost just $25 billion dollars, the Manhattan project even just $2 billion, what do you think a project of these scales would cost today?

You're also mixing the status quo with your (unclear) desire of how the world should be. Germany spent the last 80 years to build up an energy grid built on coal – nuclear peaked at 30%!. Of course they emit more CO2 today compared to the French!

But if anything, that's an argument for why Germany should start agressively building out renewables (aggression there was abandoned 20 years ago by the Merkel admin).

> 3 trillion or more till 2045

Looking at decades is a surefire way to get big numbers. But depending on your starting points (I guess 1999 during SPD/Greens coalition), that's just €60 billion per year. A lot of money but not exactly shocking.

> The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.

Even the state of Bavaria - not exactly known to be mad for wind power - classifies more than half of its area as containing locations suitable for wind power. Of course that's nothing compared to Lower Saxony, but that's why they aim for total installed capacity of just 6 GW by 2050 (source for all that is the Bayrischer Windatlas issued by the, again, very sceptical of wind power, CSU government of Bavaria).

You're really just decade old fud against renewables. Do you really think that in the whole of 70 thousand square kilometres of Bavaria there are no points where the wind is strong enough 150 m above ground to produce power profitably? Because that's just not true. And 6 GW, by the way, are just one to four thousand modern turbines. Across the largest state of Germany. There's nothing mad about that at all.


Germany spent over 360bn on eeg alone till now, not adjusted to inflation. That's about 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. And EEG is projected to rise further.

In 20y since EEG creation, Germany achieved much poorer decarbonization vs France during Messmer

You can check out today how nicely is that investment performing https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

So Germany did both spend more and achieved poorer results which can be seen literally today or in yearly average. All this while it has highest household prices in EU per eurostat (last year, this year it'll probably be topped by Romania)


German nuclear did provide for about 4-5ct similar to the swiss one https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...

Or alternatively merit order data https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...

And this includes everything. No subsidies were given per bundestag. In fact if subsidies were so high as some claim, govt would have just needed to cancel them instead of banning. The only ones that are trying to picture a different reality are some orgs like FOS/Greenpeace.

Wind in southern Germany is unprofitable because of solar(solar is almost always universally cheaper vs wind) and transmission cost, as well as nimby from all parties incl greens. You get much less output vs north while solar is cheaper and eats your share. This is why despite higher incentives not much is built. Currently the bid ceiling is in 7ct/kwh range. But final price is determined by other factors too, like how often you pay this guarantee or curtailment. EEG is projected to rise despite most expensive contracts being over, because it's paid more frequently.

Offshore is in a worse situation since it's even more expensive to deploy there- recent tender got 0 bids, just like in DK and UK in the past. That's also why UK rised compensation in AR6/AR7

New nuclear for Germany is pointless to discuss. Nobody except maybe afd wants it. The CDU promised to do a research about restarting some older units during elections - guess what- nothing got done.

Germany is currently paying about 18bn/y for transmission, 18bn/y for eeg and 2-3bn/y on curtailment and 18bn/y on distribution. All except maybe distribution network are depending on renewables expansion - the more you deploy - the more you pay, at the tradeoff that merit order will be cheaper when wind blows and sun shines. If they don't, like today https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... merit order gets super expensive - partly because fossils are expensive, partly because firm power is asking more to compensate periods when wind/solar are strong, partly due to co2 tax. And per bnetza/Fraunhofer ISE gas needs expansion to have sufficient firming


But he said

> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies

If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.

Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.


I don't know what the name of the internet law is, but I think it goes something like: when someone tells you about a regulation and how outrageously stupid it obviously is, they probably misrepresented it or frames it in an adventurous way.

In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions". And if you know anything about the region, it's very implausible. Southern states are generally not forerunners for wind power, with Bavaria's governing party being downright hostile. They are not increasing subsidies, that's for sure.

My best guess is that this refers to either differences in subsidies between the states - Lower Saxony has lower to no subsidies because building wind turbines is popular and profitable there without additional funding. Bavaria meanwhile probably lacks experts and has to bring them down from Lower Saxony or NRW, increasing building costs even at locations just as suitable as in Lower Saxony. So yeah, they might still have state subsidies, but not because they want wind power where it's infeasible. You wouldn't find an operator for that.

Another guess is that maybe this about the process for bidding on subsidies. This is a method where for large-scale projects operators can bid on executing projects not just with money but also by the amount of subsidies. For off-shore power, that subsidy often goes negative now, i.e. it's practically a license cost now. That does indeed mean that less desirable projects, which are probably less ideal for power generation, receive more subsidies, but that's a far cry from building wind power in "infeasible" locations.


> In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions"

https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...

> The price actually paid is the bid price, which is adjusted up or down by a correction factor. This is higher in low-wind locations and lower in high-wind locations. Put simply, this means that where there is a lot of wind and yields are high, there is slightly less money per kilowatt hour fed into the grid. Where the wind is weaker, the subsidy increases.

Now why do they do this? Because the goal is to do _everything_ with renewables. Which means: Since it's not so easy to route electricity from the north to the south, the south needs it's own plants, even if they are unprofitable.


I thought you were referring to that. But what's so bad about highly profitable places receiving less subsidy? Framed that way it's not as outrageous, right?

There's no malicious encouragement to build wind power where it does not make sense.

But why are there subsidies anyway? Well, all forms of power are subsidised, nuclear power the most, and renewables and coal about to the same tune (in Germany). Also, the electricity price is very low in Germany. Often lower as in France. You know, neither coal plant operators nor wind power operators profit from the extremely high consumer price point. So even though wind power is the cheapest form of energy to produce (in Germany), even it can't break even all the times, which is a scary prospect for investors.


Nuclear power in EU is least subsidized per IPEX. Renewables get about 15x more subsidies. Fossils about 30x more. Again, data is open

German household prices are highest in EU https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And industrial ones in top 5. All this despite EEG subsidies. Without them the price would be about 6ct/kwh higher


I'll wait for the Trump Diamond Card


I would've assumed the error set is generated based on function signatures. Sick stuff.


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