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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • I disagree. I absolutely love the fact that I can just turn it off after office hours and throw it in a corner during holidays and weekends. Sure, it’s a bit cumbersome to take two phones with you, but it’s also cumbersome to take the laptop and everything with you all the time. Just put it in the same bag and you’re good. Good to note, my employer provides me with a phone, so I didn’t need to buy a second one. It also means that if I switch jobs, I just return the phone and still have my personal device.

    But if it doesn’t work for you, by all means, don’t do it. For me the good outweighs the bad.







  • My BIL got a new Tesla a few weeks ago, my dad has an older one (4 years iirc). I’ve driven my dad’s one and I must say, I don’t like it as a car and the build quality is not great. Too much fiddling with the touchscreen to get basic things done. Then I looked at my BIL’s Tesla and it’s a hard no now. You can’t remove the stick for the indicators. It’s moronic.

    It’s not just Elon that makes me not even consider a Tesla. He’s just an extra reason to not consider the brand.






  • Might be a slightly unpopular opinion, but Volumio (software for a raspberry pi to run it as a headless audio system). It’s good, it’s relatively well maintained and works. But paying 7,50 a month for this software to get multiroom audio, Tidal integration and some other stuff is ridiculously expensive. That’s nearly 90 euro a year and the only thing that is actually an addition server side is syncing settings across devices and the Tidal integration (requires license fees iirc).

    And sure, I can’t buy multiroom speakers for that kind of money, but damn, is it expensive.




  • I don’t buy a U-Haul truck just for the occasion that I’m moving, am I?

    In a less snarky response, in case you can downscale your primary car to be more efficient and less costly, you can save significant amounts of money. In my country, weight, size, type of drivetrain and the sticker price all determine the amount of tax you pay on the vehicle. Getting a small, light vehicle instead of a big one you need for towing can definitely make sense financially, even if you are going to tow a caravan once a year and therefore have to rent a car to do so. Of course the individual circumstances really change a lot and in general people don’t do this due to convenience or the simple fact that they do this more often.

    But you also missed the point of my reply. The point is that these tow bots will essentially be a second vehicle on their own. It will be expensive to buy one, it will be expensive to rent one and it will be expensive to own one. It won’t make sense as a product, even if you can still use your car when you arrive at your destination. The economics won’t work out, I’m pretty sure of that.


  • That’s not a problem that a small machine like this will fix though. The problem with EVs towing isn’t that they don’t have enough power to tow, it’s that the energy consumption goes up significantly due to changes in aerodynamics and the loss of regen braking. Petrol and diesel cars have the same problem, but can refuel quickly. EVs can’t.

    Now imagine an autonomous trailer drone behind your EV. It’s most likely going to be electric, as most new automotive things are going to be electric by now. Then there are two options:

    1. You end up with a small thing that can’t go very far due to limited battery capacity.
    2. You end up with a gigantic machine that can go pretty far, but that’s in no way cheap or easy to store.

    In the first case you might as well use your own EV to tow. In the second case you might as well just rent or buy a vehicle meant for towing. I don’t see how the economics of it are going to make sense.