The clever design choices Tesla made to make the Cybertruck cheap to make.
At $39 000, the Tesla Cybertruck will be sold at the same price as Tesla Model 3, a considerably smaller car. It is also extremely competitive price wise against traditional internal combustion engine trucks, which is something I think surprised a lot of people.
But is it actually cheap?
Electric cars will usually be more expensive that internal combustion engine cars because batteries are really expensive to make. That is the bulk of the cost of EVs. However, in the long run an EV will often be cheaper because electricity is significantly cheaper than gasoline and EVs require much less maintenance.
The way social democracies get misrepresented by conservative think tanks.
As a Nordic social democrat with an interest in economics and statistics, it is hard not to notice the abundance of reports produced by various conservative and pro-market right-wing think tanks that abuse statistics to make social democracies look bad while glorifying more libertarian-minded states such as the US.
The political left is unfortunately very bad at countering this as there are very few left-wing think tanks. Not surprising given that the right has the support of large corporations which donate to think tanks promoting a very capitalism friendly ideologies. Secondly, most leftists don’t enter politics because they are interested…
Both liberals and social democrats accept free market economics and want to help the poor, so how do these ideologies differ from each other?
I want to clarify something I think confuses a lot of North Americans who are curious about the Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland.
Because there is no social democratic party in the US, many Americans don’t quite understand the difference between social democracy and social liberalism. Many Americans, for example, would look to Canada and decide it is sort of like Nordic countries because it has public health care.
Yet Canada is very different as it is based more on social liberalism than social democracy. I am using the term “social liberal” explicitly because there are many…
How do class extensions, duck typing and multiple dispatch compare when extending and reusing existing code?
Object-oriented programming is one way to help you organize large programs, but it is not the only approach. Here I compare Swift, Go and Julia in how they tackle reuse of code. Swift takes the OOP approach and supercharges it with interface and class extensions. Go tries to rethink this whole thing by bringing Duck typing into a statically typed language. Meanwhile Julia rejects the whole OOP paradigm and invents its own: Multiple dispatch.
We’ll go through pros and cons of each approach.
Swift Protocol and Class Extensions
If you want to do classic object-oriented programming, then very few mainstream languages can actually beat Swift…
Been away from Cocoa and Swift programming and feel like you have forgotten a lot of details? Here’s a refresher for Swift 5 and Xcode 12.
This story will not attempt to teach you either Swift or Cocoa. Instead the assumption will be that you knew both at some point but simply have forgotten a whole bunch of stuff.
This is an attempt at covering the stuff that is most easy to forget. Here are topics I will cover:
- XIB Outlets and Gotchas — It is extremely easy to forget stuff when using
.xibfiles to design user intefaces. In particular forgetting to wire up the right outlets. - Adding GUI Controls — This may seem laughable but I actually struggled in Xcode 12 to figure out…
What is the nature of innovation? Can seemingly aimless and frivolous activities have a utility?
We are in the midst of a machine learning revolution. For the past few days I have been working on an application using speech recognition. I cannot help but being blown away by what kind of capabilities are at the fingertips of us software developers today. We are still far away from utilizing the capabilities that already exist. Over the coming years we will see a string of innovative solutions utilizing machine learning.
Yet this story isn’t really about machine learning or software development at all, even if that is my trade. Instead it is an attempt at looking at…
Around 10–70 CE, Greek-Egyptian mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria invented the Aeolipile, a primitive form of steam engine. Many believe that with improvement this could have powered an ancient industrial revolution.
We all love alternative histories about what could have been. Many people, when they first learn about the primitive steam engine, the Aeolipile, invented by the ancient Greeks, think that an industrial revolution did not happen because the Greeks failed to see its potential. But did they?
No, there is simply no way the Aeolipile could have served as a starting point for a industrial revolution in the classical era. In this story I will delve into the details of why, and in doing so give an insight into the nature of technological innovation.
A collection of websites and youtube channels with interesting content covering a wide variety of topics.
As I have been writing my own stories on various aspects of medieval and renaissance history, I have come across many different interesting sites and channels I would like to share.
Shadiversity
Shadiversity, is one of my all time favorite youtube channels. The host Shad is just a really likeable and entertaining guy, who provides very well researched and balanced content. He covers a wide variety of topics. Here are some examples:
Around 1500 to 1600s all of these weapons were used. So what factors would make you pick one weapon over the other?
Online you will find endless discussions about the merits of these different weapons and debates about which ones were the better ones. In this story I will try to summarize the many arguments and give you a better understanding what advantages and disadvantages these weapons offered in different situations.
Topics covered:
- Understanding range and accuracy
- Damage, impact and armor
- Volley fire vs Combined Arms
- Are slings effective?
- Why did Javelins fall out of use?
Part of my interest in understanding these differences stems from playing role-playing games from years back. In these kinds of games the difference between these weapons…
The factors influencing the success of languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C and Swift
Yet again I’ve been inspired by a discussion on Twitter, this time about what makes a programming language succeed. People mention community, marketing budgets, inexpensive developers, etc.
Yet these are not really considerations related to the language, which I think is a big part of their success. For over 20 years I have picked up different languages and reflected on their pros and cons. In retrospect I think I can see a lot of common patterns for why some languages succeeded and other failed.
