You're probably not going to get any external PCIe port other than thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is fast enough for most Mac use cases anyway. TB5 gets you 80 Gbps bidirectional, or 120/40 Gbps asymmetrical, and there aren't a lot of things in a desktop environment that would really benefit from more than 120 Gbps.

I'm confused, most stores like that already have digital price tags, and have for many years. Even Walmart has been using them already for a while now.

Hydro-Quebec is facing future capacity shortages due to past underinvestment in new infrastructure. They're facing losing a significant chunk of their installed capacity due to the Churchill Falls deal being at risk of falling apart. That deal would also have included a bunch of new construction, which may not happen any more. They're making big plans about future investments to increase capacity, but are still returning billions to the government in dividends instead of re-investing in capacity expansion.

Do we really have the capacity to export so much more power to the US?

They did not use a rasberry pi 4, they used an RP2350 microcontroller. If memory serves, there's basically static recompilation happening, where Linden writes SueprFX assembly, which is being translated to ARM assembly at compile time.

Then make it optional. Let me set the location name language versus the spoken language, either just as a global setting, or on a territory by territory basis. Anybody who lives in a city where the language spoken is different from the language they speak is affected (like an English-speaking person living in Montreal), but also any tourist who asks anybody for directions is going to hear street names that are completely different than Google Maps.

As an English-speaking Quebecker, I don't recognize many of the street names that Google says out loud, because some of them sound completely different than what I expect. I could set the whole language to French, but... French is not my native language, so why should I? I just want the street names to be pronounced correctly.

Using Google Maps (or any mapping app) in Montreal is a constant facepalm where it tries to read French names as if they were English words. There are tons of situations in the world where the native language of the driver is not the language of most street names. Is it too much to ask for it to know "I'm speaking in English but I should read all street signs in this territory in French"? There's lots of situations where you might have similar situations (tourists, expats, cities with multi-lingual populations), and using unrecognizable names for streets is a big pain.

The HEV are already a substantial cost reduction over the diesels. It's not clear that the BEVs offer a sufficient cost savings over the HEVs to justify their extra cost. It's not a small extra cost, the cancelled 2023 deal for 1229 BEV from Nova Bus was at a cost of $2.1 billion, or about $1.7 million per bus.

I'm not sure it's just a cashflow issue, if the BEV don't have a lower TCO in the long run. The transit agency *is* partially funded from higher levels of government. They get funding from the fuel tax, funding from the city, funding from the regional transit authority, funding from the provincial government, and funding from the federal government. But all levels of government (and the transit authority itself) are running deficits, and there are competing priorities.

What's more important, buying BEV busses over HEV busses, or making more of the transit network accessible? Building elevators in 60 year old underground (sometimes quite deeply) metro stations without interrupting service isn't cheap or fast, and its taken them 18 years to install elevators in just 30 out of 68 stations, though they only really kicked into high gear ten years ago. But due to the funding shortfall, that work has been cancelled, except for the stations currently in progress (and the new stations being constructed as part of the blue line extension and new above-ground metro system, though the latter is a different transit authority).

The actual air temperature during that cold snap, we had days that had a high of -20. The point was just that Montreal, the second largest city in the country, experiences cold weather, and gets a lot of snow, and the electric busses are working fine here. The reason we didn't go whole-hog on them (despite there being a plan to do so) is because the transit authority simply couldn't afford the expense in the end, and chose hybrids, which offered only some of the benefits, but represented a cost reduction compared to diesel. It's not the only area where their financial difficulties are causing struggles. It's lead to labour disputes, reduced maintenance, service cuts, and accessibility work (elevators for subway stations) also got suspended indefinitely.

Montreal has 41 fully electric busses. This winter we hit roughly -40 with windchill, and we get around 217cm (85 inches) of snow a year. They're from the same Canadian bus manufacturer (New Flyer) as the Vermont busses, but we charge them inside the garage, so the temperature is not relevant for charging. The reason Vermont can't charge them indoors is due to the limitations of their garage, not their busses.

All that said, Montreal is focusing on replacing all busses with hybrid instead of electric. The bus fleet currently consists of 41 electric, 849 hybrid, and 959 diesel. The transit authority is cash strapped and underfunded and simply can't afford the up-front costs of the fully electrics, but has found that the hybrids are more reliable and dramatically cheaper to maintain than the diesels that they're replacing. Most of the hybrids also have air conditioning, which the diesels don't, which is nice in the summer.

I think you missed the part where they switched from resistive heating to heat pumps, and *then* started scavenging waste heat. You don't lose efficiency in cold temperatures from the battery operating at cold temperatures, you lose efficiency from the energy spent keeping the battery warm. And moving to heat pumps and scavenging waste heat reduced the amount of energy spent keeping the battery warm.

I'm saying that cold weather performance of the battery itself is less relevant because modern EVs don't need to spend nearly as much energy keeping the battery warm as they used to.

CATL's LFP batteries hit 205 Wh/kg in 2024, so "roughly" is doing a lot of lifting there. It's 17% heavier for equivalent capacity. And it's not just a little lower than nickel-rich chemistries, it's a bit more than half as much.

It's also not clear how valuable cold weather performance is, newer EVs use heat pumps instead of resistance heating, and share the cooling loops between the powertrain, battery, and cabin, so that the heat removed from the motors can heat the cabin and battery. They're going to need that system in place (to heat the cabin and cool the powertrain) even if a new battery type can operate at colder temperatures.

Sodium batteries don't differ enough from LFP in cycle lifespan enough to matter (not for this sort of use case, anyway), and the density is lower, so the only way they'll be competitive is if they're sufficiently cheaper.

At least this one is doing something unique for that price. The world is filled with expensive phones that have only incremental improvements over their cheaper brethren. Maybe you get a bit more performance, or slightly better cameras, or a slightly better screen. But a phone that unfolds into a full 10" tablet (a full-sized iPad, not an iPad Mini), that's something that no other phone can do, and one that offers a significant potential utility.

Of course, very few people will be able to justify the price, no matter how unique or useful that unique ability is. But if this functionality was offered in a $1000 phone, I'd consider buying it.

Most 3D printers run off cheap microcontrollers that don't have to do anything more than follow a set of CNC instructions provided to them. They couldn't detect an attempt to print a gun even if they wanted to.

Fair enough, I only tried it on desktop.