From this statement, I think you'd agree that gender is a far more important aspect of personal identity than sex is.

If I'm completely honest I am quite happy for people to identify however they like. I have no preference or agenda whatsoever. It's not something I give a huge amount of thought to really.

If it wasn't for the guess-o-meter (range gauge) being so unreliable, and the degradation, I would have held on to my Leaf. But my range vehicle (an '08 Prius) was starting to need some more maintenance, and the Leaf became problematic if I needed to run any errands after work.

I'm not aware of any Toyota vehicles sold in the U.K that have a turbocharger, except the Supra which shares the drivetrain, suspension, platform and some interior with the BMW Z4.

Heck, their Yaris GRMN uses the 1.8 supercharged engine that Toyota have been selling to Lotus for years.

I wonder how Toyota plan to transfer this to electric vehicles given how new the technology still is.

> that have a turbocharger,

It's not only Toyota. I think this is an instance of you get what you measure. European car automakers jump into turbocharged engines, because it was easy to meet NDEC. Now WLTP makes it a way harder, hence mild hybridization.

You'd have independent electric motors on at least 2, perhaps all 4 wheels. You have to redesign entire platforms to fit batteries, ensure the batteries and the drivetrain have adequate cooling, ensure that the electric motors have a certain amount of longevity, and so on.

However, EVs still have CV joints, differentials (dependent on the car, Tesla runs an open differential), independent suspension - all of which must be much stronger since electric motors produce far more torque than ICEs and also have the added weight penalty.

The transmission is the most complicated part of the drive-train and arguably more complicated than all of the other drive-train components combined. In current EVs there is no transmission, just a single reduction gearbox.

In an EV the engine is dramatically simplified compared to an ICE and there are significantly fewer parts and almost no moving parts in comparison.

Another thing to consider is that all internal combustion engines have multiple supplementary systems that are required to function such as cooling, fuel delivery, and ignition. At most an EV motor might require supplementary cooling but no commercial vehicle has one that I'm aware of.

There are fewer moving parts, I agree. The architecture itself is simpler too, I agree. But the individual components are still massively complex and expensive. High density Lithion-ion is very complex, and also requires a number of supplementary systems to manage power, heat, cooling and monitor the array.

This is wrong. They have a single electric motor (except the dual-motor ones) and a fixed reduction gear box, just like the Leaf. No one does direct-drive electric motors because it's a lot easier to make a faster-spinning motor and then use a reduction gear to get usable torque from it; a direct-drive motor would have to have a huge diameter.

>The maintenance schedule for an EV is annually changing the cabin filter, wiper blades, and doing a multi-point inspection.

You're forgetting the brakes. EVs still have regular hydraulic brake systems that need new pads and fluid, though not as much because they can use regenerative braking much of the time, avoiding use of the friction brakes, which are really for emergency stops and full stops.

You're right. I was mistaken, I thought I had read that the Roadster was the only Tesla with a gearbox but that it was eliminated with a free upgrade. There's still a gearbox but it's a fixed single reduction gear.

> You're forgetting the brakes.

I wasn't, I was touching on the differences between an EV and an ICE with regards to maintenance. Brakes are a consumable that are inspected and changed as needed rather than at regular interval like the belts or fluids in an ICE vehicle.

Brakes and brake fluid are part of the multi-point inspection that's done on all vehicles when they're serviced. As you pointed out, EVs use their brakes significantly less than ICE vehicles and so any maintenance of the brake system will be less frequent than an equivalent ICE vehicle.

Overall EVs require significantly less maintenance to their drive/power-train AND to some of their traditional systems (e.g. brakes).

I've driven a manual all my life. I don't really enjoy automatics, and I've got to the point now where I've pretty much perfected rev matching and heel and toe so I can engine brake most of the time with minimal wear on my clutch and shock to my drive train.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think I wear my brakes any faster than if I drove an electric car. I'd love to do an experiment to see if this was the case, it sounds like as lot of fun!

However, I concede that most drivers are nowhere near as interested in the technicalities of driving and teaching learner drivers to rev match and heel and toe is probably too complex at that stage in their driving careers.

For every ICE driver like you, there are an equal number of EV drivers trying to optimize their driving habits as well. The difference between ICE and EV when it comes to brake wear is that it's an active effort for an ICE driver and passive for an EV driver.

The regenerative braking in an EV varies by make/model but the 1st gen. Nissan Leaf has by far the least aggressive system. With the Leaf, the brake engagement is based on a number of factors from how fast you're going to how hard you press on the brake. The Leaf will almost come to a complete halt simply by taking your foot off the accelerator and allowing the regen system to drag the car to a stop without ever depressing the brake. In stop-and-go traffic you rarely have to take your foot off the gas.

In the Leaf when you depress the brake pedal the regenerative system ramps up quickly and only after it has peaked do the mechanical brakes engage. When stopping it's not uncommon to hear the mechanical brakes engage just as the car comes to a rest to hold the car at a stand still, it's an audible thunk.

The Tesla Model 3's regenerative braking is quite aggressive compared to the Leaf and if you take your foot completely off the accelerator pedal you will lurch forward in your seat as the car quickly decelerates.

I personally find the Leaf to be a much easier, and a lot less fun, to drive than the Model 3 because of how the brake regen systems work. In my 2015 Leaf I can engage hill mode (aggressive regen) and eco mode (gummy pedal) and then only have to touch the brakes to come to a complete halt. I've yet to find a setting in the Model 3 that compares.

You should go test drive something like the Model 3 as it's a very different driving experience to an ICE in terms of braking.

You sound like you took one test drive of the Model 3 at one setting and have no idea that there are multiple settings. If you go through the menus, the aggressiveness of the regen braking is settable. You can make the car "creep" as if it has an automatic transmission, or you can make it not "creep", like cars with manual transmissions and clutches. You can set it for aggressive regen like a real EV, or you can set it for non-aggressive regen so it feels like driving a regular car with an auto trans.

The proper setting, IMO, is the full-EV mode with very aggressive regen. You're not supposed to use the accelerator as an accelerator, you're supposed to use it as a speed control pedal. So you don't take your foot off the pedal at all, unless you need to brake hard. The rest of the time, you keep your foot on the pedal and modulate it to control your speed. If that's a problem for you, it's because you learned bad driving habits with non-EV vehicles, and you need to learn better driving habits now.

> implying that that was the only way it could work.

You're interpreting it how you want to and not taking what's being said in the context it's given.

The comment I was responding to remarked that they used engine braking as a means of reducing brake wear. They acknowledged to have never driven an EV and I was pointing out that by default an EV exhibits a behavior (i.e. regenerative braking) that is similar and, unlike engine braking, is not something you consciously have to perform. It's on by default.

You swoop in to tell me how I'm wrong (which I'm not) and that I'm complaining (which I wasn't).

> the Model 3's settings, which in fact, let you change this thing that you're complaining about.

First, I wasn't complaining about it at all, go back and reread what I said.

> I personally find the Leaf to be ... a lot less fun, to drive...

With both cars you have to keep constant pressure on the accelerator to coast, however the Model 3 requires you to maintain greater pressure which leads to fatigue faster (i.e. less fun). In the Leaf you can set Regenerative Braking to Normal and disable Eco Mode, which increases throttle response and reduces pedal weight, which allows you to coast at highway speeds with minimal pedal pressure. The Model 3's equivalent settings (i.e. Acceleration = Standard, Regenerative Braking = Low) require much more pedal pressure to coast at highway speeds.

Second, even when you set Regenerative Braking to Low in the Tesla, it is still not like driving an ICE vehicle. The Model 3's least aggressive Regenerative Braking setting is so aggressive that if you completely remove your foot from the accelerator it automatically illuminates your brake lights. Unless you're driving in a manual transmission vehicle and you downshift, you will never experience that kind of tug.

So no, in fact, you cannot change the settings in the Model 3 to be comparable to a conventional ICE vehicle. At best you can get a behavior that's akin to driving a manual transmission vehicle aggressively.

Again, I'm not complaining about the Model 3 or any EV.

With regards to my "one test drive" experience with EVs: https://i.imgur.com/KUnPluM.jpg

In EVs the brakes are engaged, just less frequently and with less force. For example in a normal car when you depress the brake pedal gently to slow to a normal stop the brakes engage immediately. In an EV the regenerative braking force increases when you depress the brake pedal and only after it has hit 100% do the brakes engage.

So with an ICE vehicle the brakes are the primary stopping force most of the time where as with an EV they're the secondary stopping force most of the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You would think so, but Tesla had a lot of problems with their electric motors and had to replace lots of them.

This poses a problem for Toyota and others (e.g. Honda) who are known for having very reliable power-trains, not because their reliability will suffer but rather because other automaker's power-trains will get significantly better. That is assuming those other automakers don't find a way to screw up, I have no doubt some will.

This also applies to ICE. Most ICE drivetrains that do not have forced induction tend to be quite simple. Forced induction makes the drivetrain much more complex and puts a lot more strain on the drivetrain, and is one of the reasons why Toyota has stayed away from forced induction.

Is the drive train in a Tesla Model X P100d much simpler than that in a 1.5 NA Yaris? I'm not sure, and would love to be proved incorrect on this.

Yes.

Internal Combustion Engines have at a minimum a Combustion System, Ignition System, Fuel Delivery System, Exhaust System, and a Cooling System. These can vary in complexity but, apart from air cooling, any one of those systems will be more complex than an EV's electric power-train. On top of that, most of the parts of an ICE are mechanical moving parts where as most of the parts of an electric motor are stationary non-moving parts.

ICE vehicles almost universally have a transmission gear box that contains a configurable gear system to alter the gear ratio of the vehicle. All EVs on the market use a fixed gear box with a single reduction gear set.

> Is the drive train in a Tesla Model X P100d much simpler than that in a 1.5 NA Yaris?

Yes, dramatically.

The thing is if there is something I want to buy, or own at some point in my life, I don't tend to forget about it or need some reminder from a targeted ad. If it's something I really want I'll usually think about it daily.

On the other hand, there could be something that I need, and have never searched for, that I have forgotten about such as going out and buying more toilet roll.

They would be the ones making the ad, targeting someone X miles from them, who is interested in BMW's.

Car just won an award, which would direct him to look up more info about the car and why it's considered good.

Maybe they just made an update to the car model he likes, but is not aware of this change.

I would prefer it if this feature didn't exist at all rather than cause runtime panics.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624...

It's not useful to blindly read at random offsets in UTF-8 strings. If it didn't panic, you'd get garbage. If offsets were automatically moved to skip over garbage, you wouldn't know what you're getting, and your overall algorithm would likely end up with nonsense (duplicated or skipped chars).

For algorithms that don't care about characters or UTF-8 validity, there's zero-cost `.as_bytes()`.

And in the rare cases, when it's not a bug, then one can just use `as_bytes` which would be good to do in any case, to indicate to other humans that this is not a bug.

B.t.w. I love the error message `[..3]` generates: "thread 'main' panicked at 'byte index 3 is not a char boundary; it is inside '早' (bytes 2..5) of `ab早`'" — I've never seen such easy to understand error messages in any language (except for in a few cases in Scala).

e.g. my_hashmap["foo"] will panic at runtime if the key "foo" is not present, or return the associated value if it is. But my_hashmap.get("foo") will return None if "foo" is not present and Some(value) if it is.

First of all, panics are perfectly safe. None of this has to do with safety guarantees.

Second, the [] syntax is controlled by the Index trait, which returns an &T, not an Option<&T>. It does this due to Rust's error handling philosophy. There's two kinds of errors: recoverable and unrecoverable errors. When something shouldn't fail, unless there's a bug, you shouldn't be using Option/Result, you should panic. When something may normally fail, and you want to be able to handle that explicitly, you should use Option/Result.

If [] always returned an Option, you'd be seeing tons and tons and tons of unwraps. It's not the right default here. However, that's why the .get method also exists: If you do think that this may fail, but not due to a bug, then you should use .get instead, which does give you an option.

TL;DR: everything is tradeoffs, and we picked a specific set of them, and that's how they all play out together.

Personal commentary: this is the kind of thing that's largely concerning until you actually use the language more, IMHO. Dealing with Options all the time here would feel really bad. Consider the other sub-thread about floats; it often feels like boilerplate for no good reason. That would introduce this for every single time you want to index something, which is a very common operation.

This would also free up the [] to be used for generics and avoid syntactical warts like ::<> parsin

It doesn't remove those warts, it moves them.

If you want all the data after a : character, you slice on the index of the :. The character after it is going to be the beginning of a UTF-8 character.

You do not under any circumstances guess that the colon is at position 6 in the string. That's not safe. Why are you going cowboy in a language that is so obsessed with safety?

It's like the default rule in a lexer, if it ever gets to it then it's an unrecognized character and lexing stops so error handling can proceed.

--edit--

Which I now realize was probably your point.

Granted, this is certainly incorrect but has little to do with safety, especially if the downstream code has to revalidate everything anyway.

I suppose one could have it return StrWithInvalidSurrounds, where just the first (at most) 3 and last (at most) 3 bytes might be invalid, which would then allow for O(1) revalidation to a &str, and even other operations like continuing to slice... But this is even more clunky for actual use!

I think a moderately less clunky API might have been to not use integers for byte indexing, but instead some ByteIndex wrapper type that string operations return, meaning one can't just write `s[..5]` in an attempt to get the first 5 characters of the string.

(Also, there's str::get that returns an Option: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.str.html#method.get )

String always assumes full UTF-8. You could make an AsciiString type if you wanted, but it's not provided by the standard library.

It's exactly the opposite of what you expect. Getting the nth codepoint is often (not always) semantically incorrect since a codepoint isn't necessarily one character. Multiple codepoints might combine to form one character. (In Unicode, these are called grapheme clusters.)

Byte offsets are used a ton because you might often have the index to a position in the string from some routine, like, say, a search[1].

I've been working on text related things in both Rust and Go for several years. Both languages got this part of their strings exactly right given that their representation in memory is always a sequence of bytes.

[1] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.str.html#method.find

The reason being that the behavior of [] for string varies widely in different languages, and so this is something that's best made explicit, both to force the author of the code to consider whether their assumptions are valid and reasonable for what they're trying to do, and to give additional context to anyone else reading the code.

As it is, I suspect a common class of bugs for Rust will be with people assuming that [] slices codepoints, because it seems to work that way for ASCII.

There is pretty much no case where indexing by character actually makes sense because it is almost always incorrect and it is always inefficient.

Indexing by byte is rarely useful, but it does have some usefulness since it can be used correctly and efficiently since you can easily find the next or previous character by searching a maximum of four bytes for the a byte that has a MSB of 0. If you want to do something like get a &str that would fit in a n-byte buffer, then byte indices will let you do that efficiently and correctly.

> If a string is an array of characters

It is not, it is an array (technically vector) of bytes.

At the very least, shouldn't there be an O(n) method to do character-wise slicing?

You can, but it depends on what you mean by “character”, as that’s not a concept in Unicode. Every kind of thing you could mean has a method, specific to it, since they’re different things.

(char in Rust is a Unicode scalar value, and you can collect into a Vec<char> and then slice it, as an example of one of those things. And that’s still O(1) at the cost of using up to four times the memory.)

  fn main() {
      let a = "ab早".as_bytes();
      let a = &a[..3];
      println!("Hello, world!");
  }

This example was basically a suggestion to throw0u1t: if they want to cut in the middle of the utf-sequence for whatever reason, they can [edit:] do it without extra crates.

What I don't understand is why slices are indexed in bytes and not in objects. If String has an ability to check that we're cutting in the middle of the character sequence, why doesn't it provide an ability to take 3 fully formed characters.

If you want to find the one millionth codepoint of a UTF8-encoded string, you have to more or less (1) visit every byte of the string.

If, on the other hand, you want to find the codepoint that covers the millionth byte, on the other hand, you have to read at most four bytes (read the millionth byte, and there are three cases:

- it’s a full codepoint. If so, you‘re done.

- it is the first byte of a multi-byte codepoint. If so, read forwards in the string for up to 3 continuation characters.

- it is a continuation character. If so, search backwards in the string for the first byte, then, if necessary, read forwards to find more continuation characters.

So, that is O(1)

(1) you can skip continuation characters, but these typically are rare.

Slicing is an O(1) operation, and that would be an O(n) operation.

Also, you can get the same performance from an operation that returns a byte array instead of a string. If that kind of performance is what you want, then a Unicode string is simply not the right type to use.

You suggest just using a byte array instead, but then you'd lose the guarantee that what you're working with is valid Unicode. Contrary to your assertion, it is useful to have a type that provides that guarantee, yet which can still be operated on efficiently.

[1] https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/14/stop-ascribing...

Indexing into a UTF-8 string doesn't serve any reasonable consistent purpose anyway, because it is an abstraction of text that doesn't provide support to the notion that a "character" is more fundamental than a word or paragraph, etc. Rust's string slicing exists solely to make ASCII text easy to handle. If your text is not ASCII, then you shouldn't be slicing it at all. Thus the panic.

If that's true, isn't it the job of a type system to help avoid such nonsensical operations? If "slice" only makes sense for byte arrays and ASCII strings, it could be provided on those types without being defined on UTF-8 strings.

Panics are not unsafe. Panic exists in Rust because they are safe.

That's "safe" by a very limited definition of safety. It's one step up from undefined behavior, granted, but it's not a very high standard. In practice, in most programs, you'd want to ensure that such a panic would never happen, and personally I think the language's unhelpfulness in that regard is a wart.

It's not strictly true, because there are situations where you want to slice UTF-8. For instance, if you already know where the code point boundaries are for newlines. But if you know that, then you've run something like a regex with >O(1) behavior and you certainly wouldn't want string slicing to do redundant work.

>hat's "safe" by a very limited definition of safety

That's the definition of safe that is used. Safety in the context of Rust means memory safety. (Division can panic, btw.) If you don't see why undefined behavior is so much worse than a panic, then do some research on it. If you want programs that never fail, you need a comprehensive plan that takes into account things like hardware failure. A programming language can't do that.

Basically, string indexing is a lot harder than it seems at first glance, depending on what you want.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#meth...

[2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/str/struct.Chars.html

[3]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.char.html

IIRC that's what grapheme clusters are for.

This is great for high-level code, but painful to work with from native code, because it usually needs some specific encoding to call into other libraries, and it's usually UTF-8 - so you need to re-encode all the time.

So it handles the (very) common case of needing the same encoding multiple times (e.g. for all file paths on Windows), while not introducing too much overhead in memory or speed.

I could be mistaken on exact details though, especially since I recall there being multiple implementations even within py3.x.

Apple should make a phone like the SE which is made for the low-mid market, not just discount its old models.

i'm on an SE. i got this phone fairly late into its life cycle and it was a deliberate choice. my biggest regret is probably not getting a second one before they discontinued it because when my current SE fails i have no idea where to get a replacement.

I bought my wife the XS, not because it has a fancier display, but purely because it was the smallest model available - and it's still too big for her.

Instead of differentiating their phones based on features, they should simply differentiate them based on screen size. That would allow them to meet several price points without making their customers feel like they’re cheap.

Remember, the SE was released outside of the usual iPhone release cycle in March 2016, so I think intent for a longer cycle was clear.

Lots of people predicted between 2 and 3 years before the SE got an update, so if March 2019 passes without an announcement, then who knows what's next.

Also, I think there's a high probability they're trying to work out the kinks in an SE-sized phone that is all screen. I'd be surprised if they released the SE2 and it has a home button.

With the solve down in new features and design Apple could have skipped the iPhone 8, XS and XR. Except of cause "the market" and their stockholders expects new phones, regardless of the need.

It was a miniaturised iPhone 6s released while the 6s was ‘current’, and got to ‘low-mid market’ pricing by being discounted as it got older.

SE size, just go edge to edge.

Now I have 3 SEs (one with a broken screen that I'll get fixed, one currently in use, one still in the box) that will hopefully last me a while - maybe the phone market returns to sensible sizes & features in a few years.

I don't want an 8 because I don't want a phone with a glass back.

iPhone SE was perfect. Metal all round, small, affordable, powerful.

What is this “case” you’re talking about?

Kind regards SE-owner

The trouble with a glass back is that it can still shatter when dropped even if it has a case on it.

Both times I've dropped the phone getting in or out of the car. First time it landed face first on the garage floor and shattered the screen and the second time it landed on its side and just scratched the case a little.

Hard to know what will happen when you drop your phone.

I find this is the real problem. I've had phones that I've dropped many, many times, onto hard surfaces, that have come away without a scratch. Then I dropped a Nokia 3 and the screen just flew apart.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207043

I can't not drop things.

It is not my first time hearing that some individuals may prefer a smaller phone, and you’re correct. I don’t find that difficult to understand.

Headphone jack

Unfortunately even last years models do not support LTE band 71, so they are a poor choice for T-Mobile US customers. No dual SIM support is another reason for many.

The latest issue I have is where the phone I'm writing this on keeps switching from 2.4 to 5GHz when in the bedroom. However, when it switches from 2.4 to 5 it becomes unusuable due to the poor SNR ratio. I wish I could pin it to 2.4GHz, instead I keep having to wait for it to drop the connection and renegotiate on 2.4GHz.

How was the Apple Airport slow? What kind of diagnostics did you do? What does the Google WiFi do different that makes it work so much better?