Yeah, but the plate itself was $100/year last time I looked, which is outrageous. (It looks like it's $50/year now. I swear that's lower than it used to be)
This. When I moved from Ontario, Canada (where they charge a yearly fee for them), to CA, I was all excited to get a vanity plate - until I saw they also charge a yearly fee..
In the most ironic twist of all - Ontario did away with license plate renewals a few years ago, and now, I would actually consider a vanity plate..
I've always wondered if a regular plate was better for avoiding speeding tickets - a vanity plate is much easier to validate, IMHO.
I had a friend who used to work as a QA for an ANPR parking system. He said that they had to investigate an issue where the car with 11111 kept appearing in the system as unpaid, but at different places across the network at the same time.
The issue turned out to be drain covers in the field of the view of the cameras, which the system was detecting belonged to car 11111.
>Dealers certainly make less profit on EVs. The Dealer model was built around regular, required maintenance schedules as profit centers. EVs have far fewer moving parts and fluids with regular maintenance schedules.
Is there any data out there on what percentage of new car buyers take their vehicle to the dealer for maintenance? I've found myself in a position where I can't do my own maintenance for the first time in many years, and after waiting 3 hours for an oil change 3 different time at 3 different dealers I doubt I'll ever hand my keys to a dealer service department ever again for any non-warranty work. And this is on top of their extortionate pricing.
I drive a hybrid with a weird size/shape 12V battery. (It uses the traction battery for starting, so only needs a smaller 12V for e.g. accessories and simple bootstrapping of electronics.) Though I normally do my own maintenance at this scale, when it went bad I went to the dealer because they both had the right battery and didn't charge much more than parts. Plus drove me home after dropoff, and drove me back there when it was done (a few hours later? fuzzy memory), at no extra cost.
I don't have actual statistics, but some factors I can think of:
- New car leases sometimes require dealership-only maintenance.
- Car warranties sometimes imply upcharges may be allowed (such as labor fees) during warranty services if non-warranty maintenance wasn't handled by the dealership.
- New cars sometimes come with discount plans or service subscriptions for maintenance at the dealership.
- Maintenance at a single dealership still sometimes gets reflected in resale value, including trade-ins to that dealership and also some people and auctions will pay a small premium for "single owner, dealer maintained" cars.
Yeah, dealers are an interesting experience at times, but there's an interesting web of reasons that people still use those services.
This is extremely limited scope annecdata, but I've spent a few tens of hours each testing LLM coding agents in Rust for personal projects and in Python at work. My impression is that LLMs are far more productive in Rust. I attribute this to the far more structured nature of Rust compared to Python, and possibly the excellent compiler error messages as well.
The LLM gets stuck in unproductive loops all the time in Python. In Rust, it generally converges to a result that compiles and passes unit tests. Of course the code quality is still variable. My experience is that it works best when prompts are restricted to a very small unit of work. Asking an LLM to write an entire library/module/application from scratch virtually never results in usable code.
I've had very bad luck with Taco Bell's AI. It is not good at all with modifications in my experience. I actually order on the app now just to minimize my interaction with the chatbot. It is very good at processing "mobile order for <my name>" at least.
What are "normal stores"? For me, Ralphs (Kroger), Stater Bros and Whole Foods are the main available (what I think of as) "normal" grocery stores, and of the three anything on sale at Ralphs is sure to be the cheapest of the three.
For what it's worth, I am an active developer of space flight software. This might be true somewhere, but it's not true anywhere I've ever encountered. The contortions required to avoid using the stack would be insane and cause far more bugs than it could ever prevent. I'm pretty confident asserting that this is simply not a thing. Even heap allocation is very often allowed, but restricted to program initialization only. Furthermore, these rules are relaxing all the time. I am aware of at least one mission currently in space that is flying the C++14 STL with no restrictions on heap allocation and exceptions enabled. Unmodified `std::map` is currently flying in space with no ill effects.
1) You don't... hence, my question about no nested function calls. If you push it anywhere else, you can call it whatever you want, but you just re-invented the stack. I _guess_ you could do some wierd stuff to technically not get a stack, but... again, it's wierd. And for what, again?
2) Some fixed address. If you have for example:
```c
typeRealBigStructure foo;
void baz(typeRealBigStructure * struct){
// Do whatever to struct
}
void bar(void){
baz(&foo);
}
```
The foo will probably end up in the BSS and will take up that space for the whole lifetime of the program. That's not the heap, not the stack, just... a fixed location in memory where the linker placed it.
I guess on big PC's stuff is very dynamic and you use malloc for a lot of stuff, but in embedded C, it's a very common pattern.
Ah, you're right, the struct case is actually pretty straightforward (especially since recursion is likely forbidden anyway), I just have trouble contorting my brain to such a different viewpoint.
The sibling comment already answered your question, but just to add: As I mentioned earlier, this was actually how old programming languages worked. Famously(ish), Dijkstra secretly snuck recursive functions into the ALGOL 60 standard, thus forcing compiler authors to use a stack!
And yet my experience looking at the deluge of clearance-required dev jobs from defense startups in the past couple of years is that there is absolutely no premium at all for clearance-required positions.
Take a look at job adds for major defense contractors in jurisdictions that require salary disclosure. Wherever all that defense money is going, it's not engineering salaries. I'm a non-DoD government contractor and even I scoff at the salary ranges that Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup post, which often feature an upper bound substantially lower than my current salary while the job requires an invasive security clearance (my current job doesn't). And my compensation pales in comparison to what the top tech companies pay.
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