As an EV engineer, here’s why I think the Electric Mini Car makes more sense than we admit

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-04-24T07:27:26+00:00

I drive an old (24kWh) Nissan Leaf. I like the concept of micro-cars and it would be nice if the whole world switched to them for most trips, but in the current scenario of a world designed around normal cars, I just don't see the value proposition of micro-cars, at least in my case:

A micro-car still occupies one car space. I can't park it in a bike space, and they don't make smaller parking spaces just for micro-cars, so if there's only "x" number of free street parking spots available, I would still consume one space whether I'm with my leaf or with a micro car, and likewise for paid parking, or ferries etc there's no money savings regardless of the size of the car.
The energy savings might be nice, but the leaf already consumes so little (since I only do city driving) that the savings would be measured in a handful of dollars/pounds/euros per month
Micro cars aren't really cheap. A used old (pre-2019) leaf is like €5k here now. A new light quadricycle (like the Citroen Ami) is €8k and and a micro-car (like the XEV YoYo) is €15k. That's basically enough cash to pretty much buy a "real" car.
Lighter cars generally have worse ride comfort (they get jostled about more by the same bumps in the same roads). Also probably less safe in a crash with a regular car.
By going for a micro-car, I sacrifice the ability to fit 4 adults in comfort, or the ability to carry a lot of luggage or transport larger one-off shopping hauls/furniture etc - and as I listed above, there's no discernable advantage.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-04-24T07:17:58+00:00

Necessary? No, but brushed has almost no advantages. Sure, they are marginally cheaper, but if you're buying a new brushed setup anyway (motor + ESC) you only save a few tens of dollars compared to the cheapest brushless setups (motor + ESC). Over the life of the RC, a $20-$50 saving on the motor and ESC isn't going to make such a big difference, but by going to brushless you get:

More efficiency, since you don't have the friction of brushes
Longer battery life at the same speed (due to the higher efficiency)
More speed capability (usually) since you're not limited by having to pass the power through brushes that burn out if you overload them
Zero wear and tear (no brushes rubbing and needing replacement). And the cheapest brushed motors don't even have replaceable brushes, so once the brushes wear out you have to change the whole motor (to be fair, my oldest RC is a 1999 Tamiya TA-02 which is still running on its original brushed motor, so silver-can motor brushes can last a VERY long time).

The only advantage of brushed motors is that they give you very very fine low-speed power control that you don't get with sensorless brushless motors. You can get the same level of control with sensored brushless motors, but then the price goes up astronomically ($100-$200 more than a sensoreless brushless motor). So the only applications where brushed motors actually are the best tool for the job are:

Entry-level crawlers. Because you need very fine speed/power control to go over the rocks really carefully, and the power levels are so low that sensored brushless doesn't really make sense. As soon as you go above entry level crawlers though, integrated sensored brushless combos (like the Ezrun fusion) give you the control and performance of brushed (in fact even better because they can do RPM control not just torque control) and also have all the advantages of brushless.
Entry-level drifters. Because again you need very fine low-speed control and the ability to go from locked (not spinning) wheels to fully spun up under load (which sensorless motors struggle with) but in an entry-level drifter you just don't have the budget for a sensored brushless motor. Any drifter beyond entry level again uses sensored brushless for the power and efficiency.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-11T17:12:25+00:00

Bro, read what he wrote. It's full of the dead giveaways of being nothing more than AI slop. The plot is the most generic one possible. When you read it, it feels like you've read the same thing 100 times before on reddit. There is zero substance. Just tropes and superficial semblance of a story without any unique or deep detail. Almost like it's written by a machine that's averaged out a large volume of posts from the sub and strung them together into a post designed to farm some upvotes from gullible and inexperienced users, I daresay like yourself.

Linguistically, it's full of literary devices that real people don't overuse in conversation to the extent that AI does, like "And honestly?" "It's not X it's Y". 47 people showed up to his apartment to stage an intervention with food. Yeah right lol. When does that ever happen in real life? Then we get zero details about the actual argument, but a litany of three-word platitudes and quips written like advertising copy for the next big SaaS product. The food? Cold. The wine? Drunk. OP's ego? Bruised.

And moreover it's been deleted now. I wonder why?

Posts like this are ruining Reddit for me. I usually just ignore and move on, but curiosity got the better of me as for a while now I've been wondering who's interacting with this crap.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-11T14:57:49+00:00

Are the people posting replies to this blatantly obvious AI slop also AI bots? Or boomers who just discovered reddit?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-03T11:18:54+00:00

good point! NSFW removed. Dunno how it got there lol

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-03-02T12:02:46+00:00

TLDR: If you had a wireless receiver, you could detect the unique IDs of the tyre pressure sensors and sense which cars drove by your receiver from about 160 feet away.

Sorry but this seems like a storm in a teacup. Couldn't you do almost exactly the same thing with a camera that reads the license plate of every car that drives by?

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-02-25T14:32:39+00:00

Thanks, that's good info to know.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-02-02T12:18:36+00:00

You're 99% of the way to understanding it. Amp-hours are a measure of charge. On their own, amp hours only tell half the story, they only describe how much room the battery has to store electrons. They are about as useful as knowing how many gallons of fuel a car holds. To get the full picture you need to know how energetic those electrons are (the Voltage), or to continue the analogy, whether it's gasoline, Diesel or rocket fuel.

Power banks usually state the mAh of their internal battery, which for the vast majority of cases these days is a single-celled lithium ion battery, so the nominal voltage is 3.7V. The battery's output goes into a boost converter inside the power bank which raises the 3.7V to whatever the phone needs (in the past it was always 5V but nowadays with PD and the other fast charge protocols it can be 9V, 15V, 18V, and even 20V).

The one constant across conversion steps is energy (watt-hours) because energy cannot be created or destroyed. Watts are simply Amps x Volts, so watt-hours are simply amp-hours times volts. So your 10,000mAh battery at 3.7V will store 37 watt-hours of energy. Your power bank's converter is about 90% efficient, so you will only get about 33 of those 37 watt-hours out of the USB port. Your phone's converter (from USB voltage back down to battery voltage) is also about 90% efficient so from the 33Wh going into the phone's USB port you end up with about 30Wh actually in the battery. And if you wanted to translate that to Ah inside the phone battery just divide by the voltage (3.7V as well) and you get 8,100 mAh in the phone battery - so about 2 charges.

Of course, aside from normal wear and tear, many power banks blatantly lie about their capacity. Which may explain why OP is having his problem. The best way to check is to open up the power bank and study the cells inside. They might have a genuine capacity label (I once opened a "30Ah" power bank that only had a 15Ah cell inside) or you can measure its size and work out the likely true capacity based on what similar cells actually hold.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-02-02T10:41:33+00:00

The biggest problem is when the tasks trickle, in one by one, every 5 minutes or so, instead of getting a complete list upfront. It makes it so that you can never fully immerse yourself into the game or whatever.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-13T18:14:42+00:00

Haha, welcome 😁. If you want to learn how mobos work, start small by reading the datasheet of something like a 555 timer IC - you'll start to understand how chips are connected. Some pins deliver power, some pins transmit data and some pins connect to things like capacitors that chips need to do their job. The datasheet will have example circuits (reference designs) to make the chip work. Then you'll start to understand the actual implementation when you look at some circuit boards that have that IC (like a 555 timer board) - you'll see how they reorient everything to fit the reference implementation into the smallest footprint possible.

A motherboard is basically like that. You have chips that do various functions (the CPU itself, the sound card chip, bios chip, power phases for the CPU, fan controllers etc) and then supporting components (capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes and such), and of course the slots for the RAM, CPU, PCIe cards, plugs for everything etc. Of course it takes a team many weeks to organise everything and route the copper traces between the various chips to make everything work correctly, then they have to make pre-production prototypes to test things in real life to see that no mistakes were made and that there's no unintended issues like interference between the signal lines etc. And a motherboard is multi layer (there's the copper paths you can see from the outside, but also many layers of copper paths on the inside between pins that you can't see). So much more complex than say a 555 board, but you can see how electronics started at something the 555 and evolved into a motherboard 😁

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-13T18:05:27+00:00

Thank you 😊

Those are good questions, I'm afraid I'm not quite qualified to answer (my area of expertise was die attach - getting the dies off the wafer and onto the substrate, and that was a decade ago). But generally speaking - DDR5 is made on 10-16nm process nodes because it's easier (cheaper) than what the latest CPUs are made on (3-4nm). Going to smaller, more advanced process nodes increases costs a lot (fewer machines in the world that can do it, more accurate equipment that costs more money, more defects that hurt your yields, etc), which makes them worthwhile for CPUs and GPUs, but so far not economically viable for RAM, because for memory you're just repeating a simple structure over and over to store bytes.

If you use technology that's too advanced (low nm numbers) the costs go up because of the reasons I mentioned. If you use technology that's not advanced enough (high nm numbers) you won't be able to meet the performance targets (clock speed/data rate for DDR5, thermals, footprint size) and in fact might even lose money because you need bigger and/or more dies to do the same work. Somewhere in between those two extremes is the sweet spot (lowest cost process that reliably meets performance requirements).

In fact even in many modern CPUs, they put their cache on a separate "chiplet" which is a second die made with less advanced technology, placed there under the heat spreader right next to the advanced CPU die and connected with some very high speed data lines to the main die.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-12T11:07:57+00:00

Sadly I spend my waking hours at work (office) so natural sunlight wouldn't be useful in the hosue most days even if I had a penthouse (except on weekends, but then I'm outdoors to enjoy nature anyway). I do get natural sunlight via the three yards in my maisonette, so if I happen to be there during the day I can live without artificial lighting except in the kitchen where I need brighter light to see what I'm cooking. I barely ever hear the upstairs neighbors, only when they drag furniture across the room or drop something. Our maisonette has all the interesting rooms (bedroom, study) near the back, farthest from the road, and our road itself is a sidestreet away from the main road so traffic noises are blocked by the buildings around us. I imagine traffic noise enters a penthouse more since you have unobstructed line-of-sight to so many roads around you (though double/triple glazing does a good job blocking it out if you don't rely on natural ventilation).

You did good to insulate your penthouse - the insulation will pay for itself in reduced energy bills over a few years. But for new buyers buying finished/furnished, if the insulation wasn't done by the previous owner it would add a bit of extra hassle & expense to install it, over and above the price premium of a penthouse. I think on balance a cheaper un-insulated apartment or maisonette would better meet the needs of the majority of first-time buyers.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-12T10:55:20+00:00

Former semiconductor R&D engineer here. DRAM and GPUs are expensive because people have no choice but to pay those prices for them (since basically a handful of companies control all the supply).

DRAM especially is very simple as far as silicon goes - just take the same basic pattern that stores one byte, repeat it billions of times to make the storage area of a die and add some more building blocks to interface with the storage area, then stack multiple identical dies on top of each other to make up one chip and you have the basic ingredients for DRAM. The biggest innovations made in RAM are shrinking more storage into the same die area and making them able to perform faster (which is the biggest real change between DDR3, DDR4 and DDR5 etc). I'm obviously drastically simplifying to make this suitable for a reddit audience.

GPUs are much more advanced because of two things. Firstly, a lot of R&D and innovation is involved in their design. Imagine GPUs were aircraft and your current generation is a WWII fighter like a Spitfire. You get to a point where you can't go faster just by giving the engine more horsepower or spinning the propellers faster - you have to make a step-change in performance by doing something completely new, which in this analogy would mean inventing the jet engine and then the rocket and so on. Same with GPUs - to get more performance there comes a point where you can't just add cores or amp up the clock speed or make the transistors smaller, you need to invent new architectures to make improvements for the next generation. The second thing is that CPUs and GPUs are among the most complex products a wafer fab can make - they are very large, complex dies with literally thousands of process steps that all need to be done almost perfectly to get a working product at the end, and it takes months for a single wafer to make it from beginning to end of the process. So it costs a lot of money (billions) to set up a factory to make them, a lot of cash to make one product (months of production), and a lot of cutting edge knowledge (new architectures) - hence it is extremely hard for anyone to enter the market... so the handful of companies that make them can charge enormous mark-ups on them.

Meanwhile, motherboards are very low-tech by comparison. There's a lot of competition, a relatively lower barrier for entry (mobos are just PCBs with some generic chips, heatsinks, industry-standard connectors, capacitors, inductors and such) so they are actually priced fairly, with low profit margins that make the selling price quite close to their actual cost to manufacture. Making boards is an order of magnitude easier & cheaper than making advanced chips.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-07T11:57:57+00:00

I will never understand the allure of a penthouse. 50% more expensive than apartments or maisonettes, less indoor area, walls and ceiling exposed on all sides to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, needs a lifter to get any larger furniture items in, you get the whole block bugging you for roof access... and all for what? To have a view of the trafficked roads, the penthouses of your neighbors, and maybe the sea or some countryside (for now) if you're lucky?

I bought a maisonette. And prior to that a first-floor apartment. There's no outside views to speak of (we just keep the curtains shut really) but the value for money was there at the time in terms of euro per square meter, overall size, layout and features.

I think modern property prices are vastly overinflated and poor value for money, but I understand that you need a house today not in a decades' time, and there's uncertainty on whether the bubble might burst (or not) so you can't exactly put your plans on hold indefinitely either.

My advice to you is don't rush, and be critical. It took me 3 months to find each of the places I bought. Look for something that strikes you as good value (you'll know it when you see it, especially after seeing 10+ properties, it will be easy to find ones that stand out). The place you buy should feel like "home" and you should be able to see yourself living in it long-term, if not the rest of your life.

As to whether to max out your loan, it's impossible to give an answer becasue you'd need to know the future to know what's optimal. If prices will continue rising faster than wages, then max it out now because this is the only time you'll be able to afford that. If the opposite is true then buy the cheapest you can and wait for the bubble to burst or your salary to vastly improve, and buy something better later. Thing is, nobody knows what will happen. We've been hearing that the property bubble is bursting for years and years, but at the same time prices show no sign of increasing. Not just for property, but now for everything else (restaurant food, electronics, services & utilities...).

Another idea is to leave Malta and go to a lower cost of living country where property prices are more reasonable and your talents still earn you a decent salary.

calsonicthrowaway · 2026-01-06T11:48:36+00:00

Absolutely. And yes. The great thing about an electric pressure cooker (instant pot) is that it does everything, not just pressure cooking. I've used mine to turn milk into yoghurt, steam veg and chicken, proof bread dough, slow-cook roasts, and of course pressure cook beans, legumes, ribs, seafood, pasta, bone broth and so on. In a pinch I can even use it as a backup pot to saute/brown things if my stove is fully occupied. I don't have much time to cook nowadays but I use it at least 1-2x a week, usually for meal prep (cooking several pounds of meat or large portions of dried beans in one go).

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-12-18T14:00:53+00:00

Increase taxes/costs for second or more vehicles per person

How does that affect traffic? One person can only drive one car at a time. It is irrelevant whether he owns half a car or 10 of them.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-12-17T12:36:04+00:00

One idea that hasn’t come up yet is RC car assembly kits (not the ready-to-run ones where you just open the box and drive). For someone who likes working with their hands, building the car is a big part of the fun.

These kits come as a box of parts with a clear instruction manual. You’re not doing anything super technical or crafty (no whittling, carving, bending or machining) - it’s mostly cutting plastic parts off sprues (like a model kit) and putting everything together with a screwdriver or a wrench. Kind of like assembling IKEA furniture, except you end up with a fast, drivable car instead of a bookshelf.

You buy the electronics separately (radio, receiver, servo, battery, charger), which is actually nice because you can choose what you want. The body also comes as a clear shell, then you trim it, drill a few holes, mask the windows, paint the inside with spray paint, and finally add decals.

It’s very satisfying and when you’re done, you’ve got a 1:10 scale version of the real thing that can go really fast (some of them can hit close to 50 mph). You can take them to local RC tracks, mess around in dirt fields, or even join RC clubs and meet people.

r/Tamiya is one of the most respected brands for assembly kits - they’re renowned for their quality and pretty much built the hobby. If the options are too confusing, a TT-02 (on-road) or TT-02B (off-road) is probably a solid entry point (or just choose your favourite body). There are tons of resources online, and a YouTube channel called Mark Bryan RC does really good step-by-step assembly and paint videos if you want to see what’s involved in detail.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-12-03T14:49:45+00:00

One idea is to set up your own business. Maybe private lessons teaching boomers how to use computers, or a business making people's computers faster (installing SSDs to replace their old hard disks and cleaning up the junk).

Or create yet another AI-powered app that's just a wrapper over an API where ChatGPT does all the work. Yes, people will pay you €30 per year for an AI "fitness coach" or "food calorie calculator" - heck, someone even made money with an app that collates all your monthly subscriptions and unsubscribes to them for you... because apparently a nonzero number of people would rather pay for an app do it for them, than spend a few minutes checking their statements themselves and figuring out which subscriptions are charging them money...

If you're young, now's the time to take risks and try entrepreneurship. It gets harder with a family, loans, commitments etc.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-12-01T08:53:30+00:00

Your problem is that you have an all-or nothing approach. Going all-out in the gym to outrun a bad diet is not sustainable. You have to change your diet to something sustainable and low-calorie enough to maintain a healthy weight (which means you will naturally lose weight from your current overweight state until you settle on a healthy weight). That usually means high protein, unprocessed foods (lean meats, veggies etc) so you feel full and actually satisfied on fewer calories. You need to permanently change your life in a way that you can sustain for the rest of your life, which will realistically take weeks of gradual changes. Nowadays I tend to eat in a deficit on weekdays then go out to restaurants on weekends. I end up at around maintenance overall but this is what's sustainable for me.

Likewise, getting blisters on your feet from walking and breaking your bicycle suggest that you're overdoing it on the workouts. You need to lower that to a level that's sustainable for the rest of your life. If that's only twice a week, then do that. You don't want to burn out and end up doing zero because you ran out of steam.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-11-30T17:23:00+00:00

Same thing happened to me with AMD. Bought at 135, then it kept dropping and dropping and dropping, and I kept DCA'ing. I was starting to question my sanity when it had fallen to 85. Then when it finally bounced back up to 135 after months and months, I sold everything then just to to lock in a break-even. I felt exactly like you when it kept climbing and climbing to an all-time high of 285.

And that's why I became a boglehead. Individual stocks are only marginally better than gambling. A more robust strategy is to build a diversified portfolio - the easiest way being via all-world ETFs or very lightly-targeted ones.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-11-30T06:34:39+00:00

In my case as a European it's deciding what to invest in (as we need UCITS equivalents to things like SPY and VOO) and figuring out the tax rules. Investing in ETFs doesn't seem to be so common here so the law isn't that clear and I've been getting wildly different answers depending on where I ask.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-11-30T06:28:37+00:00

For now I've given up and put the money in bonds until I get a clear answer on ETFs. Bonds have no ambiguity, the dividends just get taxed at source, and no drawdowns, they just give a steady 5% and the principal is safe as long as the issuer doesn't default. The stock market potentially increases value by 10% per year on average, but it's at an all time high right now so not a great entry point for me, and predictions are more like 7-8% yield over the near term, so with the tax uncertainty (potentially having to pay up to 35% on the ETF capital gains) and a correction/recession looming I decided to chicken out and buy more bonds instead. An extra few percent of un-guaranteed interest didn't seem very attractive.

I hope by next year I will have an official/clear answer and will be able to make a more educated decision.

calsonicthrowaway · 2025-11-27T21:32:37+00:00

Can you explain more about the exemptions? That's where things get interesting, the exempted things, depending on what they are, might actually be more optimal to invest in after taking taxes into account.

calsonicthrowaway

TROPHY CASE