Mistral has recently shown a good trajectory of improvement. It is already an important thing that there is a European mid range open weight model that can compete. (Frontier models need a lot more resources, it is important to compare apples with apples) This is good enough for many applications were data security and sovereignity are prime concerns. Of course, it would be good to have a frontier model, lets see how Large 4 will perform when we get there.

Mistral Medium 3.5 isn’t that far behind comparable current open weight models.

Who knows? That is either just an excuse to protect that illegal facility of an oligarch or they are really using that facility to target girl schools in Iran.

No.

It is generally thought that official token price is breaking even, at best. Maybe it is not even doing that. The worth of the AI usage has nothing to do with those costs and is likely much lower. So far there is very little done on understanding actual value of AI use though.

I am not saying you are wrong, just that the above statement can be correct at the same time.

Yes, but what good is that if 100 USD more is still losing tons of money.

You can export your contacts and settings and import them in another browser with a few clicks. I am not sure what energy is needed for that but use whatever you prefer.

Isn’t the share of posts on Reddit coming from the US at something like 42%? Most of the content is in English from what I have read but I could not find data on how much exactly, if you know where to find that kind of data, just post a link.

I am not annoyed, why would I be? Your “primary” language example is just failing the point. An English comment written by someone who speaks another primary language is still English. Reddit is an international meeting place. English is a widely spoken lingua franca in major parts of the world, certainly in Europe and to some extend in India. If you have a place where people from different countries meet, the language will be most likely English and that dwarfs the number of US Americans with English as primary language.

As a case in point, do you seriously believe most of the posts on r/Europe for example are from US Americans?

Do you think only native English speakers are posting online in English? But you are right, it isn’t “American defaultism”, it is US defaultism.

True, that’s why I did not even bother to mention it ;)

You are using a derogatory term for cars that are great choices for many. Even if those cars are not suitable for your requirements it just puts you in a certain light.

There are indeed not a lot of MPV EVs on offer, I guess, car producers really want to push people into more profitable, less useful SUVs instead. But then VW has been killing the Sharan also among ICE vehicles. So this isn’t even an EV problem.

The best best for your requirement is maybe still the Toyota Proace City Verso L2 50 kWh. AT 40000 EUR it is also somewhat reasonably priced for a van with 5-7 seats. It has a central screen but it is rather conservative as far as modern cars go. Yes, it is a full Van rather than a compact Van but like I said, producers really don’t want to produce those anymore.

Golf carts don’t come even close to the feeling. It is more like driving an go-cart racer, from the drive feeling, but without the noise of course. Different, but hardly lame. When you look at the Renault 5 or the ID.Polo, they don’t feel that different on the inside from ICE cars. Yes they have some central screen nowadays but so do modern ICE cars. Other than that, real buttons, real handles and controls and one does not have to use one pedal drive if one prefers more traditional controls. Of course gear shifting isn’t a thing anymore and that is still strongly rooted among most European drivers.

Ah, someone who makes fun of practicable cars that are suitable in reality for the majority of urban and suburban users. Let me guess you are looking for one of those child-crushers?

It is happening right now in Europe I think. Renault started it with bringing back cars with emotion, for a more reasonable price tag. The Renault 5 at first, now coming the new Renault Twingo (starting at 20k EUR), the VW ID.Polo with some other brands based on that same basis. etc. Compact, not oversized and overweight cars, built to a price but interestingly still not coming across as flimsy and cheap as a Tesla interior and with real buttons and largely with real door handles. There are also options from abroad, like the Hyundai Inster for example but also some from China with BYD, GM etc.

This is what kept EV adoption back in Europe, the lack of options in that segment at a reasonable price. But this is changing as we speak.

Sadly, the privacy won’t come back in general with new cars but if I look at the coming ID.Polo, VW is throwing out most of the Tesla trash, the previous CEO has brought in (terrible and extremely cheap interior, no real buttons, no reall door handles etc). It is a really good VW again.

It is even more extreme if you view the entire index history. The Covid peak looks almost benign in comparison and that was quite substantial but with a rather slow in rise and fall. Now, since the LLM bubble has been started, NASDAQ has almost doubled and in recent months almost feverishly. Nah, no bubble, nothing to see here, all based on reality. Please invest, we need to unload the bad money onto someone else.

Again, this has nothing to do specifically with EVs it is a general new car thing. There are still options out there though, if you want minimal digital interfaces. The Fiat 500e for example comes in its basic configuration without a central display (you can still get the bigger battery with that setup). You can optionally use your phone as replacement, for example for navigation, or not. No weather, no social media, no music playlist. Oh, and the the car has real buttons as well.

So you don’t like the ID Buzz offer, fair. It doesn’t make the position that VW has nothing on offer as largest seller of EVs in Europe any less absurd.

Combustion engine efficiency is limited by hard physics and modern day combustion engines have gotten impressively close to that theoretical limit. So no, the remaining potential of ICE is not that great anymore.

Actual efficiency of BEVs is way better than even the theoretical limit of ICE.

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