And, really, wouldn't a car that had controls like a plane be awesome? Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I'd adore a set of metal physical switches just above the windscreen. Add a HUD while you're at it...
I'm new to cars - I haven't passed my test yet. I also live in the UK, where manuals are the norm (and that's what I'm learning on). What is it that you dislike about CVTs? When you say a real gearbox, is it manual or automatic?
Not the person you're replying to, but I know what they're talking about.
CVTs work by a "belt" riding on "cones". These cones can slide in and out and change the size of each side, meaning they can change their gear ratio dynamically. This is great in many ways: the vehicle can always get exactly the gearing it wants for a given situation and there's no shift lag or shudder or whatever. Just nice, smooth, continuous adjustment of the gear ratio.
However, that belt riding on the cones depends on a good bit of friction to work. Friction means wear and tear. For a car level CVT, they make it out of a lot of little metal wedges on a metal band instead of what you'd normally think of a belt. However, it'll still constantly wear out leaving lots of tiny metal shavings. Owners are typically pretty bad about actually maintaining their cars, so transmission fluids and belt replacements often go long or skipped entirely leading to early deaths for these transmissions. Plus, you typically can't put as much power through them without risking damage.
They probably mean a real transmission as in one with actual interlocking gears whether that be automatic or manual.
I got an email from Microsoft recently with that funny thin font used for headers. It reminded me that that was a trend around 2016 or so. The headers would have thinner font strokes than the body text, despite being substantially larger.
I remember that around that time (I was quite young) I was putting it in all my attempts at websites (all hideous, even at the time) and I thought it looked really cool. Funny the way trends go.
In the case of the email it was clear that it just hadn't been updated with the times.
It almost makes me want to find some use for them on my Linux box (not that is has an NPU), but I truly can't think of anything. Too small to run a meaningful LLM, and I'd want that in bursts anyway, I hate voice controls (at least with the current tech), and Recall sounds thoroughly useless. Could you do mediocre machine translation on it, perhaps? Local github copilot? An LLM that is purely used to build an abstract index of my notes in the background?
Actually, could they be used to make better AI in games? That'd be neat. A shooter character with some kind of organic tactics, or a Civilisation/Stellaris AI that doesn't suck.
In short: no. Current-gen NPUs are so slow they can't do anything useful. AMD and Intel have 2nd-gen ones that came out a few weeks ago, and by spec they may able to run local translation and small LLMs (haven't seen benchmarks yet), but for now they are laptop-only.
Dark matter (matter that has mass but does not interact in any other way) might be the literal solution. But there are also other suggestions (MOND is a big one).
My solution to this was to setup my laptop to boot in less than ten seconds. I could generally go from shut down to logged in with Obsidian, Firefox, and Anki open in about 30 seconds.
For my use case I use a hybrid of the two, simulating standard rate limits and doing backoff on 529s. It's pretty reliable that way.
Just beware that the European AWS regions have been overloaded for about a month. I had to switch to the American ones.