Programming Throwdown, Episode 163, Recursion.

Take it away, Patrick.

I was trying to come up with a good intro topic for the show,

and I decided to harass Jason, so I apologize. I'm not, no, I'm just teasing. I want to talk about electric cars. So electric cars have always been about to be a thing. I actually am not strongly

opinionated about whether they will be this sort of

exponential adoption thing that I feel like a lot of tech people feel this is like what will happen.

Like it'll just become more and more inconvenient to go to the gas station. There won't be gas stations

and then overnight you'll blink and everyone will have electric cars. I don't know. Not going to get

into that per se, but I have noticed a lot more people driving electric cars. So Jason and I were talking about it briefly, but basically, so I drive a plug-in hybrid, which I actually really, really like. I drive a Honda version called a Clarity. I don't even think they make it anymore. Now, what's the plug-in part mean? What makes it a plug-in? So that's great. So a Prius, most people know about the Prius, which is just like a hybrid. It means that you have, you know, electric motor to drive your wheels, but you have a gas engine to run effectively as a generator to make the electricity. And in something like a Prius, it just sort of does this all the time, but it has batteries.

It can short-term kind of store the energy and deliver it.

And I might be mistaken.

I may have changed over the years about Priuses, but as an abstraction, this will work.

So basically, it runs the gas engine and it can store sort of power.

But every time you turn your car off and turn it back

back on you're sort of more or less starting from scratch like it doesn't intend to build up a lot of

energy so it doesn't have big batteries because batteries are pretty expensive they're also pretty heavy

and so your engine will run from time to time.

So there's not really an expected mode of operation where you would go on an entire trip

and not use your engine.

And so it's sort of more along the spectrum of like even modern cars when you stop at a

stoplight will just turn off the engine and has like a little bit of I actually don't know how they did

but like you know a little bit of it can kind of start quickly and get you going without you kind

...