MIT students call elaborate pranks “hacks.”

Source: class of 2011

Maybe not relevant for this specific discussion, but a decent quantity of Americans are stuck with fucking Dollar General for their groceries and they sure as hell don’t deliver.

The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.

And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.

Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.

You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.

The R3 is much smaller. My wife and I are looking at it to replace our Model Y and exit the Tesla ecosystem.

I think one of the coolest bits about Aptera’s approach is how you don’t really need to worry as much about cooling. If you trust their 100Wh/mi estimate, that’s an average draw of around 6kW compared to 15kW in even a Model 3.

Assume 90% efficiency (conservative), and its the difference between dissipating 600W of heat (midrange computer) vs 1.5kW (hairdryer). Passive cooling options especially around the batteries become more viable at that point.

Aptera eat your heart out

Sure, but it would be less efficient than a sail, and since the incoming radiation would impart inertia on the solar panels, you would still be limited on where you could steer.

Yeah, I’m working on that part. It’s just messy because a lot of portions of the code can’t be confined to functions. There’s a lot of GOTO equivalents.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?

(For the US market. They still make sedans for Europe)

One of the temporary fixes for the Chevy Bolt fires was to update the software to detect if the battery was about to go up and then honk the horn to warn everyone which I think is hilarious.

This thing is going to weigh like 8,000 pounds.

Thought this was a design for a clip on Jack Daniel’s bottle handle and got excited.

For sure. I just like to bring it up whenever somebody talks about needing a 400 mile range. More often than not, it’s not even their only vehicle. They just want a 1:1 replacement of their ICE range with no consideration of how home charging changes everything.

If you can charge at home, I think you should reconsider that 400 mile requirement. I have 310 mile range and rarely use more than like 20% of the battery.

I mean if you think of a car as a personal privacy pod, many people don’t have those inside their homes. I remember seeing this a lot on our walks during covid. I think some people needed a private place for a phone call or just needed to get away from their family for an hour or so when there was literally nowhere else to go.

Hate cars all you want, but this is hardly indicative of car culture.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Lake_Union_Streetcar

The rail car in question is not grade separated.

We have the South Lake Union Railcar in Seattle. Nobody rides it. And like I’m not one to blame infrastructure, but you can literally walk faster than it moves. Meanwhile there are shitloads of buses with plenty of ridership. Many fully electric with overhead wire.

Meanwhile bicyclists routinely get their wheels caught in the tracks and eat it.

I can’t imagine the efficiency of rail makes much difference in a city environment. The best argument I’ve heard for rail is that it’s more a commitment to developers that the route won’t be changed any time soon.

What I don’t get is if you have to pay actors, camera crew, rent on sets and equipment, etc, how much can you save on a writer by using AI? Especially since the expectations are already so low?

Is this just a way to avoid hiring union work? I assume these actors aren’t union?