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I think some basic versions of both motors and circuits are 3d printable now. I doubt good enough for driving a reprap, but perhaps later.

Supposedly "the answer" is a discarded engine block: https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/patdelany/

"Open Source Muti-Machine": The heavy, ultra-stiff mass of the cast iron dampens vibrations and forces the cutting tool to move in a perfectly straight, micron-accurate line dictated by the factory-bored cylinders.

Ask an AI about it, but conceptually it's an amazing concept. There are probably billions of "nearly micron-accurate" machines, and if you're 1000% repeatable 90° then the world is (eventually) your oyster.


Best guess is that it's disabled for anything but track/trick stuff. There will be some cool videos eventually showing up with tricks people pull with this. I don't know what else it's for.

I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.

But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.


Solo track use at that. I can't imagine that other drivers are going to be all that happy if they get hit by the exhaust from one of the thrusters in a corner.

Gases dissipate very rapidly, even moreso if doing pulsing or whatever. Probably very unsafe for a human standing literally right behind it, but it'd likely have 0 effect on another car at typical driving distance.

Except for the bit where you can't see a thing.

Great idea to use something like that in a tunnel or a garage. Suffocation - no breathing ... and probably some blown doors/walls from the pressure

How are you going to suffocate when the thrusters are sending out compressed air?

Nitrogen, actually.

Car tunnels should be able to handle that level of bad gasses.

What bad gases? It is literally air. Do you see a lot of mechanics passing out in garages with all that compressed air being let loose?

They said "something like that" and I could easily see other outputs, especially nitrogen or some kind of combustion.

It looks like they are actually using nitrogen: https://youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts&t=1134s

Air is mostly nitrogen, about 80%. Pure oxygen as you might be thinking, would be quite dangerous - not only for long-term consumption but also in terms of its effects. Oxygen is fuel for fire so a 100% oxygen environment would quite create the pyrotechnic show! The 'white' you see from the exhaust isn't the exhaust itself - nitrogen is obviously colorless, but the moisture in the surrounding air freezing. It's going to be coming out quite chilly to keep the nitrogen liquified ( boiling temp of something like -196F).

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Whoa, was just watching the video (great link btw). People have been debating the specs, but they're shown unambiguously right here. [1] It has 95 kn peak thrust, 6g peak acceleration, pressure of 5500 PSI, and a min operating temp of -200F.

[1] - https://youtu.be/22rvpUecLts?t=1339


Of course air is mostly nitrogen. But if you replace 10% of the air with pure nitrogen you go into OSHA-angering levels of oxygen depletion, and if you replace 25-30% you get into serious danger.

Not easily achieved in a tunnel, but much more easily achieved in a garage.


10% of the air replaced with pure nitrogen would be 0.8 * 0.9 + 1.0 * 0.1 = 82% nitrogen, 18% oxygen. That's perfectly safe for brief exposure, which is all it would be before you return to ambient levels.

To create a dangerous scenario you've gotta do something like somehow gas out your entire tank in a garage and then just stand around for a while breathing it in. Kind of an improbable scenario unless somebody is trying a really weird suicide attempt.


The bigger tank apparently holds 250kg of air. That's about 200 cubic meters. A two car garage is likely less than 100 cubic meters.

You wouldn't need to dump nearly an entire tank of nitrogen to reach levels that are immediately dangerous. And oxygen deprivation makes you stupid well before it makes you pass out, with no "lack of air" panic since that is based on CO2 levels, so even when it would be survivable for a couple minutes you might not even think to escape.


The crash photos are going to be Darwin-award-worthy

I could see a safety feature where it launches itself into the air to avoid an imminent crash (providing the area above is free)

I suppose I can see this also. It sounds horrifying. A head on collision is a pretty terrible thing but having one of the cars suddenly fly 30 feet in the air and crashing into on coming traffic does not sound like a great option. Reminds me of the cybertruck "this would make the perfect post apocalyptic vehicle."

you might have a better chance of surviving that 30 foot launch than a head on collision with a pole or a semi truck. don't get me wrong it seems wildly impractical but there may be rare situations where it's useful. ejection seats on fighters frequently injured their pilot but that is better than being dead.

This whole thing is incredibly stupid and yet, people are bending over backwards to defend it. There is not a single traffic situation where the ability of a car to suddenly launch itself into the air doesn't have more downsides than it staying put. This includes overhead wiring, other people nearby, tunnels, bridges, overpasses, lampposts, traffic lights and other street furniture. With a little luck you will survive the impact of your toy when it lands but the party that you land on does not. People have a hard enough time predicting trajectories with everything constrained to 2D, if cars start jumping around like fleas that is not an improvement. From a standstill with other parties around you this is already a serious problem, if it were moving forward at highway speeds in traffic it would be utterly irresponsible to trigger this kind of launch.

What, you don’t think the solution to a situation with too much out-of-control kinetic energy is to inject a whole bunch more semi-randomly-directed kinetic energy?

You are delusional if you think more than one Rocket Roadster will be within miles of another one on a public road.

The image of a chain reaction of RRs popping up like popcorn when another appears to be about to land on it pretty hilarious, though.

You see, when you are about to have a crash, and you only have a few milliseconds to react, the best option is to put more energy into the event.

How about rockets towards the front of the vehicle to stop it?

As the saying goes: The more energy the goes into the crash, the better.

They’ll have a special edition with hypergolic propellants.

That depends on the landing zone being available in a way that's hard for the onboard safety system to predict. But if the car is, say, spinning out you could use these to restore stability or try to recover from the other sorts of disasters that overpowered cars can end up in even on clear roads.

The Rocket model should never spin out - traction control using thrusters should make it impossible.

The thrusters are primarily pointed rearward and to the ground. It's not capable of doing much at all for a flat spin, the typical scenario of a car spinning out

Incorrect - the Rocket trim (if it ever exists) has four thrusters pointed downward at the wheels for lift and they can rotate 180 degrees and two thrusters at the front pointing outward for use control.

once your wheels leave the road, its hard to slow down. Just getting to zero mph before flipping 100 times and rolling over would be immensely useful.

The car launching itself in the air would also launch anything in the road - debris, rocks, soil - at dangerous speeds in all directions.

What goes up...

That sounds like a surefire way to make a bad situation worse.

Perfect rich asshole vehicle. Add a ‘safety’ feature that wildly endangers everyone around you.

I think every buyer should receive a complimentary nomination for the award.

The award is reserved for people who actually died, you can only be nominated posthumously.

It’s just a matter of time before they win.

it's a show it was not in any way a production car, stop being that gullible people

If you have the ads turned off, it's a lot nicer. I got that with some family bundle for more Drive space.


Let me put it this way.

Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.

I don't want to pay for that.


>Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.

Depends on what you watch, as always. my YT feed is a mix of news, random gaming content, documentaries on a variety of topics, and odd little tech trivia. It covers all the bases at once.

Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch". Then I just pluck it onto my NAS and move about on my day. Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?

Nebula is the only other service I ever considered paying for. It's not a "Youtube killer" and misses out on a lot of the odd trivia sides of YT, but it overally feels more fleshed out on content than Netflix".


> Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch".

If there's even 1 show I want to watch, it's great to watch it. The problem with Youtube is even when they have stuff I want to watch, it's a pain to watch it. Their UI is atrocious!

> Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?

You just unsubscribe at that point.

Know how much stuff I had bookmarked on Youtube that is no longer available? A whole damn lot.


Maybe I'm missing something, but every video service Ui feels the same these days. Grid of videos with some loose sorting, click to play/pause, seek controls. I wouldn't call any of them good/bad on UI alone.


Or just watch Youtube on a laptop, and install an ad blocker.


Depends on the personality. Do you watch movies on a laptop?

For me, the big screen and ambience play a big role.


HDMI cables are cheap. The best roku is a 30ft HDMI cable.

Actually I've used the steam deck in this role a bunch, works great.


For the big screen, I have another tiny PC and a wireless keyboard.


If there's some cost or availability question you have, AWS has some complicated bullshit to solve the problem for you. Check out reserved instances.


Imagine if all the energy spent whining on the purity of a system being insufficiently private or decentralized or somehow loyal to a fight against the man, was spent instead on actually improving those systems. They're open source.


The system I'm complaining about is Google forms, not any open-source software project. I cannot actually improve it because I am not Google.


IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.

But that didn't pan out.


Probably contention on databases.


This is essentially guaranteed. There are lots of useful smaller models that we should be able to run locally. Over time they'll be more and more capable and require less API usage.


Im wondering if we are finally seeing the end of the "hard disk" era, and are entering a new era of vast instant on systems.


Unless you spend 5min googling and see that you can do zero retention via AWS Bedrock.


Yeah even the chatgpt teams subscription claims ZDR. I believe the business plan from anthropic does too.

Of course maybe there is some fine print I haven’t read, and obviously I get the point that it may not be trustworthy.

edit: whoops I just checked and the “business”/“teams” plans just agree not to use your data for training


AWS Bedrock has stated that all new Anthropic and OpenAI models will not allow ZDR (only older models).


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