Has he actually given up on the Metaverse thing at this point?

I’d have no problem if someone did me, for the record. Seems only incrementally different from mental imagery or writing a fanfic.

At this point I’m clearly in a minority, though.

These are all Eastern European software developers, per the article.

Pretty much.

Well, that’s too far in the other direction. Zero is a very small number, and Derek Chauvin is in jail.

I think we all know the practice of that is a little hit-and-miss.

If it was identifying Lemmy users, it definitely would be. But, it’s a tool that reveals identities of a small, supposedly accountable group during real-life interactions, and we’re just mentioning it, so it seems like there’s at least an argument to allow it.

Oh how the tables have turned, lol.

I mean, the industry itself was onboard with regulation this time. At least some of it.

It didn’t happen in the US because the US is basically in terminal gridlock at this point. The EU passed something.

Ah yes. Someone made a GPT version of it that was much more fluent, too.

Unless you remember pre-LLM chatbots you don’t know how far we’ve come. The first time I played with GPT2 I knew everything was going to change.

Yeah, not surprised. An experienced software engineer in the US won’t have to do unskilled labour unless there’s something else massive going on with them.

It sounds like you’d know better than me, haha. Since they’re talking about being capital-lean I’m guessing they must outsource the frame pressing. Having a rare, super-specialty injection molding machine would not be lean.

IIRC they mentioned fibre reinforcement, but it couldn’t possibly be the aerospace-style precision product, exactly because that would cost a lot.

Edit: And I’m guessing cold-setting resin would be too expensive?

Hmm. Well, plastic can have a pretty good strength to weight ratio, if taking up more volume in the process. If sheet metal can do it maybe they went all-plastic.

If they’re including fibres too, that famously exceeds metal’s rigidity depending on to what precision it’s done.

Yeah, friction losses scale with angular velocity and not torque, and moving a ton of metal takes torque. Don’t forget the braking losses, though, unless it’s a hybrid of some kind. There’s no turning movement back into fuel the way you can turn it back into electricity.

The point is if you’re looking good range, there’s several dials that can be adjusted on an ICE car, related to the prime mover. On an EV, drag is the start and finish of the considerations (unless you’re going to move it onto rails, maybe). And of course range is a huge deal, because a liter of secondary cell can’t come close to the energy density of a liter of petrol and 38 liters of ambient air.

Are truck chassis usually stamped? I had assumed they were made from cast components.

Dope. I wonder if there’s a way to customise it into a sedan. I can speak less to the mechanical aspects of having a super-bespoke super-integrated manufacturing process, but I’m confident the electronics part needs to go back to basics like this.

Quite possibly. They’re gambling on a market for a no-frills car existing, but it might just be too small. That’s what killed economy cars the first time.

Volt or Bolt? Volt is a hybrid.

If Bolt, I’m guessing that was a very old one that will get like 50km of range.

As I understand it, the aerodynamics can be no joke on EVs. The acceleration is very efficient, there’s very efficient regenerative braking, and an object in motion just continues in motion until there’s a force. That means drag is pretty much where your whole battery charge goes. (I’m not sure how much tire flexing accounts for exactly)

For an example off the top of my head, the Arrow concept car manages 500km by not having side mirrors. Compare that to an ICE engine which wastes most of the fuel energy as heat, but to a widely varying degree depending on design and implemented energy recovery features.

I’ll second the mom-and-pop thing. It’s a lot more realistic than the average Joe having to configure and manage things, but still will kill monopolies and associated fuckery dead. That’s kind of how Lemmy instances work, although I only know for sure my own is on a private box.

It’s a bit harder for heavy things like streaming, though.