dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week 14 hours ago:
Parts, sure. So, after a 3 month shipping wait from China you get a replacement battery or drive unit dropped at the end of your driveway on a pallet. Now what?
I don’t think any buyers other than maybe the guy who runs the Aging Wheels channel are going to be willing to take apart their own Chinese EV and do major repairs to it. If no one works on it, or if they open a perfunctory couple of service centers that are all conveniently thousands of miles away from where you live, that’s not going to do you much good.
- Comment on US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week 15 hours ago:
Presumably the manufacturers of these things would have to set up a dealer network in the US of some sort in order to be competitive at all. Otherwise, these will be completely dead in the water with US buyers. Plastic crap from Temu and AliExpress is one thing, but I can tell you nobody will buy something as expensive as a car knowing it’s completely unsupported.
Historically, importing Chinese vehicles has been a totally buyer-beware operation. You might get a short replacement parts only warranty from whoever the importer is if you’re very lucky. Otherwise, you’re on your own. Both finding the parts and doing the labor. I say this as an owner of three (3) Chinese motorcycles which have been fine enough machines for what they are, but never mind a warranty – no mechanic’s shop will touch them even if you’re willing to pay. So I do my own work on them.
But cheap motorcycles are way less complex than a full sized electric car.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 1 day ago:
I can believe it. I still have multiple libraries of physical media, and I pretty much never buy anything new that I can’t likewise physically own. I might rip and make MP3’s or transcode or emulate, or whatever, for convenience, but sometimes it’s just nice to be able to stick the disk or cartridge in the machine and have it just work without any of the associated modern ancillary bullshit.
Everything wants to be a service now. I just find that so irritating.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s Tesla quietly slashed over 3,400 job postings, leaving just 3 listed in the U.S. 1 day ago:
I have to wonder just how many people are left who are willing to deliberately sign up to work for Tesla at this point anyway. I certainly wouldn’t.
- Comment on Seems legit 1 day ago:
Or Geoff.
- Comment on Chemicals in car interiors may cause cancer — and they’re required by US law: 2 days ago:
Like cotton/linen fabrics? Cotton is pretty naturally flame resistant. Probably can’t help you on all the plastics in a modern car interior, though.
- Comment on Chemicals in car interiors may cause cancer — and they’re required by US law: 2 days ago:
The flame retardant thing is baffling me, anyway. Flame retardant fabrics in a vehicle either toting around 10-20 gallons of monumentally flammable gasoline, or hundreds of kWh of lithium batteries. Sure, chief, the fabrics will keep it from catching on fire…
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 2 days ago:
Playing MP3’s off of a USB stick is literally all I do with my car’s stereo, and in fact all I want it to do.
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 3 days ago:
Crap like this is why I ride a motorcycle.
Only one of my bikes even manages to have enough electronics in it to have a clock.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Even at the time I found the contortions they put themselves into to avoid your protagonist from either speaking or having a name to be equal parts sad and hilarious.
- Comment on Choose your difficulty 4 days ago:
Penguin difficulty? Just git gud, scrub.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 5 days ago:
I’m sure they’ll want to, but that’ll be a little better than need to, i.e. relying on them for the raw materials as well.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 6 days ago:
Post vid, please.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 6 days ago:
Notwithstanding the instant privacy nightmare this would create, essentially abolishing online anonymity overnight, this is kinda-sorta what MAC addresses are already. As to why MAC addresses can be spoofed so easily without any real impact on anything, refer to my first statement.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 6 days ago:
Well, metallic sodium liberates hydrogen real fast on contact with water, which I guess is tantamount to the same thing.
Yes. But not to the same level as just dropping a brick of pure sodium in a bathtub. In a battery like this there is not pure lithium/sodium/whatever just sloshing around inside. The sodium is tied up being chemically bonded with whatever the anode and cathode materials are. Only a minority of the available sodium is actually free in the form of ions carrying the charge from cathode to anode.
Just as with lithium-ion chemistry batteries, it is vital that the cells remain sealed from the outside because the materials inside will indeed react with air, water, and the water in the air. Exposing the innards will cause a rapid exothermic reaction, i.e. it will get very hot and optionally go off bang.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 6 days ago:
It is definitely that. That’s kind of the point, actually. Sodium is easier to come by than lithium and does not require mining it from unstable parts of the world, nor relying on China.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 6 days ago:
It is if it’s a dry electrolyte cell.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Yeah, this definitely was not a case of “competition makes everything better.” More a case of every greedy motherfucker wanting to have their own private walled fiefdom making everything worse. Who’s going to be the first to bring up the GabeN quote?
I’m with you, I am proud to say I subscribe to precisely zero streaming services. There’s very little on any of them I actually want anyway, and anything I might actually want to see is readily available… elsewhere.
- Comment on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production 6 days ago:
Well, only relatively.
In order to work batteries need to have a certain amount of instability built in, on a chemical level. Them electrons have to want to jump from one material to a more reactive one; there is literally no other way. There is no such thing as a truly “safe and stable” battery chemistry. Such a battery would be inert, and not able to hold a charge. Even carbon-zinc batteries are technically flammable. I think these guys are stretching the truth a little for the layman, or possibly for the investor.
Lithium in current lithium-whatever cells is very reactive. Sodium on its own is extremely reactive, even moreso than lithium. Based on the minimal lookup I just did, this company appears to be using an aqueous electrolyte which makes sodium-ion cells a little safer (albeit at the cost of lower energy density, actually) but the notion that a lithium chemistry battery will burn but a sodium chemistry one “won’t” is flat out wrong. Further, shorting a battery pack of either chemistry is not likely to result in a good day.
- Comment on Micronics Micron 3D - $3000 Desktop SLS printer 6 days ago:
Honestly even at this price point I don’t see much use for a machine like this for hobbyists. Plastic SLS printing only has a few advantages over the significantly cheaper and widely supported FDM machines most of us use. SLS printers can create overhangs and do “print in midair” tricks that FDM can’t because the partially completed part is supported by the unfused powder, and they theoretically produce parts that are isotropic, i.e. there is no difference in layer vs. planar adhesion and they are as strong in the Z axis as they are in the X and Y. This might matter for mechanical parts, but it’s not terribly important for the vast majority of people who are just cranking out low-poly Pikachus and Deadpool busts or whatever.
- Comment on Because of smartphones, pocket TVs were never a thing. 1 week ago:
There absolutely were pocket TV’s. As a kid, even, I owned two of them. They are now of course functionally useless because they predate the switch to digital television by a significant margin. Both of mine were Realistic brand ones, which was an in store label for Radio Shack. Color LCD displays, telescoping antenna, and they ran off of 4 AA batteries. They were about the size of an OG Gameboy or a large Walkman.
I might even still have one in a box of tech junk somewhere. I believe the second one was a Realistic Pocketvision 27.
You can still buy a portable digital TV. These were always a bit of a stretch for a “pocket” television, more the size of a small tablet but thicker. But they totally did, and still do, exist.
- Comment on This is not a stereogram. If you look at it a certain way it will not resolve into anything. 1 week ago:
It’s Dickbutt, isn’t it?
- Comment on Nintendo DMCAs Yuzu forks on GitHub 1 week ago:
- Comment on How do you build complex shapes? 1 week ago:
Yes, you can.
You can set up datum planes in arbitrary orientations but in all honesty, I’ve never bothered. You can position a sketch in any orientation, at any angle, at any position in 3D space. You are not confined to right angles of the X, Y, and Z axes.
Sketches used in a loft don’t even have to be oriented on the same plane relative to each other.
- Comment on How do you build complex shapes? 1 week ago:
I can’t comment on other software since my experience with the commercial options is near-zero. However, specifically in FreeCAD you can do some incredibly tricksy things with sweeps and lofts. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of them.
You could create your shape there almost entirely with sweeps. A sweep takes two or more sketches and you can think of them like “keyframes” in 3D space. Typically you would stack them on top of each other at the specific locations you need, and at the location of each sketch the 3D solid have a cross section of exactly the shape and dimensions of that sketch, and then the shape will be interpolated in the space in between in various ways you can select. The dimensions of each sketch can, of course, be completely parametric and as dimensionally accurate as you need them to be.
The pocket tool is also extremely powerful if wielded creatively. You can knock holes of arbitrary shape and complexity through things, not just circles and hexagons, to any depth. You can create complex three dimensional curves by making a solid of some shape or another, and then making a pocket all the way through it at right angles or indeed any angle. Think of it kind of like a milling machine pass.
- Comment on Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles 1 week ago:
?
The NACS connector is the Tesla connector. Tesla won this format war. So what’s for them to be salty about?
The only wrinkle is that older Teslas require a reflash to work with the new (or rather old, same as CCS) communication standard that would be used by NACS equipped non-Tesla charging stations.
- Submitted 1 week ago to 3dprinting@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 1 week ago:
Buy a motorcycle. Not technically a car!
- Comment on Why people are boycotting Asus all of a sudden? Asus outrage explained 1 week ago:
I dunno, the Boomslang was pretty rad back in the day. But it was so old it was a ball mouse.
- Comment on Why people are boycotting Asus all of a sudden? Asus outrage explained 1 week ago:
Keyboards, headphones, laptops, a handheld Steam Deck imitator, and various other RGB gamer shit. All of it is trash. Their business model nowadays seems to revolve entirely around upselling Aliexpress quality Chinese garbage at premium prices and then methodically denying every single warranty claim for defective and DOA product using spurious excuses. Oh, and their driver software is crap. And their products are consistently behind even Logitech on the features you get for the price.
Through no particular intentional means, I am now a Logitech convert. For mice and keyboards, their stuff has always been consistently reliable for me, their “G” series driver software is significantly less irritating than Razer Synapse, and most of their stuff is cheaper as well.
I think in my lifetime I’ve trashed four Razer keyboards, at least as many mice, and two pairs of headphones. All of these died early deaths – within weeks, sometimes a couple of months at the outside. Every time I tell myself this time will be different. It never is. I don’t buy their shit anymore, and I don’t recommend anyone else do, either.