frontiersummit

A survey is sent to car buyers with a huge number of questions related to their satisfaction. Automakers, Tier-1 suppliers, and probably others get to buy this data to mine for market research.

At a past role with a Tier-1, we bought part of the dataset. A quick regression showed that satisfaction was strongly correlated with buyer age, and there was very little signal otherwise. (Young people with overtime work and daycare pickups don't respond to surveys unless they have a serious axe to grind while retirees aren't so constrained)

My caving experience is less than yours, but I want to echo what you say. The average person envisions spacious tourist caves, not belly-crawling 800 yards through muddy gravel which has been more my experience with wild caves in the American Midwest. Gear gets shredded in caves worse than maybe any other environment, and slows you down like nothing else.

It has always felt to me that Wirecutter focuses on only one end of the Pareto curve ("what is the very best XXXX that money can buy, within reason") and ignores the middle of the curve where most people are actually shopping ("what is the best XXXX that I can get for $XXX"). It also seems to reliably ignore brands from Mainland China (Hisense, Midea, etc). I guess It makes obvious sense to court rich (or at least price-insensitive) readers.

I only see power requirements (1300 W) but no mention of voltage or frequency requirements---not even in the user guide. The pricing in € hints that the creators are in 240/1/50-land, and that I'm out-of-luck in the 120/1/60 wastes of North America. It's a shame, because I'm very much the target demographic for a kit like this. One could transform it from 120 V or run it on our 240 V split-phase with an isolation transformer of course, but running the A/C pump 20% faster might be dubious.

As an aside, I'm frustrated for the same reason regarding induction cooktops. European units are a fraction of the cost of their American equivalents.

As someone who has used 3D CAD professionally for decades, I must confess I had low expectations for this tool. My expectations have been greatly exceeded, and there is real value in something like this.

The value is not in creating models of new/custom parts, but in quickly generating models of standard parts such as pipe fittings, bolts, connectors, and stuff you could buy from a catalog. Prompts like "m4 cap screw which is 50 mm long" or "2 inch ASME B16.5 pipe flange" seem to reliably generate adequate results. Design of large assemblies often requires locating or drawing dozens (or hundreds) of such models (though there are sometimes libraries available). It's almost like the model was trained on the entire McMaster-Carr catalog! (maybe they scraped it?) The models will still need to be checked to ensure quality, but this is true regardless of whether a human or AI creates them.

Modeling even simple fixtures and brackets with a system like this is cumbersome: I tried, but requires paragraphs of metes-and-bounds language. Nevertheless I got the parts I wanted. Much of engineering happens at the interfaces, so accurately describing things like hole patterns and mating surfaces is critical. This can certainly be done in text, just not time-efficiently.

Additionally, the output (STEP files, etc) are what we call in the business "dumb solids." They don't include any parametric logic, and the sorts of edits which can be made to them are limited and often require serious creativity.

Another drawback: this thing is slow! A good CAD user could draw a lot of these parts in less wall-clock time. I assume this can be overcome by throwing more iron at the problem.

The UI/UX is has a ton of rough edges (and I'm still not sure if I made an account or not) but is totally fine for a proof-of-concept.

I went into this with incredibly low hopes: I've heard many promises of software which promises to make CAD faster and easier and accessible to non-experts. These look great in sales pitches, but the engineers and designers in the audience invariably wince (or worse). This is something that I could actually use and would make my life easier.

Skimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.

The stereotype is small, under-powered sportscars are sold to to men having a "mid-life crisis."

I read this as "person, 35-ish, stuck in a rut" which is a situation so common that automakers engineer cars like the Mazda Miata specifically for people in it.

Climbing to altitude is the straightforward part. The transition from zero knots to the stall speed of the aircraft (minimum speed at which it can remain airborne) is the tricky bit. Designing for a lower stall speed necessitates wings which produce higher drag (by being larger) which requires more propulsion, which means bigger batteries and motors. So launching from a catapult or rocket or mothership or whatever means a lighter plane.

Just over 20 years ago, a small model aircraft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts%27_Farm) crossed the Atlantic in 39 hours using about a gallon of Naptha as fuel. The same year, the Design-Build-Fly club at my university built an electric aircraft which had some serious endurance and payload capabilities, though I don't remember the details. Keeping a model electric plane aloft for a day is impressive, but how many hobbyists have built something similar by now without any expectation of VC money?

I'm similarly curious. Designing for a higher stall speed permits smaller wing area, lower drag, and lower weight. The cost is that takeoffs and landings become troublesome.

I'm very curious what's going on here... Does the EU just have better negotiators? Did someone in the CDC get their pockets lined to accept a higher bid? Is there some law or contract which prevented the CDC from playing hardball?

Why not cut back on general aviation flights first? My naive solution (granted I know little about ATC) would be to give commercial flights priority over GA flights if ATC is overloaded. No 8-seat business jet is more economically important than a 200-seat airliner. Say nothing of recreational piston-engine flights. At the very least slap a $5000 surcharge on every GA takeoff or something.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/882/

Is it just me or does anyone else feel that Wirecutter only considers the upper end of the performance vs. price Pareto curve? Recently I read their review on dehumidifiers, and all 5x recommendations were Frigidaire/Electrolux models that cost twice as much as the Midea unit I ended up purchasing. (Midea is arguably a more reliable brand these days anyway, but I digress)

Wirecutter wants to tell me what is the "best" when I really want to know what is the cheapest product that will satisfice my needs.

I have a sneaky suspicion that as interest rates increase, subscription models will become much less popular. Sellers would rather have the money today, since the present value of future subscription payments becomes less. The "everything as a service" model makes the most sense in a zero interest rate environment.

I guess I don't know what roads you are driving on, but as a counter example, class 8 trucks (tractor trailers, etc.) have abysmal acceleration but most of their drivers have gone millions of miles without even a fender-bender.

Most people able to drive a car like this are of the "only lease a depreciating asset" mindset, so it's all monthly payments regardless.

Don't ignore the commercial market. Daimler Truck has a massive global footprint---here in North America their brands include Freightliner, Western Star, Thomas (school busses), and Detroit Diesel. These brands will not be unseated anytime soon.

People buy cars with that much power as a "flex," not because they are regularly hooning around in them. A $100k+ vehicle with a Mercedes badge is enough of a flex already, and flexing towards a different crowd regardless, so the additional power is not necessary.

This puts it mildly. Paul Volcker has been (perhaps unfairly) called the Father of the Rustbelt, due to how rising interest rates broke the back of manufacturing in the American Midwest during the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Cooling" the economy means layoffs and plant closures, often concentrated in specific geographic regions. The only question is: what firms and employees get sacrificed to placate the inflation Gods this time around?

At a naive level, this sounds like the sort of supply chain attack we've all been taught to fear. Asking seriously: has this build been replicated? is the source different from mainline? if so, what changed and who changed it?

Indeed, but you can expect the architects and developers to still call themselves progressive urbanists, conveniently leaving the parking crater out of frame in all of their renders.

This is already being done in a lot of places in the American Midwest, such as my city and the neighboring city where my partner lives. The form it takes is a lot less glamorous than Strong Towns disciples probably want:

An entire block gets leveled and filled with cookie cutter 5-over-1s. The neighboring block also gets leveled to provide a giant parking lot for the residents. This happens even in city centers and near universities.

People choose their vehicles for both functional purposes and sociocultural purposes. In somewhere like Manilla, a motorcycle has net positive functional utility since it is cheap, can park easily, and cut through traffic. In somewhere like Houston (where the study was authored), a motorcycle has net negative functional utility, given the humidity, rain, ample parking, and lack of lane splitting. That means riding is done for sociocultural purposes: to signal who you are by how you move about. For someone who is riding mainly for this reason, will they adopt a new light pattern, especially if it means adding a lamp to their head?

Superblocks seem like they would be super-fun for a 24-year-old single or someone visiting on holiday, but would be a logistical nightmare for a young family. Is this so? or am I a frog stuck in a car-dependency well?

A toaster is probably a bad example, given the common error states (burnt toast, stuck toast) which are no doubt amplified by design flaws in some units. I've never seen a toaster with 2000+ components, so maybe such a machine is different. A toaster is also historically famous for a dangerous error state: if the plug is inserted the wrong way round, the coils will be switched on neutral. A toaster which is "off" is thus liable to shock an unwitting person using a fork to resolve the stuck-toast error state.

I think it cuts both ways, as anyone who has needed to mine an existing data set for a new purpose can attest. Having the data sanitized can may your parsing job infinitely easier, while it can simultaneously destroy data which would have been extremely helpful to the new project.

The older my eyes get, the more I wince when hearing DPI numbers like that. Scaling of UI elements is never as perfect as we pretend it is. For example, getting both GTK and Qt to simultaneously scale properly on my workstation is something I've given up on, nevermind the bios screen (and I'm only at 109 DPI). Shakes fist at cloud

I remember looking at the same data some time ago and reaching the same conclusion about accidents at night. Another factor was that the pedestrians themselves are very likely to be intoxicated.