dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork , 9 days 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.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days 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.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days 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.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days 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.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago

The flame retardant thing is baffling me, anyway. Flame retardant fabrics/plastics 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...

dual_sport_dork , 11 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.

dual_sport_dork , 12 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.

dual_sport_dork , 11 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.

dual_sport_dork , 12 days ago

I have never in my life heard anyone actually call weed "dope."

"Dope" is heroin, and its derivatives and relations.

dual_sport_dork , 15 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.

dual_sport_dork , 15 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.

dual_sport_dork , 15 days ago

It is if it's a dry electrolyte cell.

dual_sport_dork , 15 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.

dual_sport_dork , 15 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.

dual_sport_dork , 15 days ago

Post vid, please.

dual_sport_dork , 14 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.

dual_sport_dork , 18 days ago

?

The NACS connector is the Tesla connector. NACS was entirely their doing; 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.

dual_sport_dork , 20 days ago

I have an electric leaf blower. It is indeed significantly quieter than a two stroke gasoline powered one, albeit not exactly what you'd call "silent."

I primarily use it to dry off my bikes after washing, and to blow dust off my shop floor and outside. Sweeping is for chumps. I also use it to remove the grass clippings from my sidewalks (I just blow them back into the grass) because the very same Karens who bitch about leaf blower noise are also the very same Karens who bitch about the sidewalks being "untidy" and getting grass clippings on their shoes.

Unfortunately, my leaf blower is not powerful enough to blow them away.

dual_sport_dork , 20 days ago

Golf courses, definitely. I managed a hardware store for a while and our primary customer for reel mowers, as well as sharpening services for the same, were golf courses.

dual_sport_dork , 20 days ago

It would work, and it does work better for specific applications like metal chips around the drill press and grinders. But doing the entire floor with it would take all day. The nozzle is only 9" wide.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

Gigabyte (remember them?)

Sure do! Both my board and the board in my wife's computer are Gigabyte. So's my video card. The only issue I've ever had with their stuff has been a bad stick of ram a few years ago, which they exchanged without argument.

Brands in this sphere I definitely have had trouble with: MSI, Razer -- so many problems with Razer -- and ASUS.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days 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.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

I dunno, the Boomslang was pretty rad back in the day. But it was so old it was a ball mouse.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

I've never paid for a Windows license, ever. I sure as fuck didn't for Win 95 when it came out, since us script kiddies figured out pretty fast you can install it with a CD key of all 1's. And then I used Windows 2000 for a long time. So long that I still remember the (stolen, MSDN) license key I used from having installed it umpteen times.

DDTPV-TXMX7-BBGJ9-WGY8K-B9GHM

There, you can have that one gratis and for nothin'. For all the good it'll do you now.

And I still have one of those grey and blue plastic MSDN tackle boxes full of CD's of all the Microsoft stuff. You want a copy of Visual Studio 2003 or something? I got you.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

As your attorney I advise you to buy a motorcycle. Bikes and bike parts are cheaper. And then you can have more bikes than cars, and more bikes to buy parts for. Wait, where was I going with this again?

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

Which is probably the play. I'd doubt Microsoft really gives a flying fuck about home users buying licenses anymore, since their revenue model for consumer Windows is just ads and data harvesting now anyway.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

11 has artificial hardware requirements built in that will prevent it from installing on a lot of computers (possibly most computers deployed in the world, at this point) which is the main issue. All those non-technical home users who bought a brand name prebuilt PC in 5, 6, however many years ago that still works just fine will not be able to upgrade.

They will be left in the lurch unless M$ relents and removes those requirements (unlikely), they all learn to patch them out themselves (extremely unlikely), or they all go buy new computers with newer hardware (extremely annoying).

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

Nothing got named "Windows 9" because Microsoft feared compatibility issues with janky programs looking for the first set of characters in "Windows 95" or "Windows 98."

Later this was changed by the marketing department to some blather about "wanting consumers to perceive a clean break from the previous version." But then, Microsoft also claimed Windows 10 would be the Last Windows, and it would just have feature updates built on top of it forever as a service. So you sure as fuck can't take anything they say at face value.

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

I actually liked the full screen Start menu from 8/8.1 for the specific use case of my living room PC. You got a big 10-foot UI by default with nice large icons you could punch from across the room.

The whole put-your-mouse-in-the-corner-and-swipe for the charms menu was baffling, though. I get that this was supposed to be a tablet UI thing, but why make it mandatory for the mouse interface as well?

dual_sport_dork , 22 days ago

Buy a motorcycle. Not technically a car!

dual_sport_dork , 24 days ago

We all knew this day was coming. And, I suspect, knowing this is precisely why most of us are here.

dual_sport_dork , 23 days ago

People talking about topics the marketing-droids feel is likely to result in the sale of a product, i.e., "What is the best X to buy?"

dual_sport_dork , 23 days ago

• Cats
• Memes about cats
• Cats using Linux
• Owning a car is evil and you should be ashamed
• You should have a cat instead
• We hate Elon Musk
• Knives

(Hey, at least I'm trying.)

dual_sport_dork , 23 days ago

[Scrolling through my own post history.]

[Side-eye monkey meme.]

dual_sport_dork , 23 days ago

I don't know if matters have improved any, but back when I created my lemmy.world account specifically it had some kind of bugout about what I'd entered, but it output this to the developer console and not on the page itself. Had I not thought to press F12 I would not have discovered that it had its panties in a twist about whatever it was, I think characters in my email address or something. I forget exactly what its problem was.

So yeah, I can definitely seeing that baffling the average user.

dual_sport_dork , 24 days ago

This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn't happen.

It's not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to "revolutionize" the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.

And as usual, this article harps on "range" as if that's not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack -- just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these "could" build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.

dual_sport_dork , 24 days ago

That's how battery chemistry works. Even this, if it is real, is a bunch of individual cells in a bank. There is no alternative; you can't have sufficient reactivity between dissimilar materials to generate the types of voltages required in a single cell. You need multiples of them in series to hit 200 volts, 400, 600, whatever is required by the vehicle's drive hardware.

dual_sport_dork , 24 days ago

Lapped by what? Vaporware? Oh, yeah. If we Americans don't get all our liars organized we'll never be as good as the Chinese at playing make-believe.

This article is an ad. This thing being described is not actually a product; it does not meaningfully actually exist. It is installed in zero vehicles, and the manufacturer's claims are completely unverified and, probably, unverifiable. It's not real. These kinds of press releases get posted all the time. The company is just simping for investor money, that's all.

dual_sport_dork , 23 days ago

That's because Toyota is trying to put all their eggs in the hydrogen basket. Toyota is the only brand that really has a functional consumer-available hydrogen fuel cell car and I think they're stuck in sunk cost fallacy mode with that technology.

dual_sport_dork , 24 days ago

The article also calls this a "leak." Is it really a leak if it's in the insider Windows build that Microsoft makes freely available to anyone who wants it?

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Wait. After all this hype Tesla has only managed to move 3878 units of the Cybertruck? That's hilarious.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

As much as I like to see this sentiment, I think now as ever the people who actually follow through with moving to Linux will be few in number.

Most users who get fed up and decide the hell with it are likely to just buy a Mac instead, as revolting a development as that may be.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

The irritating thing about all this is, at least if Raymond Chen is to be believed, the OS letting you do what you want without getting in your way was actually a/the core design philosophy of Windows up until probably the end of the XP era. It seems with Vista they started losing the plot, and by the time of Windows 8 Microsoft had fully committed to going completely off the rails.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

Windows user A will not know what their home directory is and will respond as described. Windows user B will assume that it is their "my documents" folder, which may or may not be the case, because: Windows user C will know that there are effectively three home directories in Windows (/users/username, /users/username/documents, and /users/username/appadata/local) but that won't help anybody determine which one some program actually put the goddamn file in.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

I think the point the parent poster was making is that the system shouldn't be designed that way in the first place. And when the vendor fucks it up due to releasing the product in a half-baked state, the hammer needs to be brought down on them in such a way that it will functionally discourage them from doing it again.

If the electronics providing functionality in your vehicle are so complex that the excuse is being made potentially adverse interactions between its various components from various OEM's can't be tested and accounted for, what has actually happened is that designed your product wrong. Throw it away, start over, and do it right next time.

dual_sport_dork , 1 month ago

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dual_sport_dork , 29 days ago

And at any time.

Cutting someone's brake lines is all or nothing and can't be done while the vehicle is already in motion. Anyone who is not an idiot will hopefully notice as soon as they start driving that there's something wrong with the brakes. But you could brick somebody's car remotely and without warning while they're taking a curve on the interstate at 80 MPH, and that'd be a lot more problematic.

In reality, few to no people outside of novels and Hollywood have actually been killed by some malefactor "cutting their brake lines."

dual_sport_dork , 29 days ago

Yes, actually, it is.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7038fcd3-97b2-4c7a-b208-78c49b71893e.jpeg

Source.

Motor vehicle fatalities had their nadir in 2014, which coincides with the time when we had all major safety innovations sorted out: Advanced air bags, stability and traction control, ABS, RADAR/LIDAR/etc. collision avoidance on fancier models, reverse cameras, mandatory TMPS, etc.

Cars today are basically exactly the same mechanically and insofar as physical safety features existed in 2014. But the line goes back up into the 2020's as idiots started packing cars with touchscreens, everything-by-wire control systems, hiding critical controls into the infotainment screen, removing physical tactile controls, and loading everything with mountains of electronic distractions. Many of these whizz-bang electronic features nobody actually wants are also released in a sorry state. New cars are objectively worse than cars from 10-15 years ago, with the possible exception of EV range.