They’re gonna completely fly themselves. They’re gonna be taxi drones, even if they’re privately owned. They’ll have some sort of interface to let the passenger riding pick the destination and route, and even change destinations during the flight, but they’ll be flown by a computer.

Collision avoidance is easier (much…

The big unsolved problems are large-scale collision avoidance and robust emergency handling. It’ll definitely take years to develop the sensors and software required to do that. Everything else already exists (in one form or another). I don’t mean to diminish the difficulties of system integration, but it’s a lot…

I used to think air taxis were a crazy pipe dream, the stuff of three-dimensional traffic jams and instantly fatal fender-benders. I don’t think they’re crazy any more. They’re years away, hilariously expensive, and a regulatory nightmare, but not unfeasible, even with today’s technology.

When you hear ‘flying cars’,…

How would you describe the Culture (honest question, not sarcasm)?

While it is legitimately a eutopia, there’s an enormous, insurmountable difference in capability between the Minds and the human-scale individuals who inhabit the Minds’ worlds. Even the most capable, motivated, and brilliant human-scale characters in…

Musk is a big fan of Iain Banks’ eutopian “Culture” series, in which the Milky Way Galaxy’s society is ruled by (benevolent) superhuman-verging-on-locally-omniscient AIs that control all industry, resource distribution and politics. In terms of intelligence and capability, the relationship between AIs and human…

I picked up my DSR last week for exactly this kind of riding. I spend a lot of time checking fences and counting livestock for my job, so a low-maintenance, quiet, torquey offroad bike is perfect for me. Range isn’t an issue because a normal day is only about 20-25 miles (50/50 on and off road), and the bike’s range…

I’ve loved the Mass Effect trilogy since I was a kid, but couldn’t get interested in Andromeda until about a month ago. Now I’m doing a full-trilogy Legendary Edition Insanity run and trying to get as close to 100% completion as my limited sanity can manage (I’m almost ready to hit the Omega-4 relay).

Don’t play Mass…

The Mako is neither good nor bad. It dismisses such petty descriptors out-of-hand, just as it rejects “realism”, “steering”, and “physics”. Such things are of no concern to the Mako.

The Mako is Chaos. You can call it a demon, or you can call it a god, but either way, you will scream in terror and delight as you…

You see this a lot in little puppies chasing birds and squirrels - once the chase gets exciting, it doesn’t matter what you tell them to do. They’re so caught up in the moment that they simply cannot stop. Luckily, dogs are smart enough to be trained very quickly.

Maybe we could start a similar program for cops? I get…

This sucks, because I’m trying to buy a DSR right now, and ApPaReNtLy I now have to make an actual choice between multiple colors that I like, rather than having no choice at all.

Both this article and the original were well-written and interesting. Whether or not you love Tesla and/or Musk, it’s important to analyze the effects of new technologies. What stood out to me:

Modern cars have amazing crumple zones and other safety features designed to divert impact force away from the occupants. How…

This is a car for people whose lifestyles call for a hatchback, but whose egos need a “truck”.

I hope one day a car company releases a small pickup again, by which I mean: two seats and a six foot bed, crammed into as small a footprint as possible.

This seems like good real-world testing to me. Just like real drivers, autonomous cars have to learn how to function with obstructed or damaged sensors.

For example, most humans have redundant eyes (2), so they can still see if one gets obstructed. Those eyes can blink to clear dust away. If that’s insufficient to…

The most unrealistic part of that scenario is the absurd notion that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg would cooperate, rather than fight to the death over the title of ‘Grand High Narcissist-in-Chief’.

This video reminds me of the time my baby brother first started playing with little electric riding toys (he was around 3-4yo at the time). When going straight, everything was fine, but he didn’t know where his wheels were, and didn’t really understand how steering worked, so he’d bump into things or drive off the…

I’m a younger millennial who’s just getting into motorcycles for the first time, and I’m not looking at Harley-Davidson motorcycles at all. I care about price, reliability, capability, comfort, and appearance.

My impressions:
Price: HD motorcycles seem to cost about 50% more than comparable bikes from other…

Before we can argue about what number the speed limit should be set at, we need to agree on what the concept of “speed limit” means.

Better than the inverse, I guess. I misread the headline and was expecting a very, very different article.

Maybe they decided that they needed larger/brighter brake lights on a vehicle that spends a lot of time stopped/moving slower than traffic. Maybe this was just the cheapest way of getting larger brake lights, and the reverse lights were just cut.

So you’ve gotta get up to 88 miles an hour, potentially in a time period without paved roads. Gotta be durable, and have decent power + suspension. My vote is for a modern pickup (diesel or otherwise) with three or four extra cans of fuel and a full set of spare tires in the bed. Screw blending in with the Model Ts.