tweedledee

A huge loss to and a massive vote of no confidence in MSR Cambridge.

Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.

I enjoyed the realpolitik of Expanse but hated the trite interpersonal conflicts which seems to be a mainstay of modern drama. I find the main characters to be rather childish.

I wonder how much may be due to LongCovid. If even 10% of infections result in LongCovid then I would expect to see it in job reports.

My primary concern would be the noise. I can deal with small rooms, no windows etc. but I assume students crammed that close together would be crazy noisy. I have ADHD so I’m much more noise sensitive than most, but even for normal people I would expect better sleep and study outcomes from a quiet environment.

My favorite part was the gaslighting done by Cadbury. “It hasn’t gotten smaller, you’ve gotten bigger”

Q seemed to be an 'Operation Trust' / операция Трест campaign. The idea is to undermine resistance by pretending there is already one in place and that the secret resistance with a plan that will be eminently successful. It undermines actual resistance. The parallel being Trump supporters being the resistance that didn't do anything (other than make fools of themselves) with the belief that there was a secret plan to keep Trump in power. In this scenario Q would have been created to undermine Trump and his supporters. A large part of propaganda is to make your enemies look foolish. I'm reminded of a Voltaire quote: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous. ' And God granted it."

It’s still simpler and cheaper. The swashplate is much simpler. Much less power is fed to the main rotor as inertia is built up slowly and only for take off. The lower standard of reliability as worst that happens is you don’t take off. Engines are pushing a more forgiving higher speed prop, so engines and fuel are cheaper.

I don’t know how marginal jumpstarts are, possibly very, which would limit the utility. Especially where there is a runway nearby.

For completeness I should add; Quadrotor configurations rely on varying prop speeds to control pitch, yaw, and roll. The larger the props the more difficult it is to vary the prop speed in a timely manner. Electric motors are more weight efficient at high speeds but larger props need to be slower. You could add a gearbox but either way you are gaining weight and complexity. Plus parts start to get really expensive as you scale up and get out of hobbyists range.

Most wing suit flying is generally far away from obstacles. When they do get close its not many obstacles and it’s carefully planned. Flying FPV through forests is a lot of fun because of how random it is, and how dangerous it feels, but you quickly become aware that the human brain is not set up to do that kind of high speed navigation. There is no traction and flight lines have to be planned a few moves ahead. There is very little margin in the best of times, and sometimes no margin at all. It’s like that ball tracking / hidden monkey experiment. While you are watching one tree another jumps out at you from nowhere. It would be like playing Russian roulette non stop. You’re looking for the intersection of people who are actively suicidal and with a spare $100K.

I am aware crazy people do exist. It's a matter of degree and I would suggest that flying this thought a forest Endor style would be far more dangerous than free solo climbing.

They are explaining how quadcopters don't scale very well. You may be misunderstanding the explanation. The surface area covered by the rotor is much less for quadcopters and it is difficult to make up for that. Plus small rotors are less efficient. One upside for quadcopters is simplicity but that advantage diminishes with scale.

I've flown FPV drones through forests, it's insane. The reaction speeds needed are crazy. It is almost impossible to last a day without crashing. I'm sure there are lots of fun things to do with it, but Endor style races is not one of them. The people willing to do things that crazy don't last very long.