thelastknowngod

I must be a special, fantasy person that does road trips with 700mi or longer drives

Assuming you have the ability to drive at a perfect, ideal, consistent 80mph 700miles is 8h45m of driving. You aren’t going to stop for a bathroom break in 8 hours?

200 miles will likely give you 3.5 or so behind the wheel. Take a break and stretch your legs… It’s better for your health anyway than sitting for so long.

Not to mention it’s 3000 kilos. They really need to start adding vehicle weight limits to licenses. The US license test is a joke in most states, and then people are allowed to drive 3 metric ton vehicles from a 10 minute drive.

Yeah agreed but that’s a different conversation unrelated to this thing.

Wonder what the engineering solution to this could look like…

Thinking something like a zero trust model being required for all web requests… Like the target address would need to receive a validated identity token from some third party but that token couldn’t contain identifying info about the requester. Likewise, the validating third party would need to verify the identity of the requester without having knowledge of the target address.

Then that raises more questions like who would we all be comfortable trusting as a verifier and what data would we use for that validation? The validation system and the data used to validate would need to be provided for free too to account for low income people so no subscription services or hardware MFA keys. Also who counts as an identity to be validated?

What do enforcement mechanisms look like if this does get built? Are the validators entirely passive or do they actively participate in the process? Like do we have rate limits imposed by the validation engine or do we just leave that to the target address/organization to impose themselves? What happens if someone is banned from a site? Does the site notify the validators to drop requests earlier in the lifetime of a request? Do individuals get a lower request quota than corporations? Would you have to form a company just to prototype a new tool/product?

If someone seriously wanted to work on this I’d jump on the opportunity to work with them. It sounds like a fascinating project.

It’s a big, stupid truck but so is every other truck it’s competing against. It’s got poor visibility but so does every other truck/suv being sold in America. The cheapest option doesn’t have the longest range but it’s still longer than the average person would realistically drive in a day. It can’t haul much but the overwhelming majority of people driving trucks in America aren’t towing or hauling things on a day to day basis… The people doing real work buy vans or have special purpose trucks.

The steering geometry seems nice and the rear wheel steering is interesting. Those seem like the only major positives though.

It’s not as bad as everyone seems to be making it out to be but it’s obviously still a dumb car that shouldn’t exist. That’s all cars though really.

EDIT: Since the front windshield is flat, I assume its cheaper to replace than typical curved windshields? No idea though… Might be talking out of my ass.

Yep. I would LOVE one of these chips in a kubernetes node.

This is what it feels like to interact with the Linux/opensource/selfhost people sometimes.

“bUt ThEy CaN wAtCh YoU!!1!”

I’m an American living abroad and I use a VoIP service to maintain my US number. It had actually gotten more difficult to do this because of the changes they are making.

A few weeks ago I needed to submit docs proving I was a legitimate business with US tax id and whatnot… If you don’t have that, you have to provide an alternate number from a traditional phone contract of someone who lives in the US. Unless I were to pay for a phone subscription in America, there is no option for an individual to do this independently. I needed to use a family member’s number.

My American phone number is very much necessary but I only use it on very rare occasions… Paying something like $30-40 per month for an American phone contract (that I’ll never use) plus the $15-20 per month fee for the voip provider is excessive.

If they just had an id verification system for American citizens and didn’t tie it to a domestic account holder, that would be something.