This is ridiculously well trod ground, but Prey also wasn’t at all helped by Bethesda’s marketing.
They had what is probably the truest successor to System Shock 2 that’s been made on their hands and Bethesda made Arkane use the title of a 15 year old portal based shooter that had absolutely no relation to the game and didn’t do particularly well because they owned the IP.
The entire Bethesda-Arkane relationship has been pretty thoroughly mismanaged.
A cheap Allwinner SoC has enough compute to do what they’re showing. So, yeah, China.
Likely more expensive since you need enough onboard compute to run the computer vision.
That said, it’s potentially reusable. The next logical step would be to add some sort of tether that entangles the target drone. Right now, it’s just relying on direct impact to knock the other drone out of the sky, but all you really need to do is ensnare the props. That’s doable without destroying the hunter drone.
On a long enough timeline.
In reality, they lost to TSMC as much as anything. That’s the real meat of why this case was so important: AMD not being able to gain marketshare meant they couldn’t afford to reinvest into R&D. AMD falling behind in fab tech and having to spin off Global Foundries to stay afloat was a near-direct result of Intel’s anti-competitive moves back then.
That lag in process tech had ripple effects for years. AMD didn’t really start to gain serious marketshare until the one-two punch of Zen and Intel hitting a process wall (while TSMC kept moving).
As long as you don’t need particularly tight tolerances or fine details, it works perfectly fine. The setup really isn’t anymore complicated than I described. I have done it just because I wanted to see how difficult the process is. It’s around $100 in startup costs assuming you have access to a printer. After that it’s mostly just waiting and occasionally measuring cut progress.
Check out the Rack Robotics Powercore as well. It’s a low cost wire EDM system that uses cheap 3D printers as a motion platform. It uses a very similar principle to cut metal using wire as the cutting tool. May or may not be more suitable depending on your exact use case. Still pretty rough around the edges though; SendCutSend makes more sense for most people that need things cut from flat stock for the most part.
The majority of components in these things typically are printed. It’s just the pressure bearing components like the barrel where ECM is being used.
The FGC-9 discussed in the article is notable because it was explicitly designed to be manufactured using components that are not regulated as firearms parts under European law. So there are non-printed parts in it, but everything is dual-purpose and can be acquired through unregulated channels, e.g., the hydraulic pipe that gets used as a barrel.
The reality is this is one of a handful of emerging technologies that are going to reshape a lot of things about the world in the future in ways I don’t think society, as a whole, is cogniscent of, let alone prepared for.
This is one of them. The battlefield use of small drones is another.
I tend to say that the world we’re living in now is one where gun control is increasingly obsolete. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s not a statement on whether that’s a good or bad thing. It’s just what I think we’re going to increasingly find to be the new reality: the rise of small scale, low cost, divertible manufacturing technologies is going to make traditional supply-side approaches to regulation untenable. That genie is out.
(Drones are in a similar, if distinct space: low cost, commodity, and divertible from low/no regulation supply chains in a way that makes it nearly impossible to cut off supply without shutting down other legitimate economic activity).
I don’t know what the right answer is. I do think it’s going to take a pretty fundamental rethink of how we approach these problems. I don’t think the full ramifications of these types of technology have really reached the wider zeitgeist, and, frankly, I kind of worry about how people will react. There are a lot of pretty scary paths this could take, both in terms of how the technology gets used and in terms of what attempts to curb them could look like if they’re not carefully thought through.
Machine is borderline overselling it.
The ECM process works by pumping water containing an electrolyte through a metal part. When a current is applied to the water, exposed metal gets slowly etched away.
What these groups are doing is starting with high pressure hydraulic pipe and inserting 3D printed jigs that are basically a negative mask to bore out the pipe to their desired diameter, cut the chamber, machine in rifling, etc, with the end product being a functional barrel. As far as I’m aware, so far this has been limited to pistol caliber cartridges; rifle calibers are a step up in pressure and come with a whole host of different engineering challenges.
The “machine” is really nothing more than a bucket, an aquarium/pond pump, and a desktop power supply. It’s honestly a really clever approach to the problem from an engineering standpoint.
The ECM process isn’t suitable for manufacturing ammunition.
In general, you’d still be generally reliant on the traditional manufacturing supply chain there. There is development happening in that space, but nothing anywhere near as complete as the FGC-9.
Jake Hanhrahan of Popular Front has done really extensive reporting on the general topic of 3D printed firearms. He’s interviewed both people in the design community and people involved in the fighting and manufacture in Myanmar.
Quick Google for the Census Bureau only turns up median rather than mean:
Median is probably a better value here since it’s going to reduce outlier effects.
Looks to me that median rent in most states in 1990 was closer to $300-400 per month than $500.
Partisan
Score: 3 Explanation: The article primarily reflects Rhianna’s perspectives and narratives while omitting Chris Brown’s viewpoints. Suggestion: Include statements from Chris Brown regarding the beating for balance.
I really enjoyed Weird West. It mashed up immersive sim elements with Divinity-inspired isometric sandbox combat. Lots of really cool world building.
Rough around the edges in a few places and probably a little ambitious in scope for the size of their team, but overall a pretty solid and fun title for a new indie studio.
tl;dr definitely interested in seeing what they do next.
You tell them you don’t work for $500.
Or you tell them that you do.
Per hour.
But since they’re clearly such great mates with dad, you can cut them a deal.
our last “just war” that was even a little cut and dry was world war two.
The Balkans were pretty cut and dry in justified intent.
It was an intervention into the worst genocide in Europe since WW2. We’re talking not only wholesale slaughter of civilians, but even the establishment of literal rape camps as part of an organized, systemic campaign of ethnic cleansing. What was happening in the former Yugoslavia was absolutely horrific and the US and NATO stepping in to put an end to it was an unequivocally good thing.
That said, there were still questionable incidents like the “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy or the numerous cases of civilians killed by NATO bombs. But that mostly emphasizes the fact that there’s no such thing as a clean war. War is always going to leave blood on your hands, even if it’s being fought for the right reasons.
Fleet yaw is a different phenomenon that impacts terminal ballistic performance. It’s essentially a way of describing why some projectiles tumble and fragment after impact while others will tend to remain more stable and pass straight through for longer.
The projectile AoA being described in that context is only a couple of degrees. It’s enough to change how the round behaves after hitting something, but it’s not the type of in-flight wild tumbling that results in keyholing on a target.
In fairness, tires really should be replaced at minimum in pairs on any vehicle. Definitely hurts more when it’s a full set, though.
And it hurts extra hard on the STi. My latest set of tires a few weeks ago because I damaged a sidewall was ~$1500.
Subaru’s AWD system is legitimately better at putting down power to the wheels and getting traction than the vast majority of other AWD systems on the market. There are plenty of third party tests showing as much.
That said, it’s a question of whether you actually need that. The truth is the vast majority of people don’t need AWD at all for the kind of driving they’ll actually do.
I have an STi which has an active center differential beyond even the typical Subaru system and I absolutely love it. It’s magic feeling it at work. But my “likes to take the car on dirt and go sideways at 50MPH” use case isn’t needed for a commuter either.
“Smarter” is the wrong way to look at it. LLMs don’t reason. They have limited ability to contextualize. They have no long term memory (in the sense of forming conclusions based on prior events).
They potentially have access to more data than any individual human and are able to respond to requests for that data quicker.
Which is a long way of saying that they can arguably be more knowledgeable about random topics, but that’s a separate measure from “smart,” which encompasses much, much more.
lol and this is exactly why that decision was so baffling.
The game has absolutely nothing to do with the 3D Realms Prey game. It’s truer to System Shock than the Bioshock series ever was. It routinely goes on sale for next to nothing – highly recommended if you’re a fan of SS2.