The B23 has 60 minutes of endurance plus 10 minutes reserve. For each minute of flight it needs a minute to charge. Recommended flight time is about 40 minutes, which make sense to keep the battery at a healthy state of charge. However I'm confused by how they can market a 10 minute reserve time when the FAA requires 30 minutes reserve fuel for visual flight rules and 45 minutes reserve fuel for instrument conditions.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.151

It says cruise speed is 110 knots (120mph or 200km/h). Cruise is achieved at 80kW with 48kWh of energy available, so it can fly for 36 minutes total at "cruise" speed. If we subtract mandatory reserves, one could fly for 6 minutes.

For reference, most small airplanes have at least 4 hours of endurance. My airplane has 6 hours.

This "cross country" flight will take months as shown by their schedule. It's neat, but it's very much a prototype.

https://h55.ch/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Flyer_B23_Energic_EU.pdf

Absolutely air traffic in the sky should be identified. There is no problem with that, but it's the idea that it is too easy to find out everything about an aircraft owner by simply seeing the number on their tail.

The rich guys obfuscate that info with shell corps to own the aircraft.

Shouldn't everyone have the right to the same level of privacy regardless of how much money they have?

No you cannot. You cannot easily find someone's address from looking at their plate. You need more information, or to do some advanced searching. It is simply not the same.

It is different because you typically need to know the municipality I live in first.

Also the registration allows anyone to track me anytime I fly.

How would you feel if you had a public gps transponder on your car publicly showing who you, where you are, and where you live? Also what if you are required to plaster that registration number on the side of your vehicle in large letters that can be seen from a block away?

It's a massive invasion of personal privacy.

Shitposters ride for free

This is actually most helpful to the little guys that own $20,000 airplanes.

I have a small airplane and it's always bothered me that my name and address are publicly accessible through the FAA registry.

Most pilots I know are careful about photos they publish online showing their tail number printed in large bold letters on either side of the aircraft. This registration number can be entered into websites like flightaware.com and someone is literally two clicks from seeing my full name and home address.

Definitely, but I was more referring to this recent bout.

This is simply false.

The Houthis are not a state. There are a rebel faction in a civil war in Yemen.

Even if it were the Yemen government banning ships from it's waters it's can't do that by international law. They don't own the whole strait.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bab-el-Mandeb

Lastly, a UN resolution passed that outlaws this behavior.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_2722

The US and international allies have been frequently attacking Houthi rebels since January 2024.

There were even memes about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

I never said the attack itself was justified. I only answered the question.

A more targeted strike was possible, and it's reprehensible that one was not chosen.

The target himself was a legal target even by the most strict interpretation of armed conflict international law.

A targeted strike was absolutely possible. So many innocents did not need to die.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cedle6je601o.amp

Unfortunately it's always been the case for as long as humans have had war that the civilian casualty ratio is around 50% to 90%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio

Edit: Apparently the 90% figure is a myth. According to the wiki it's much more likely to be 50% to 60%.

Are you actually asking?

The Houthi's are an Iranian controlled terrorist organization that have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea since November 2023.

The Houthis have sunk two vessels and killed four crew members, forcing a lot of shipping to Europe to be diverted around the South of Africa.

The US and allies have been fighting the Iranian-backed Houthis for over a decade, this is just a recent resurgence following the war in Israel.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67614911.amp

Sell it to whom, Ben?

Well, OpenAI has clearly scraped everything that is scrap-able on the internet. Copyrights be damned. I haven't actually used Deep seek very much to make a strong analysis, but I suspect Sam is just mad they got beat at their own game.

The real innovation that isn't commonly talked about is the invention of Multihead Latent Attention (MLA), which is what drives the dramatic performance increases in both memory (59x) and computation (6x) efficiency. It's an absolute game changer and I'm surprised OpenAI has released their own MLA model yet.

While on the subject of stealing data, I have been of the strong opinion that there is no such thing as copyright when it comes to training data. Humans learn by example and all works are derivative of those that came before, at least to some degree. This, if humans can't be accused of using copyrighted text to learn how to write, then AI shouldn't either. Just my hot take that I know is controversial outside of academic circles.

Yah, I'm an AI researcher and with the weights released for deep seek anybody can run an enterprise level AI assistant. To run the full model natively, it does require $100k in GPUs, but if one had that hardware it could easily be fine-tuned with something like LoRA for almost any application. Then that model can be distilled and quantized to run on gaming GPUs.

It's really not that big of a barrier. Yes, $100k in hardware is, but from a non-profit entity perspective that is peanuts.

Also adding a vision encoder for images to deep seek would not be theoretically that difficult for the same reason. In fact, I'm working on research right now that finds GPT4o and o1 have similar vision capabilities, implying it's the same first layer vision encoder and then textual chain of thought tokens are read by subsequent layers. (This is a very recent insight as of last week by my team, so if anyone can disprove that, I would be very interested to know!)

While noble in intent, the protest itself was incredibly stupid and dangerous.

I am a pilot that flies into Hanscom Field and I remember the day of the protest. It was low ceilings, so no visibility. You don't see the runway until the last 400 feet and that 400 feet goes very quick once you pop out. The protesters chose to stand on the runway in these conditions at great peril to themselves, flight crew, and passengers.

People have been trying to get this airport shut down for years due to noise. It's very hard to convince people that homeowners (of properties worth multiple millions of dollars) who have been complaining about noise from the airport for 20 years suddenly care about the environment.

Hanscom already sees tons of jet traffic, with many landing, unloading passengers, and flying to another airport for storage (ferry flights). While there is bound to be some induced demands from hangar expansion, the runway utilization is already maxed out. There are long wait times for takeoff because of all the traffic. Aircraft are told to hold or circle to deconflict landings. Hangar expansion will reduce the number of wasteful ferry flights.

Not to mention that the area where the hangars are being built is currently a toxic waste hazard from the US Air Force. In fact, old Air Force hangars still exist on that side of the airport, but no one is allowed to go over there because of the toxic waste. This hangar expansion will clean up that toxic waste.

Ultimately most of what you have said is right.

I've worked in business acquisitions and management, and I have a minor in business from MIT Sloan; folks at the top don't need to understand the technical details, they just need to find the best people. When I run teams, I try to make sure I am dumbest person on that team. My purpose there is seeing the bigger picture and managing timelines, not getting into technical details despite my desires to.

Humorously, this whole thread is full of people upset that the CEO doesn't know about great circle paths, but that's not the reason the flight path isn't straight in this case. I'm also a pilot, and aircraft follow ATC directed high altitude routes that generally follow great circle paths over long distances, but tend to be jagged along the way. This is one of my flights from [Boston to DC(https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/ab38ea61-4a85-44d1-a916-b1d8fd44084a.jpeg).

Where I can agree with the vitriol of every commenter, is that this CEO is being very dumb presenting the question to the internet and that along might be a sign they are not fit for the job.

I do wish I could find communities with more even-handed discussion. These ideological hell cages make me never want to comment which hurts Lemmy over all. There just doesn't seem to be nuanced discussion on the internet anymore.

Why are people upset over a $109,000 contract from the DoD. That’s literally less than a rounding error. The DoD puts interns in charge of more money than that.

$109,000 is not even enough to pay for 50% of a single contract employee’s time (the going rate is $250k-300k per head). This article is just outrage for the sake of outrage. Don’t embarrass yourself by even bringing this up in a conversation with someone.

I’m honestly more impressed the DoD found someone to write a contract for this low of a value. Hell, the total cost of the FOIA request was probably more after all the bureaucracy it went through.

Except not, because only piston aircraft use leaded fuel. Turboprops and Jet Turbines use Jet Fuel which does not use lead.