This seems reductionist. There's plenty of other reasons people are F1 fans: the spectacle, the wealth, the prestige. While speed is certainly a draw for a lot of fans, speed can be at odds with the some of these other traits. For instance I took my son to qualifying in Miami, and while we both thoroughly enjoyed it, qualifying is quite short, and not nearly as exciting as watching it on TV. My son's first comment was: they don't seem as fast in person.
We ended up kicking around the track for a few hours taking in all the sights and experiences and he enjoyed that a lot more.
I guess my comment is, speed is important, sure, but don't give me a plaintext website either. There's a balance between speed and entertainment value.
I thought F1 was supposed to look a lot faster in person. The cars going at 300kmph don't look so fast on a screen because the camera stabilisation. Someone who makes drones on YouTube collaborated with RedBull to shoot Max Verstappen with a drone at those speeds. And Max was impressed by the perception of speed from the drone footage compared to regular TV broadcast
your eyes/brain stabilize better than any camera/software.
Having attended f1, rally and euro hillclimb races in person, I also thought the F1 in the v8/v10/v12 era indeed looked slower than on TV. I think the reason is they were so scandalously loud that you would expect something visually faster from something that is ripping your ears off even with plugs.
> My son's first comment was: they don't seem as fast in person.
That was the exact opposite of my experience with autoracing. Watching on TV with the long tracking/panning shots seem to reduce the effectiveness of the speed. Standing at the track watching the cars fly by and are only there for a split second really brings home how fast they are. "zoom zoom" is about as close as one can get to describing it. There's also just no way to replicate how loud the cars are either. I've seen Fox try where they have moments where the commentators shut the hell up for a minute, they push the mix from the mics around the track, display Vu like meters on screen with some sort of Dolby/surround type of something suggesting it sounds great in that mode. Don't care. Nothing like being there.
I'd expect a long lens shooting down a series of S-curves (think: Austin) would exaggerate how fast the cars look, but everything else would seem faster in person. My first F1 race was, indeed, in Austin, and the cars seemed mind-bendingly fast. Even just the sound sent a shiver up my spine as I walked up to the track from a half mile away. But that was in the V10 era; now they're very quiet.
On the other hand, my last F1 race was at Silverstone, and we were at Vale grandstand which is right at pit entry and the final chicane before the front straight. Sitting in a braking zone definitely makes the cars look slow.
Yes! There'll be different key traits for different customers. Like you say for F1, might be speed for some, prestige for others. So perhaps you might need to focus most of your things on both, or some things on prestige and some on speed. Generally there'll be a relatively small set of truly key traits.
i rewrote a code base that i’ve been tinkering on for the last 2 years or so this weekend. a complete replatform, new tech stack, ui, infra, the whole nine yards. the rewrite took exactly 3 days, referenced the old code base, online documentation, github issues all without (mostly) ever leaving claude.
it completely blew my mind. i wrote maybe 10 lines of code manually. it’s going to eliminate jobs.
that's the part i'm not sold on yet. it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week - but every dev in every company will be able to use that tool, thus it will increase the productivity of each engineer by an equal amount. that means each company's products will get much better much faster - and it means that any company that cuts head count will be at risk of falling behind it's competitors.
i could see it getting rid of some of the infosec analysts, i guess. since itll be easier to keep a codebase up to date, the folks that run a nessus scan and cut tickets asking teams to upgrade their codebase will have less work available.
the amount isn't relevant to the argument; the point is that the amount - whatever that may be - is applied equally to all companies, which means the competitive balance will stay the same. its a great build tool, but you still need builders to use the tool.
Find My doesn't require the passerby to have connectivity _at the time it passes by_. They record where they were when they saw the lost phone, and whenever they get connectivity back, they report that to the owner.
As an amateur I always thought a “marketplace” of reference designs with criteria you could filter on (through-hole, easy to hand solder, pitch, programming, etc.) would be a great resource. You could even make an attempt at compatibility (I2C, SPI, # of GPIO pins) with certain MCUs. If something works in theory, let me pay the designer and get the schematic and footprints in KiCAD or other EDA.
As a programmer there's something that really clicks in OpenSCAD for me. I've made a few designs that are super easy to adjust/repurpose based on variables. When Thingiverse's customizer worked well (well enough), it was a great tool.
Not only that - it's kind of a flawed comparison anyway.
None of the F9 boosters are orbital vehicles, i.e. they cannot even be compared to the Space Shuttle since their only commonality is that both are rocket-powered vehicles that crossed the Karman-line.
There's simply no good point of comparison at the moment since the F9 is the first of its kind.
I was curious about the space shuttle solid rocket booster, so I looked it up...
Out of 270 SRBs launched over the Shuttle program, all but four were recovered – those from STS-4 (due to a parachute malfunction) and STS-51-L (Challenger disaster). Over 5,000 parts were refurbished for reuse after each flight. The final set of SRBs that launched STS-135 included parts that flew on 59 previous missions, including STS-1. Recovery also allowed post-flight examination of the boosters, identification of anomalies, and incremental design improvements.
It is a flawed comparison in the other way as well. The shuttles required vast amounts of refurbishment after each flight. While the thermal protection system was improved with the later shuttles, they required a lot of inspection and replacement of individual tiles, which was an enormous cost. It was also standard for the main engines (SSMEs) to be pulled out and swapped with ones that have been fully inspected. Even the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) needed to be towed back to port, disassembled, and completely refurbished for each flight.
The F9 first stage, on the other hand, typically goes through a relatively light amount of inspection and repair after each flight.
Per-flight costs for the shuttle was $1.6 billion USD (2010 dollars). A good chunk of that was refurbishment for the shuttle and the SRBs. I didn't find specific numbers in a quick Internet search.
> Per-flight costs for the shuttle was $1.6 billion USD (2010 dollars).
That was the improved cost. In the late 80s I interviewed at the contractor running shuttle ops (Lockheed missiles & space?). The head of the NASA project office told me it was close to 2.4 giga$ to turn around a shuttle and they hoped to cure that with a new prime contractor arrangement (and also fix the management problem that was the proximate cause of the Challenger disaster, but apparently only suppressed it for a time...)
Isn't that the cost of the entire space shuttle program (including R&D) divided by the number of launches? I believe the real cost of turning around a shuttle flight towards the end to the program was a fraction of this.
I wonder what the cost of a currrent spacex flight is doing this same kind of accounting. I don't suppose anyone really knows since spacex is a private company.
In some sense, the Shuttle program was in continuous development. But to give you some idea of the work involved in even the later launches, consider this:
Instead of inspecting 24,000 tiles by hand, they developed a scanner to automate the process starting with STS-118:
They had hundreds of techs, working thousands of hours per launch to get each orbiter ready. SpaceX is expending a tiny, tiny fraction of that effort to get each stage-1 booster ready for re-flight. Part of that of course is that the booster is coming back at sub-orbital speeds.
So it is more fair to compare the F9 stage-1 to the pair of SRBs used for the Shuttle. But even then, there was a lot of effort just to get the SRBs ready for re-flight.
Just because all their current flights so far have burdened them with enough payload to not achieve orbit doesn't mean they aren't perfectly capable of orbital insertion and manuevering. Don't forget they do have to do a deceleration burn once they release their upper stage; because without it they would continue on a trajectory that could easily carry it 2/3s around the world before hitting atmosphere again.
That being said you are kinda right in that they really can't be compared, considering the shuttle is more a payload with a really awkward engine arrangement and can't actually reach orbit without ditching multiple SRMs and a fuel tank larger than it is, but can actually do useful stuff once up there.
Yeah but think about the difference in cost the space shuttle alone costed almost 200 billion dollars over its 40 flights its still 5 billion dollars a flight. Now compare this to these boosted they don't include a mission module but they cost about 62 million in there first launch and following launches are only about 15 million dollars. Note to mention the pace of launches are much much faster than the space shuttle. These may not be orbital boosters but they don't have to be these costs demonstrate the mistake with space shuttle is trying to do to much. Now I cited the total cost of the space shuttle and but to say just because these boosters haven't reached 39 flights so they are a long way off is silly they did this in 2 years the space shuttles lifetime was like 40 yrs.
I don't think that comparing this booster with the STS is particularly valid. While I don't want to downplay SpaceX's very real achievement here, the STS was a much more complex and flexible platform, it was human-rated (with all the engineering overhead that that entails), it was built without the advantage of the last forty-plus years of technical development, and it was done first. All those things cost money - at the time or with hindsight.
So now it trails two orbiters less than while on the drawing board, hooray! (if we include Buran, which did make it to orbit but has even less in common with Falcon 9 because the engines of the reusable part are upper stage)
