This helium crisis is nothing new. It's now 20 years since I wrote a column titled The looming helium crisis and little has changed.

The local teleco switched to Fiber. I get 2Gbps up/down. + phone for $80 a month. I had Comcast Business for $200 a month, I had a 3 year contract for 160 the first year, then 180, then 200. Except it didn't stay that consistent. Their fees increased. the contracted base amount stayed the same.

So I'm saving 140 a month now. i may drop the phone and save another 30. And my speeds are better. So far I haven't had any issues.with reliability. 2 months of service, it's been up while I needed it.

I can't say that for Comcast either. Even on a business account, I had regular outages.

The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.

The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.

A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.

I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.

What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.

PT Barnum was so right.

And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".

It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them :-)

No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.

I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"

Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?

Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.

The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.

If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".

I'm still using Steam. Gabe hasn't done anything to abuse my trust.

now that's a throwback!

I thought it was US waste being our team who is monitoring it.

Exactly. That's all I've been doing lately. New Project, Start feeding Claude Code the notes. Build up the memory. Spec time comes, use him as a rubber duck, walking thru the whole process, we document everything first. I get a MD file, convert to a docx for the users, and submit. It's a good starting point, my ideas + boiler plate stuff from Claude. I could just give it to him to code out as well at this point, but I still need to go thru a review, and then there are contractors that need work....

So far this process has worked pretty well with me. There's still design in there. Like I'm the director telling the actors what we want, and then the giving the control over to them to interpret. What is nice though is I can ask if something is possible to do, and Claude can usually find out. It gives me starting options at least.

Just waiting for Rust#

Indeed. I built a Raspberry Pi Pico based controller for some flashing LEDs on my drone. It has red and blue LEDs and I wanted them to flash with the cycle of three short flashes then a pause; alternately the red LEDs then the blue LEDS. Took barely a minute to code that in python and dump it onto the board. In such cases it doesn't matter that the language is interpreted because the task is not demanding of the hardware.

The "Police Drone" still flies to this day! :-)

How interesting it would be to do a drive-around with an open wifi hotspot in the car -- just to see how many LG TV sets try to connect and find out what data they send.

Just saying, for a friend :)

Yes... we could destroy Putin's nuclear torpedo before it even made it to the UK coast! :-P