I'm sorry, but when you look at the current administration, are the people at the top people who scream to you "I reached my position because of my competence and skill"? It is the crowd that's constantly screaming about "DEI" that has been the most obsessed with promoting people based on appearance and personality over any actual competence whatsoever in the fields they're being put in charge of.

And for the record, the guy who led the X mob against this person - Nathan Cofnas - has stated that beyond "whistleblowing", his motivation is that Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'. Are these the sort of people whose side you want to be on?

Problem is China needs the US to buy their goods almost as much as the US needs to buy their goods. Refusing to sell to the US isn't really an option for China. Anyway it's certainly not an easy thing for China to do.

Also, people think they're so clever when they do this, when they generally don't actually work with modern models anyway. It just makes you look manipulative and unprofessional.

Hmm that sounds familiar. Seems to work for Trump, so it should work for everyone else, right? Anything goes now. Heck he's still trying to put his name back on the Kennedy Center even though only an act of Congress can do that, and he's still trying to get his way regarding birthright citizenship even though the supreme court told him straight up it wasn't constitutional. If Trump can make a mockery of the whole system, then what this guy did is perfectly fine.

It's over an order of magnitude heavier than the largest of those (Helios).

There's a difference between an aircraft being built to lift itself and perhaps a tiny payload and be paperlight vs. an aircraft designed for actual commercial service carrying passengers.

The feet are needed to accelerate the plane to takeoff velocities in order to conserve battery mass.

Also, the big AI companies get a number of advantages, such as large batch sizes and being able to balance on-peak and off-peak workloads better.

Is most of your daily driving "a race"?

This is a midrange model. This is competitive midrange pricing. For my midrange work I've been using GLM-5.2 - Gemini 3.7 flash is a bit cheaper and a bit better on the benchmarks, so yeah, I'll probably switch so long as the prices stay low.

Sometimes you need a high-end model (Claude Fable, GPT 5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, etc). Sometimes a low-end model is fine (GPT 5.6 Luna, DeepSeek 4 Flash 0731, etc). Usually a midrange model is the best balance.

That was the peak during the test flight yes. Cruise would be considerably higher, probably comparable to other prop planes.

No it couldn't be used for crop dusting. It's simply not designed for that. This is geared towards short hop passenger service.

There are to be three variants of the ES-300: an all-electric 200km version, a hybrid 30-seat 400km version, and a hybrid 25-seat 800km version. And the ES-300 airframe very much is not some existing airframe.

EV fires are rarer than ICE fires (and slower spreading as well), so given that the competition is fuel-based....

It is a perfectly cromulent statement. 1MW = power, $5 = a cost of energy. They are providing both power and (indirectly) energy.

They didn't bother to install a co-pilot, a seat for the co-pilot, passengers, seats for the passengers, the hybrid gen set as you say, fuel for the gen set, and who knows if they installed a full production sized battery or just a smaller one

Are you just learning about the concept of a prototype in this comments section?

That's not correct. There are three modes. All-electric, hybrid-30 passenger, and hybrid-25 passenger, with ranges of 200km, 400km, and 800km, respectively. The airframe is to be certified for 20k feet (FL200), with optimal cruise altitudes from 10-15k feet, but this was explicitly described by the company as a "low-altitude test flight".

And to all the people going, "LOL, that's never going to cross the Pacific!" or similar range comments... and? Long haul flights (over 4000km) are only 5% of commercial flights. Very short / regional flights are 27% of total flights. There's very much a market for puddle jumpers, and airlines very much will buy them if they offer competitive advantages.

They obviously don't speak as precisely as we would like. But I read it completely differently than you did. Maximum power is 1 MW, which is comparable to a twin otter that has with two engines. Same ballpark. Cruising power would be considerably less. Total energy consumed was not stated, other than the equivalent in electricity costs.