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A video posted in another thread says the segments are sealed with bulkheads, floated into position, submerged by allowing water into a ballast section, dropped into place , aligned with pins, drawn to the next segment with hydraulic jacks, and sealed to it with rubber gaskets. Then the bulkheads can be removed. The gaskets also allow for some thermal expansion.

I'm curious what the lifetime of those gaskets might be and how you might maintain them.


They are GINA gaskets[0], they were supposed to last 120 years[1], but it has recently been shown that they may deteriorate faster than previously expected due to being under constant compression[2][3]

[0] https://www.trelleborg.com/en/marine-and-infrastructure/medi...

[1] https://www.trelleborg.com/marine-and-infrastructure/-/media...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08867...

[3] https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/03/rubber-used-in-undersea-tunn...


Interesting! The spec sheet actually says 170 years but maybe they add some safety factor.

https://www.trelleborg.com/marine-and-infrastructure/-/media...


The "ballast sections" may act as bilges, so that any leaks will accumulate there and can be pumped out. 100% water-tightness is not essential. Occasional re-grouting/caulking of the joints may be good enough.

I figure once you join them, you could also apply waterproofing to the outside as well, no?

Maybe. What would that look like, adding more gaskets on the outside? That sounds even harder to maintain since the only way to get access is diving.

Some kind of goop that would get very slowly squeezed into gaps by water pressure ?

Sealing is really not that difficult if you have access to the high pressure side. The hard part is identifying the location of the leak. In sum, this means that they have to absolutely nail it, on the first attempt, for the bottom part that is resting on the sea floor. If they can to that, the rest of the circumference will also be so good they don't have to even think about fixability.

The sections are laid in a trench and covered by sediment. There's not going to be any routine maintenance by divers.

Lost? No, they shoveled search into the furnace day after day as they prioritized sewage like paid results, link farms, and blog spam while burying the actual result far below, if returned at all. LLM showed up and gave you the direct answer you wanted in <1s; you don't even have to read the shitty troll result page.

What if the whole point of the war was planned to generate trading opportunities? Every crazy tweet or announcement another cash out.

It's like every time you see a poorly run business and you think, how can they stay open? The answer is it's usually a laundering operation, a tax shelter, and who knows what else. The message to us poors is, nothing these people do is as it appears; there's always a bunch of stacked, leveraged advantages.

https://newrepublic.com/post/192244/trump-celebrates-destroy...


Heard of the documentary, "Everything is a Rich Man's trick"? It's quite eye opening, and makes this similar conclusion with evidence pointing to the Rich Men through history. Highly recommend a watch.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. If you look at effects of geopolitical events and who profits and loses, rather than stated intentions. This global oil crisis, the Ukraine crisis, tariffs ect. It's the equivalent of the "the purpose of the system is what it does".

Oil crisis: Trumps friends profit on insider info, US oil industry (also his friends) profits, Russia profits because they are another big oil producer, USD dominance is harmed (also helps Russia), everyone else in the world eats the costs

Ukraine: Russia bleeds, Ukraine bleeds, arms industry profits, politicians in general get something to grandstand on in front of the voters. Personally I believe that this conflict has been artificially prolonged just to amplify the effects

Tariffs: US public eats the costs, Trump profits politically by appearing strong, Trumps friends profit on insider info


Tarriffs: SOP is to take away something in an outrageous amount and manner, then sell it back to the victim. It's basically state extortion.

While I don't think trump and co are smart enough to plan big stuff like this, I think it is pretty obvious they are trying to benefit oil companies and I have no doubt oil companies were involved in the decision to bomb Iran to some degree.

What I mean is Trump and Co probably spoke to oil execs before making the Iran decision to ask if they would raise production. Then they lied and said yes, while knowing they would drag their feet as prices rose.

Trump is a stoog. The folks around him treat him like an idiot. There's no way they weren't involved here. They've been around his entire presidency.


How much friction loss do you get going through a transmission compared to direct drive?

Very few / almost no EVs are direct drive. The industry-standard layout is an integrated package of transverse motor with two-stage reduction and final drive, giving something like in the general vicinity of a 10:1 overall ratio (longer ratios are directionally more efficient, while shorter ratios are usually more cost-efficient). That's the ballpark of 2nd gear in many cars (final drive 3-4:1, 2nd gear often around 2-3:1).

So if you mount just the electric motor from an EV (insofar as it exists as a separable part) to a manual gearbox and weld that into 2nd gear you have something which broadly matches the design envelope of that motor. You could reduce gearbox losses by also removing the now unneeded but still idling gears.


Negligible. Roll the windows up if you want that range back.

I still think it's dumb and they should package it to replace the transmission and stuff all the batteries where the engine would go.

It would be "easy" to make the motor replace the bellhousing and midsection of a 4L80 and then simply provide the same output so you can stick whatever tailhousing you want on it. Put shifter on the side in the same spot, etc, etc. Could've packaged the batteries to fit in the same place as a SBC longblock.

I can't really come up with a "good" reason they did it the way they did. The problems the transmission solves are pretty trivial. Like either replace the engine so it can work with "any" transmission that can handle the torque (i.e. most of them) or replace the transmission too. Don't replace the engine and then mandate a particular trans. The only reason I can see to do that is if it's some sort of wink and nod deal where they know that it's easy to make it work with other transmissions but they're not touting it as compatible to cover their asses.


I'm not sure a direct drive is possible with EV conversions. You still need to match effective RPM range with diffs. And replacing transmission with a simpler specialized diff would cost much, much more than just using the existing transmission in place.

Most 2wd drivetrains lose between 15-20% of the power. But that includes the driveshaft, differential, and axle as well.

Sure, local models good and yes, there's no way we can trust Google.

We can be positive the entire motivation of Chrome is user behavior surveillance. There's not a nano-chance in all the multiverses that Chrome model is doing anything privately. They've gone to extraordinary length to accomplish this. It's not for free.


It is entirely about user surveillance as well as pushing their product on to their users because they have the install base. Google Chrome has become Microsoft IE6 in hostile user behavior.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.

What did we expect when they dropped "don't be evil" from their company values?


A claim about as useful then as it is now. They never wanted to be anything but, once Sergei left. The Schmidt era had them publicly declare one thing while doing something else entirely behind the curtain.

They were corporate evil from day 1. The rest was just PR slogans, and playing the good guy as long as you don't need to squeeze profits.

If Google were focused on surveillance, why haven't they been collecting keystroke data (like grammarly) for years?

Isn’t it really “pushing a feature to their products”?

Not when you are appropriating 2GB or more of space for that feature.

I don't trust them either, but the same Google makes Gemma 4 available to run as locally and privately as you want, and those models are pretty amazing for their size.

Both can be true: they give a nice local model so you find it useful AND the chrome harness captures every token in and out for exfiltration.

LLMs are costing Google a ton of money in compute and storage right now. If they can farm any of that off to the users, it makes economical sense.

But yes, there is a 100% chance that logs will get sent back to Google too.


> farm

Ooh, this is interesting. There's nothing stopping them from sending jobs down to local machines. That's some 3 billion nodes. We went through this with coin mining and spam botting.

Nothing stopping it except your ire if it's discovered.


This. I feel like there should be a developer uptime index that measures these things that we use every work hour.

And it should not depend on their status page which seems to take a while to catch up when there's an actual outage.


https://isgithubcooked.com/?services=api-requests.actions.gi...

You can pick whichever services you feel fall into this category in the top.

For the bundle I chose, there have only been 3 totally clean weeks so far in 2026 :/


Interesting paper that generalizes "Lilliputian Hallucinations" a little to other contexts:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Lilliputian-Hallucinat...


EUV lithography is the state of the art. It makes far denser chips and is quite out of reach for the backyard fellow. Find a documentary on how ASML machines work: they're near the pinnacle of human accomplishment!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph...


How many of the disappearances were defections?


The term is sanewashing.

None of this kleptocracy is normal, or sane, or acceptable.


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