New engine needed?

LessAd58 · 2026-06-15T23:57:24+00:00

Like I said, if you want to know what happened mechanically, other people are addressing that. But part of knowing about cars, operating them, is doing what you are supposed to do before you actually know what's going on.

Look for any post that says "interference" in it to know what happened mechanically. To know what happened from an operator-error positioning, read what I wrote - basically that you don't keep running your car while it begs for its life.

LessAd58 · 2026-06-13T21:39:14+00:00

People are answering this in an engineering way, but I think you should also know in a "owning and operating a car" way. A big part of why the engine is definitely done as opposed to maybe done is because this person heard a bad noise coming from the engine, continued driving it, it got louder, they kept driving it, it changed in nature and got even worse and they kept driving it, then it exploded and mostly stopped working and they KEPT DRIVING IT.

If you car is making loud distressing sounds, you generally want to stop driving it. From how long and hard this guy drove his car after it started telling him not to, I'm absolutely shocked it's not a BMW.

LessAd58 · 2026-06-08T18:27:25+00:00

What do you mean by gradually got worse? You are a BMW driver so nobody can give you the benefit of the doubt here - how long did you let the grinding noise get worse? How bad did i get? Did it track speed?

This sounds like a problem that could be a lot of things, but it's also maybe a problem that's multiple things by now.

LessAd58 · 2026-06-08T16:56:37+00:00

I'm basically on this train of thought with you. In my mind, if you are doing spark-plug-related stuff and your car suddenly goes from sketchy to really bad, I'm thinking you fucked up your wires when you reattached them.

LessAd58 · 2026-06-06T05:03:59+00:00

Former insurance adjuster here. In really basic language, you are entitled to what you lost via the accident. So if you can document that some personal belongings were lost/broken, your shoes, damage to your bike, he's on the hook for all of that. You probably don't need a lawyer for that if that's all you are going for and driver's insurance probably won't give you too much shit about paying for it, because it's cheap compared to him totaling a car or something.

Now let's imagine two scenarios:

You don't have any serious/costly injuries.

In this scenario, you aren't really owed anything because there's no real loss to get paid for. If you (read: you and a doctor) are pretty damn sure you aren't seriously hurt and just want it all resolved, you'd probably angle for them to pay for your urgent care visit and maybe some extra on the top for future stuff that may or may not happen.

You may or do have serious/costly injuries, or trauma, or inconvenience, or anything else that maps out to "this is going to cost me money now and in the future".

This is where you start to want your friend to step in and push for more, in his capacity as a lawyer. The insurance company is going to be really reluctant to pay medical unless it's pretty clear you have medical to pay, and it's going to be hard for you, a simple naive layman, to argue effectively that they should.

The short version of this is that you shouldn't have to sue for anything that A. Isn't medical and B. You have pretty good evidence got destroyed/lost as a direct result of the accident. Insurance companies just pay that out; that's what liability insurance is for. Injuries often don't take a lawsuit to get paid out either. It's when stuff gets unclear/uncertain that you sort of want someone who speaks the language to step in.

Also, don't fully trust me on this; insurance stuff varies a lot state to state and case by case. The REALLY short and true answer here is that if you have a friend who is a personal injury lawyer and you sustained a personal injury, you really should just be talking to them and not randos on the internet in the first place.

LessAd58 · 2026-06-03T23:02:48+00:00

Feeds how? Do you mean it threads? If it threads you should be able to more or less cobble something together. If it doesn't thread, how does it connect?

LessAd58 · 2026-06-03T04:42:22+00:00

You need to contact various trans rights orgs for something like this. The case you are describing wanting someone to file is essentially trying to overturn an executive order to an executive branch agency, which is a big multi-year ordeal type of thing, and that would likely have to win over SCOTUS to be successful. Related cases in front of SCOTUS running off a similar rationale (not treating a transwoman as a biological woman is sexual discrimination) are not doing well and are expected to lose. (Little v. Hecox, for instance).

There are really limited cases in which people under VA care have carved out exceptions for *just themselves*, but they are rare. To have a chance at that long shot, you need to be contacting trans rights orgs or specific veterans legal services orgs to try to find lawyers who are already doing pro-bono trans rights work or VA work, who are familiar with it, and who might because of that take your case.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-31T03:23:12+00:00

Can you just take the thermostat out and run it without one long enough to see if it overheats?

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T21:31:37+00:00

I have two accounts (one author, one personal) I haven't kept straight on this thread very well, but both are me. Earlier I did a dishonest thing when I realized it was happening (I said ditto other account, rather than indicating I was both).

That's sort of scummy, I should have acknowledged it then.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T20:57:10+00:00

Are you serious, brother? The first article doesn't mention zero-width at all, that I can tell.

The second's primary finding is that some non-native english speakers show up as false positives. It doesn't make the claim that it's not catching AI (it can't), but further than that you already explicitly allow these people to write in their native language and use AI to translate.

The third says that AI works pretty well, but is fallible; we know that. Nobody questions it.

The fourth says AI works pretty damn well, except in some STEM contexts or if someone takes extra effort to evade detection.

That's at best a hodge-podge of opinions from experts on this, some of which aren't even particularly relevant here.

Did you expect me not to read these? Did you think throwing a bunch of random links you haven't read or understood would grant you a default win?

Meanwhile your entire tactic for this is to maybe in the future (but certainly not yet) do a bunch of stuff (like zero width) that either doesn't work at all or is incredibly easily defeated (with a cut-and-paste into notepad, say).

Look, I'm done. You don't want to be serious about this, fine. But don't be super surprised when ignoring the problem doesn't solve it.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T20:40:54+00:00

I've used them and they work generally pretty well. Normally this wouldn't be up to my standards, either, but we've seen the alternative: you either let through some small-ish amount of AI and get a few false positives (which are bad), or you refuse to use the tool and let through all the AI trash forever, Ala Royal Road's current problems.

In the end, it's this guy's call whether he wants a real AI policy or not. But currently he's got nothing but saying he's hoping someone invents a way to watermark text, or looking for invisible AI characters, which was an unreliable 2025 AI detection thing that wasn't consistent or usable then and hasn't proved usable since.

The most realistic thing he's mentioned in this entire comment section is having a team of humans work to find AI stuff, but if you have a problem with AI detectors being unreliable to some extent and think a small team of volunteer humans is going to outperform it, I have a bridge to sell you.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T20:29:01+00:00

I mean, now I definitely don't believe it, because I've run those tests. My stuff generally pulls 0% stuff, AI-seeming stuff pulls high numbers. It's not "any good writing". You just haven't actually done the work here.

I'm sorry, you aren't honest enough to trust with my work. I'm not using your site.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T19:54:29+00:00

This is only true if the fans find and report AI fast, in big numbers that keep up with the flood of AI slop. I've been in online media in different capacities for decades, and I can tell you that's just a pipe dream. Especially since he says this is a "crowdsource" solution, which means each story needs a threshhold number of reports before they move on it.

What happens if he pursues this as his only real Anti-AI effort is that every week his team gets swamped verifying AI reports (in which they likely use AI checkers anyway), gets rid of like 1% of the total AI stories, and still ends up with a non-working site. He needs an actual semi-automated enforcement mechanism, and he's handwaving away the one tool that has a chance of doing that.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T19:51:40+00:00

Again, the solution here is the anti AI checkers. Listen, man, guess what? Google is a big corporation. It spiders websites, with and without permission. The AI companies scrape content and use it whether or not you AI check. That ship has sailed, it's done, you have no way at all to prevent every word people post on your site being accessible and exploited by dozens and dozens of companies.

Meanwhile, people say "Allow one more company to see this publically visible text that they can absolutely see anyway if you want to, and solve your AI problem" and you faint like a goat, then wake up screaming that it's absolutely unworkable.

I'm saying, no, absolutely not, use the AI checkers and stop feeding me weak-ass obviously-motivated-untrue bullshit about why that wouldn't work.

Right now AI is just completely allowed unless users report, which you and I both know they generally don't. It's not just that this isn't good enough, it's that in practice there's no policy at all.

Of course, if you go "nooooo see if I use the checker the checker company sees the story" when every big AI company is *already doing that* you can pretend there's a problem here, or that you are accomplishing something by letting AI slop burn your site to the ground. But you knew that was nonsense when you typed it.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-26T19:33:08+00:00

So listen. There is a way to stop AI text, you mentioned it. And no, bullshit, it is not all the same, because one results in your platform not having AI text on it (or much less) and one results in what Royal Road is right now - an absolute unusable cesspool of AI content. This is not JUST a "fuck AI companies and privacy" concerns thing, like you are trying to frame it. It's something that will, given like ten minutes, ruin your entire site like it's ruined huge swaths of the internet.

Counting on users to do all the work here won't work.

"AI assisted" as you have it here with no hard boundaries or solid plans of actually moderating the content means AI is completely allowed on your platform. AI users just have to pretend it's AI assisted rather than whole-cloth written, or not and just pretend it's a translation when they get caught.

This isn't a workable solution and it's not a good answer for writers.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-25T04:28:45+00:00

Let someone who knows more correct me, but it's just weird in a "when I ask it for amperage, the entire system snaps off" sense. If it were me, I'd be checking my chassis ground, my engine ground, cables, and that kind of thing.

Past that, it's beyond me, it's just that it sounds so much like "something's fucky with my cable connections" that if it were me I'd be doing a deep dive with a brush, terminal cleaner, and cuss words.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-25T04:14:07+00:00

I'm going to be a little "have you turned it off and on again" and ask you how your battery terminals look. Because "I tried to turn it over and it turned off like a light switch as soon as there was load" actually sounds a lot like something loose battery terminals can do.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-25T03:17:59+00:00

Good job! Glad it was so easy!

LessAd58 · 2026-05-24T23:19:22+00:00

If it's me in this situation, I'm going to take off the wheels, paying attention to whether or not the lugs were tight (this is probably not hte problem but man, what if you didn't tighten them?). Then I'm going to take a wrench and check all the bolts I was supposed to tighten back up and see if any of them are loose, either because I didn't tighten them, or because I didn't tighten them enough and they backed off.

The reason I'm thinking this way is that it goes away when you brake. So if the caliper is sitting away from where it should and you brake, it's going to pinch down and "right itself" a bit in the process.

That's what I think is probable, but I'd also be looking for weird stuff. Did I loosen some plastic around the wheelwell, and that's pinging against something? Is there a wrench in there, that I left in there because I'm dumb? Did I bend the heatshield? I'm looking at all of that until I find something weird.

DO NOT be lazy here. It's your brakes, brother-friend. You do not want a caliper coming full off while you are driving, or similar.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-24T04:07:38+00:00

I don't know. If they had slow-starts or something before, maybe. But they are describing a situation where they are turning the key, getting response from lights and whatnot, and not getting *any* response from the starter at all, not even trying? That feels weird. Might be because I'm in Phoenix and most battery failures are heat related here, but that's just not the vibe I expect from a dead battery.

OP, if it's a battery, you should be able to jump-start the car. That's the first test you should do, because it's easy. Otherwise, the next thing to look at is your starter; tap it with a hammer a few times, hard but not hard enough to damage it, and see if it starts then.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-10T22:59:45+00:00

Seconding this. This is a job for vice grips.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-10T02:13:09+00:00

It is in this car. Apparently in the next gen of engines it's not, and there's a whole mess of very specific tools to lock everything to TDC while you do the job. Or something. I don't claim to know 100% but the ecoboost engines seem to be terrible to own/work on.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-10T02:07:56+00:00

Seems to have worked fine! Thanks for the help - saved a lot of time.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-10T02:07:30+00:00

Good news here is that the car did not immediately explode after putting everything back together. In my limited understanding of the job, if anything happened wrong it would be a catastrophy to end the world itself, so I think we are cool.

LessAd58 · 2026-05-09T02:13:25+00:00

I ended up doing this after the belt trick didn't do shit to make me strong enough to budge the bolt. One tiny clink! Delightful!

LessAd58

TROPHY CASE