JohanByttner's comments

I agree that VR got a bit hyped. AM, however, is alive and well. The biggest issues are cost and time - AM takes a long time and requires an expensive machine. Thus you can print super-intricate structural parts of an airplane, but not brake pedals for common cars.

3D printers aren't material reassemblers. They replace milling and lathing when those methods take a day or more per part. You won't see it in your cupboard but rather a flight engineer might use it.

I second this. I'm part of an university team building a racecar and we mostly use additive manufacturing for carbon fibre parts that are difficult to lay by hands, such as the intake and certain wings. For this we just need basic polymers. It's a cost issue.

However, this year we are starting to build functional components. We are looking at printing the brake cooling ducts - they need to survive 200 C and 400 bar.

Some better funded teams print their uprights (the part joining the wheels to the frame) in titanium (https://www.reddit.com/r/FSAE/comments/6acr6d/amazing_additi...). The part is strengthened by annealing it.

The biggest problem in AM right now that I hear about is "how do we scale up"? Batches are very small and take a long time - to be truly useful, one needs to print a part in minutes, not days.

42 is from Douglas Adams, the answer to the question of life and all that.

I do t know about the age limit, but it might be some (possibly faulty) reasoning about commitment. Staff have been tight-lipped. We have some people from the Pole Emploi (unemployment agency) here at the moment, and they are a bit older, so some kind of trial is underway.

From what the staff have told us in Paris, 42 isn't approved by the authorities, so they cannot use the official channels to offer visa sponsorships.

Some students sign up for language courses so they can attend. Sad, but not much that can be done at the moment.

There is something similar called NMITE, which is run by a few universities.

If you want a 42-like school, speak with your local MP. 42 is run on a budget of €7m (approximately) per year, and it would be very affordable if the government got behind it with a Royal Charter.

This course is not a bootcamp. It is a substitute for an undergraduate degree and it is intended to give you a similar width and depth of knowledge (undergraduate degrees in Europe are three years). In France there are very few schools teaching computer science to a very high standard (Grade Ecoles teach engineering) and 42 has the ambition to educate the best computer scientists in France. Thumbing on the years makes that impossible.

You can go to community college; that is a legitimate choice; but 42 teaches you in a different way, one which 42 argues is more suitable for learning than classroom hours and lectures. And you miss out on some of that ambition.