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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Only 4% of marketers overall think X ads provide “brand safety” — certainty that their ads won’t appear alongside extreme content —

    The 4% may represent lumpy pillow manufacturers, sellers of freeze dried survival food, random cryptocurrency products, and Trump 2024 flag/tshirt providers.

    The spokesperson added that X’s “brand safety rate is on average 99%, as validated by DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science,” companies that analyze the value of digital advertising placements.

    “But that 1% remaining will have your products featured next to ads denying the holocaust, hate speech against LGBTQ+ communities, and ads discrediting proven science in favor of, oh I don’t know, phrenology or something” -the spokesperson probably


  • I thought exactly the same thing. If they’re not a 3D printed rocket company then they’re just another of a field of rocket companies? Why would a customer choose them. The article enlightened me to who:

    In a private letter to “investors, advisors, and friends” summarizing the company’s operations after the first half of 2024, Relativity said it currently has a backlog of $2.6 billion in commercial launches and is in discussion or has signed a contract with many major megaconstellation providers (but not SpaceX). Ellis would not confirm this, but multiple people have told Ars that Relativity recently signed a deal for multiple launches with Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation.

    There is at least $2.6 billion worth of customer that wants a SpaceX like launch product, but is unwilling to buy from an Elon Musk company. With how toxic Musk’s behavior is these days, I could see that customer market growing. The US government is putting LOTS of payloads into orbit in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 because there’s nothing even close to it in price and performance. If Relativity can even get close to Falcon 9, they’ll almost certainly pick up a large chunk of US payload contracts as the government doesn’t like to have a single supplier for nation security reasons.


  • To people joining this thread later asking where a commercial product of this is, or pointing out that 10% solar efficiency is way below other existing products, you’re missing the point.

    This is basic research to prove one single aspect of solar panel construction. That question apparently was: “We currently know that PET backsheets work for solar panels, but can we use a different material which may have less CO2 impact and still produce a working solar panel?” The answer being “yes”. That is a big step that other people doing other research and product development can build on. It may be years (or never!) that a product comes to market with sisal fiber backsheets, but the answers from the work done here are integrated into the body of knowledge that will produce the next improvement in solar panels.


  • California announces that the policy is going to expire. People who paid more and had an expectation of never-ending special road access are angry.

    This is the step where your comparison to solar (at least in California) breaks down. I’m not a California resident, but from what I understand under the NEM 1 and NEM 2 rules there is NO expectation the preferential net metering will last forever. Solar customers were specifically told that putting in solar during NEM 1 would guarantee those terms for 20 years from install date. Same thing for NEM 2, the rules would apply for 20 years from the install date. After the 20 year period, you’d be subject to whatever net meter would be offered to new customers, which could be none. source

    What this proposition proposes is cutting that 20 years to 10 years from install date:

    "Convert NEM 1.0 and 2.0 accounts to the NBT either upon sale of a home or after 10 years of interconnection. " source

    So customers that took a large financial risk installing solar that are coming out ahead may now have the deal shifted out of their favor. How is that fair to the solar customers? Worse, the knock on effect will destroy the trust in state government incentives in the future. Why would any citizen risk a long term outlay based on policy if the state government may decide one day they don’t want to hold up their end of the deal anymore?




  • Which is why hydrogen is so interesting to me, especially solar-generated hydrogen. It’s a pain to store, but if it’s used relatively quickly, the losses should be small enough to make it worthwhile.

    The pain with hydrogen storage isn’t just leakage (which is a huge problem because of how small the molecule is), but energy density. Gaseous hydrogen needs either extremely large containers or really extreme pressures (meaning thick, heavy, expensive) and even then its not very much energy storage. To get even higher density requires liquification, which means which is only reached at −253°C (−423°F), and that also requires large expensive machinery and energy to run it.

    Unless you’re changing hydrogen into something else (like ammonia), hydrogen isn’t a great solution for energy storage or transportation.





  • I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable

    Perhaps you were too young to understand who these people were:

    • Bill Gates dominated the PC world with aggressive business tactics and vendor lock in.
    • Larry Ellison bought up his competitors and jack up prices on databsae products owning the industry for more than a decade.
    • Steve Jobs lied and cheated his investors, his family, and his closest friends to benefit himself.

    Tom was a good guy, but possibly because he took his fortune and left tech. There were very few admirable leaders.



  • I don’t know why they said this — they really aren’t a viable alternative for weight-sensitive contexts at all. Their density is only abut 60% that of Li-ion batteries, and that isn’t even getting into solid-state Li batteries which are even more dense. If weight isn’t an issue, like for home or grid backup storage, they’re fine. For cars or bikes, not so much.

    Your explanation is valid for vehicles that have 100% of their battery be something other than Sodium based, and also have a use case that requires long or intermediate range. That isn’t all use cases. Vehicles that drive a lot, but never cover much distance would still be valid use cases for 100% sodium. 100% Sodium Ion powered EVs started rolling off assembly lines in Dec of 2023. Alternatively 100% Sodium Ion could also be for things like fork lifts or Semi trucks that move storage containers from a cargo ship to a storage location within a mile and repeat this trip dozens of times a day.

    Other use cases would be where a car has some sodium batteries and some lithium based ones. The sodium batteries could serve most of the “wear and tear” of short trips, with a second smaller lithium back available to augment overall range which is not used as often.





  • This seems like the critical parts:

    One big problem is that TSMC has been trying to do things the Taiwanese way, even in the U.S. In Taiwan, TSMC is known for extremely rigorous working conditions, including 12-hour work days that extend into the weekends and calling employees into work in the middle of the night for emergencies. TSMC managers in Taiwan are also known to use harsh treatment and threaten workers with being fired for relatively minor failures.

    …and …

    If TSMC is going to succeed with its Arizona chip-making venture, it needs to come to terms with the fact that it’s not the only game in town there. While TSMC is considered by many in Taiwan as the pinnacle of engineering jobs, other companies in Arizona are competing for that labor pool. Intel, in particular, is expanding its Arizona chip factory.

    So TSMC wants to abuse workers …and there’s another local alternative employer in the exact same specialty field that won’t do that.



  • The issue is MV2 made it way too easy for malicious browser extensions to do bad things, like read the content of every page you visit. MV3 makes it much harder for malicious browser extensions to do these things, but makes it harder to do things like intercept network requests.

    Then allow a savvy user to choose to keep MV2 mode via an opt-in control instead of depreciating years of hard work by non-malicious extension authors. uBlock Origin is, in fact, the ONLY browser extension I use in Chrome, as Firefox is my main browser.