malchow

Well-run autolabs recursively training discipline-specific models are becoming very valuable assets. I write more about this here:

https://x.com/jmalchow/status/2067298271647904061

As time goes on, the value of the model will go down and the value of the tools will go up.

For those who may have forgotten, Mattermost is quite good these days: https://mattermost.com/

What's interesting is you might not want to see de novo AI-generated storytelling (slop factor), but you might really like the way AI can make a story crafted by humans more interactive.

You can add your car to your whole-house AC bus using the Enphase bi-di EVSE, releasing this year:

https://enphase.com/ev-chargers/bidirectional

Satellite signals are just weak RF signals and can be disrupted easily. There is nothing 'hardened' about them. It's funny that people think Starlink or any of its many incipient competitors are any different.

This is an incredible foretaste of what AI can enable in gaming. Not replacing humans (the creators here are former leaders from Minecraft), but rather simply unlocking more fun gameplay by offering creativity, humor, and branched storytelling customized to the player.

I have a Tesla Model X and the front door and rear door aren't even latitudinally aligned.

In addition to bi-facials starting to work quite well, HNers may be interested in a rising class of ultra-low-mass material that has come out of work at Stanford and Intel in transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) (e.g. for MoS₂, WS₂, WSe₂, etc.).

It turns out these enable a very high specific-power PV cell that adds another even more attractive production curve behind what is happening in vertical bi-facials. See e.g.:

https://ee.stanford.edu/frederick-nitta-koosha-nassiri-nazif...

https://www.arinna.xyz/

Cells are subject to aggressive binning – akin to the early days of MOS process. And specs and process capability adhesion in the industry are not as "serious" as they are in the modern, U.S.-led semiconductor industry.

Source: I work on 100% Si anode batteries constructed in part with a litho-derived laser process at Enovix.

Practically, shorter path silicon does nice things for power budget for a few minutes, that then gets totally obliterated by feature builders wanting to do cooler things!

100% active Si material in the anode. Not 5% doping of graphite.

Sneak peek of the production process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYZZa39nvDM

Amazing.

Not for cars yet, but Enovix has short-ion-path batteries intrinsic to its lithrographed 3D design. Performance is quite something: https://www.enovix.com/products/

Arbitrary vehicle to home/home battery/grid connection is indeed coming in very short order.

https://enphase.com/ev-chargers/bidirectional

There are other products already available to do it (DCBel), and it can be hacked of course, but at the current moment everything comes with substantial corner case blind spots, mostly related to grid-forming/following switching and to the resilience of the power electronics.

You are interpreting the entire story from the perspective of the utility and ISO (which are distributors, neither a maker of energy nor a net consumer of it). They're Edison-era inventions, borne of the lumbering size, toxicity, noise, and poor capacity factor of mechanical engines.

Why don't you interpret it from the perspective of companies (which need to buy energy to do stuff) and consumers (who need to buy energy to be comfortable)? These are the actual buyers.

Then you'll see why solar and batteries win all, and utilities, with their badly potholed power highways with massive tolls to consumers, slowly reduce in importance.

You are exactly correct, and the purism represented by these Kafkaesque Wikipedians who "drive out fringe editors" will ultimately fail.

Yes, Spencer Gore is working on it:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-electric-a-start...

No, that isn't what vaporware means. Vaporware means a technology promised, but not delivered. What it doesn't mean is a technology promised, and successfully delivered, and at the beginning of its growth curve as supply of the enabling products ramp.

By your definition, solar was vaporware in 2001 because less than 1 gigawatt per year was built. But it wasn't. It was simply early in its lifecycle. Today, 1 gigawatt of solar is installed in the world every day. Next year China will likely reach 1 TW of annual solar production capacity.

This is perhaps why software people shouldn't throw around the word "vaporware" –- a useful software-industry term –– in hardware-based industries with well developed and well understood generational patterns.

I don't think you know what the word "vaporware" means.

1 GW per day of new solar is being installed globally. Where do you think the excess mid-day production is going to go? It doesn't have to go anywhere, actually. But it will go somewhere.

Without telling you anything groundbreaking, around 80% for PEM. It's more than acceptable when you look at how much excess solar production is being built.

Green hydrogen is developing now, and is very real, and is based on polysilicon solar advancements and PEM electrolyzer advancements, both of which provide ~3 decadal cost-down paths. See these two companies of ours:

[1] https://ohmium.com [2] https://novohydrogen.com

The oil companies don't own many pipelines. Pipeline companies own those. And pipeline companies are eager to do business with hydrogen companies.

The fight here is over whether natural gas-made hydrogen (SMR) is an interesting fuel at all. I think the numbers say no, while solar-made hydrogen is in fact extremely interesting.

Are you referring to hydrogen as a mobility fuel specifically? I generally agree.

However, it is a critical large-scale industrial input, a replacement industrial input for several additional large industries, and an excellent large-scale stationary energy store.

The jellyroll li-ion batteries invented by Sony, perfected by U.S. firms, and their IP then stolen and maximized by Chinese firms (namely CATL), are an inelegant, imperfect, and in many cases fundamentally dangerous design. And those companies have no route to improving thermal handling. It needs to change.

The issue is that utilities spend more than 50% of their incremental operating expense getting that electron to you, not making/buying it in the first place. With that kind of cost-stacking, nuclear has little hope of competing with solar.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50456

Or the choice to buy no tv content at all, a choice that our less-capitalist forefathers in the UK do not have !

For those who haven't seen it, worth looking at BrakeFlow, a feature of the new Si-anode Enovix batteries.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8eSEoOy8JY

I suspect this is exactly how it is going to go as higher density Li-Ion comes out around 900 Wh/L.

Central gov't making statements to quell a bank run is one of the few things most libertarians will always say is properly in the federal toolkit.