• 2 Posts
  • 135 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle

  • They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.

    Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.

    Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.

    In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.

    Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.

    These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.



  • Is LMFP actually available in quantity? Wikipedia suggests not.

    I realized that, I put an edit on there to not specify LMFP which has only been used in EVs in a limited fashion. I was confusing NMC which is actually the most common, oops. I changed it to a generic reference.

    The problem with sodium ion batteries, apart from lower density, is that they have a shorter lifespan.

    I’ve read differing reports on that. But yeah, cycle life is a big deal. In general it’s not great for the common Li-Ion types. LFP has pretty amazing cycle life, about five times greater and rivals the NiMH king. In many cases it’s well worth the additional size and weight, but for things sensitive to it like cars and handheld devices it’s a problem.


  • Also Sodium Ion (Na-Ion) batteries are currently in production and could be a viable alternative as the technology advances and production ramps up.

    Right now Na-Ion batteries rival only the LFP type of Li-Ion battery (lithium-iron-phosphate) having a lower energy density than other Lithium chemistries. LFP is used commonly in utility power storage for its much greater safety and longevity, but it carries about 20% less power for size and weight compared to other lithium chemistries.

    At present the favored battery type for EVs are Lithium types with the highest energy density. Some combine several advantages of the various Li-Ion chemistries having the highest energy density with somewhat greater safety and longevity.

    Na-Ion is a new type of battery chemistry with lots of potential for improvement. They use more sustainable materials being cheaper and more abundant. If they could get the Na-Ion battery type within range of presently used Lithium technologies it would be a hugely better solution, a lot cheaper, a lot safer, and much easier on the environment.


  • Big difference is a modern sailboat like a ketch or sloop can maintain a straight course as much as 45 degrees into the wind. A Victorian era square rigger is greatly more limited with a range about 60 degrees off either side of downwind. A kite would be even more limited, probably within 45 degrees so it would only be useful when going mostly downwind. Still if it’s cheap and easy to deploy it’s free energy when it can be used. An interesting parallel is the spinnaker sail used on a typical sailboat flies much like a kite and can only be used within a similar downwind range. It’s a very powerful sail when it can be deployed.


  • CO meter for sure, but a CO2 meter? It’s actually a good idea to have CO alarms in your house if using natural gas powered appliances. However CO2 is only a concern if you’re in a hermetically sealed environment like a submarine or space ship. I suppose it could be useful to check proper ventilation in the home, but normally you can just open a window.

    Anyway the Earth has a carbon cycle, in other words it filters natural CO2 emissions through environmental processes. The problem is the amount added by industry is more than the natural carbon cycle can process. So levels are steadily increasing.

    When we talk about zero carbon footprint we mean sources from industry like driving gasoline powered cars, generation of electricity, and production of consumer goods. A good amount already comes from natural processes like volcanos and erosion so we don’t actually need a zero carbon footprint, just need it low enough to avoid overwhelming the natural cycle.

    At a personal level it would be just about impossible to have a zero carbon footprint. If you had a solar and wind powered home off-grid and used it to charge an electric car you could be well below average. However any consumer goods you use put carbon in the air to produce them. Even if you went full native you’d still be putting carbon in the air burning wood and candles.



  • I agree with your philosophy on federation and defederation and support it. It’s one of the main reasons lemm.ee is my home instance. I support your actions as you feel appropriate.

    That said, it’s often the most intolerant people that get overly vocal about issues. In other words they get easily offended and try to make a bigger argument footprint than warranted. I mean if a person doesn’t want to see something what’s so hard about blocking a community in their personal profile or just ignoring a post and moving on to the next.

    Do we really want to set a precedent where we need to block a whole instance because someone might potentially get offended? I prefer not to have an admin or mod make harsh decisions like that. On the other hand there is content that is just not acceptable under the most liberal judgement and that kind of stuff needs to get pruned, that’s why we need reasonable mods.




  • Not going to read the article so in response to the comment, electric bicycles put people in a strange place in terms of safety. You’ve got the speeds of a motorcycle without the ability to flow with traffic. In the presence of high density traffic I’d say an e-bike is more dangerous than a motorcycle.

    I’ve been a motorcyclist most of my life and I can say you have to be super vigilant about situational awareness and ready to evade at all times. People driving in cars are not programmed to notice motorcycles. They’re always looking for cars and sometimes don’t register other hazards. It shouldn’t be that way, but nothing is going to change that as long as human beings are driving.

    My recommendation to anyone who wants to use an e-bike for regular transportation is just go to a motorcycle, it’s going to be much safer in traffic. There’s some really nice electric motorcycles now. For e-bike users you have to be extra careful. Drivers don’t see bicyclists anyway and you’re going a lot faster most of the time. A head injury at 10 mph can be fatal.









  • I would say this is likely not a practical super conductor… But it may well be the first ever room temperature super conductor.

    Yes of course it would be a big deal if they create one to begin with. However if it’s difficult and expensive to produce, that’s not much help. It has to be mass producible and inexpensive to have industrial significance. I mean we already have expensive solutions. Don’t need any more of those.

    The first semi-conductors were not practical either, but we can all see where that led!

    I don’t know that semiconductors are a good parallel. Growing the crystals dates back to the early 1900s and was never an expensive or technologically difficult process. Doping silicon to create devices like diodes and transistors was something new, but was not exceedingly expensive or a great technological challenge. The migration to chips which require lithographic doping was more of a challenge.

    In any case semiconductor devices were practical shortly after development. One of the first consumer products that used them was the “transistor radio” which was inexpensive and came out shortly after invention of the technology.