otherotherchris's comments

Pretty much every iron chemistry has failed to reach market. I reckon they're probably just blowing smoke.

I really want them to succeed for the sake of the planet, but it's another "revolutionary new battery just five years away" story.

They claim ~65% round trip currently and think they can improve to 75%. Not great, but polysilicon solar panels are cheap cheap cheap so charging efficiency doesn't matter much.

It's being sold as a complementary solution to more efficient LFP cells (for evening peak shifting), and as an alternative to pumped hydro and peaking gas turbines.

Google's key problem is that it seems to prioritize "freshness" above all else.

Experts on a given topic have no need to continuously spam their sites full of minutely modified "best of x in April 2022" listicles. They were authoritative when they published their views ten years ago, and they're still authoritative today. Google doesn't care. Ten year old information isn't relevant or useful.

I question what is going wrong with Google at a management level. It's products have been undergoing a slow creeping rot since Brin and Page bailed from the company.

Google Search as a product is declining in usefulness due to a very silly decision to no longer support lexical queries(!) They've built a broken AI fad that delivers nothing but song lyrics and shopping results to long tail queries. The core product is rotting and no one is empowered to fix it.

Autonomous trucks don't need stationary rest so you can halve your fleet number just from higher fleet utilization.

Battery powered trucks are also expected to have lower downtime for maintenance and overhaul, so you can shave off another 5%. Rebuilding an engine and gearbox is an expensive maintenance activity that is completely eliminated, along with brake servicing due to regenerative braking.

Once the charger situation is figured out, probably an overhead catenary and dedicated charging lanes to keep the trucks in motion while charging, the savings will be compelling.

"Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols"."

That solves part of the unemployment problem, at least for the more photogenic "teens".

Or single purpose accounts that laid dormant. My anonymous marketplace-only account was banned from logging into Facebook after a few months of activity for being what they identified as a "bot account".

They say I can send them photographs of my license and a selfie to unlock it, ostensibly so they can use those for Clearview AI to build a profile. I've declined.

I'm in my 30's and am in the same boat. A lot of my older colleagues and mentors are over 50 and won't use this service because half their network is excluded.

The most toxic people on Nextdoor and Facebook are over 60, are just a little bit racist as old people are, and haven't learned the social norms of internet use. Moderation is going to be a very expensive exercise for them if they don't want the site to turn full neo-nazi like Parler did seemingly overnight.

Android is bleeding marketshare to whom? PalmOS? Windows Mobile? Outside of the Great Firewall they dominate everything.

Apple's IOS is shrinking globally due to Apple chasing premium customers and pricing itself out of the market. An iPhone SE is $399 after discounting, the average selling price for a smartphone outside the US is about $90.

The iPhone 13 is a truly fantastic product, state of the art with an SOC that is years ahead of the competition. I'm truly privileged not only to own one, but to live in a country where the average man on the street can also afford to buy one for every member of his family. But I'm part of a tiny minority.

They don't exist. Open forums have been dying for the last decade. First they migrated to Reddit, then walled garden Facebook groups, and lately to Discord.

Google has also removed a lot of large and active forums from it's index outright, either due to AI bungling of it's core product, anti-competitive reasons, or political conspiracy.

The low effort racist/political/pepe shitpost image macros came across from Facebook. My grandparents love them.

I wouldn't mind seeing a lot less of them on Reddit, but that's apparently the only part of the site's userbase that doesn't have adblock installed which is why Reddit caters exclusively to them.

It's somewhat complementary to their Israeli fab business.

They may also think having a multibillion dollar fab investment next to the Golan Heights is safer than having one next to the Gaza strip. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We're still at Fusion Never levels of funding.

Google's main ad business is on Google owned properties. Always has been.

The biggest existential threat to Google is that Google has abandoned management focus on developing it's core offerings (Search, Cloud, Maps, GSuite, GMail, Messaging) to fight stupid antitrust battles with the EU over a tiny slither of profit in a completely irrelevant side business.

Reputational damage alone is driving away huge amounts of Cloud and GSuite business.

Typical American narcissism.

The reality is that China's farsighted rulers don't want to be a US client state/ colonial possession and have imposed strict rules on market participants in exchange for access to their 1.5 billion consumer market. American businesses can put up or shut up.

If they want to "occupy space" they could just roll out an ad blocker into Chrome. Nuke all 3rd party advertising from orbit.

I'm sure they could find a way to make youtube ads unskipable.

After selling costs, regulatory costs, and handing over the bulk of revenue to publishers, Google's yield on this third party ad inventory must be below 10%. Globally it's less than 15% of Google's total ad revenue overall.

What's the point of being in this business? You're making a lot of powerful people angry for almost zero profit.

Not bias, deliberate disappearance of specific categories of ideas. Independent blogs and forums not owned by large silicon valley companies have disappeared, for example. So have all discussions of current events, except for "mainstream" news publications.

Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.

Intel has an arch license. They aren't buying squat.

x86 has over a trillion dollars worth of tech debt in deployed business software and training, and 99% of the non-console gaming market. Quite a moat.

If Intel/AMD can achieve even half of Apple's power efficiency on laptop/desktop ARM isn't going anywhere on client anytime soon.