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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go?

    Yes, significantly so. Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries. The compressed gas tanks are also very expensive and have a limited lifespan (albeit a relatively long one, compared to the fuel cells).

    And as hydrogen scales up, it’ll get cheaper. It’s currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that’s with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it’s locally generated from solar, it’ll probably be quite a bit cheaper.

    Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it’s possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.

    Locally produced electrolysis hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency rates; about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process. Assuming you don’t have an enormous overabundance of power being generated, it’s more efficient to store the power locally in batteries (which don’t have to be lithium ion if it’s for static storage; other chemistries become competitive if they don’t need to move around) than it is to store it as hydrogen. And if you’re generating a huge overabundance of power such that throwing 2/3rds of it away seems sensible, in most cases the question would be why you don’t make a grid connection and feed in anyway (extreme remote locations notwithstanding).




  • Only UK is known to have only moderate decline, but they probably think it’s independence for UK to buy Tesla, because fuck Europe for some reason???

    UK Tesla sales are starting from a much lower base. Sales in the UK were essentially half of what they were in Germany before the recent decline.

    BYD is now the largest EV brand by sales in the UK, ahead of Tesla. Whereas in Germany Tesla is still the leading manufacturer, even after the drop.

    Also, the UK EV market in general grew last year, whereas sales of EVs across all brands declined in Germany over the same period


  • I reckon it’s simpler than that. Zuckerberg has never really invented anything novel; Facebook was a straight clone of a whole bunch of competing social media sites (which just so happened to win the numbers war), and WhatsApp and Instagram were both acquisitions.

    I think the Metaverse was Zuckerberg trying to prove to himself and others that he and he personally could come up with the “next big thing”. The fact that he came up with something which absolutely no-one wanted (and most people barely understood) is a testament to why he never came up with anything ground breaking before, too.


  • Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.

    How early are we talking here? If you mean pre-Web, in the Usenet era it was standard practice to pay a subscription to join a Usenet server. If you mean the early Web, ads were already everywhere by the mid-90s.


  • Patch@feddit.uktoStar Wars Memes@lemmy.worldAn awkward reunion
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    3 months ago

    If in doubt, you can always play the old “Chosen One” card to hand waive that sort of thing away.

    Mr “highest midichlorian count in history” Skywalker might get a free pass just because he’s magic.

    Which on balance probably means it was pretty lucky he did a redemption arc before he died, otherwise they’d have been stuck with an evil maniac in their immortal ghost club.


  • I hosted a meeting with about a dozen attendees recently, and one attendee silently joined with an AI note taking bot and immediately went AFK.

    It was in about 5 minutes before we clocked it and then kicked it out. It automatically circulated its notes. Amusingly, 95% of them were “is that a chat bot?” “Steve, are you actually on this meeting?” “I’m going to kick Steve out in a minute if nobody can get him to answer”, etc. But even with that level of asinine, low impact chat, it still managed to garble them to the point of barely legible.

    Also: what a dick move.


  • That’s a really interesting read (and worth much more attention than the pithy one-liners of people who just want to read the title).

    On reflection, I think my take away is that Bluesky will always by necessity of its design be hosted and controlled by a single centralised company. But what their architectural model does allow is the possibility of a wholesale migration from one centralised provider to another. That is, it would be possible for a suitably resourced and motivated company to host its own mirror Relay and other components and have essentially a fully functional Bluesky clone. In the event that Bluesky ever “does a Twitter” and go into terminal decline, in theory this might mean that a successor/competitor could emerge and take on the network without loss of existing content.

    I’m not sure that’ll ever actually happen, but it’s an interesting thought.


  • Strangely, I used to work for a bank in their “bereavement services” department; that is, the department that dealt with dead people’s accounts.

    If anyone notified us of a death of an account holder, and provided any proof (death certificate, coroner’s report, police letter), the first thing we’d do is freeze the account. All payments out stopped, all cards cancelled, all withdrawals blocked. This was a legal requirement, because once somebody dies their money becomes the legal property of their “estate”, and it’s unlawful for anyone to remove money from the estate without following proper process.

    There’s no need to stop each payment individually. In fact, the bank really doesn’t want you logging in to their online bank using the deceased’s credentials and messing around with things for the same reason; unless you’re following proper procedures, it’s not yours to mess with.

    Possibly it’s different in different jurisdictions, of course.



  • Patch@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    The thing to remember about investing (forex or otherwise) is that it’s an enormous global industry. One of the largest and richest there is. If you’re a normal person, with a normal day job, tinkering around in the evening trying to pick stocks or write algorithms, just remember that there are countless thousands of professional, experienced, trained analysts all over the world doing the exact same thing 40 hours a week, week in week out.

    There are no easy bucks to be made. If it was easy, it’d already be done.




  • Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.

    It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.

    I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.



  • Patch@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    Apple made the transition a little easier for those who weren’t ready to give up on their wired headphones by including a $9 adapter. However, it looks like it could now be confined to the annals of history, as the Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter has sold out in the US and other countries, suggesting Apple may have quietly discontinued it

    It says “sold out” and “discontinued”. The latter is currently just speculation.



  • All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.

    I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

    Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

    This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.