As someone who buys, sells, installs, and operates enormous volumes of battery assets, I disagree.
No one I know who is in battery tech for a living is writing off sulfur batteries as napkin-math-interesting only. I’m curious to know who you work with that believes otherwise in industry so assertively.
I've worked at a battery-analytics company which given your background you might have heard of, this involved hosting the Bay Area battery research community on a monthly basis. I'm not dismissing lithium sulfur as a viable technology. I'm saying that trying to calculate the environmental impact of a technology like that before it has sizable production and several rounds of process improvement is napkin-scribbling. Useful in some ways, but it's premature to draw conclusions from it. That's all.
Fair enough. Indeed my only point was that lithium-sulfur has production potential, as does solid-state, etc. and that’s where the industry interest originates.
HuggingFace is the place to go for easily downloading model weights. Search for the user TheBloke if you’re particularly interested in GGUF formatted weights.
You have to prove your understanding of consciousness to be certain that LLMs are not conscious. It’s your certainty that I suspect most are reacting to here.
I’m not sure where you live, but I’ve been privy to thousands of rooftop solar installations deployed in the U.S. (New England mostly) and the common case is to have the inverter wired into the circuit panel with a per-circuit or whole house automatic or manual switch, then also grid tied to realize net metering benefits. Very few installs have battery storage (less than 1%, though this is changing rapidly).
I've always been inspired by the story of id software, who funded their company by simply making a product and selling it. It seems like so many people in tech want to come up with an idea and immediately execute it at scale with tens of millions of dollars in seed money. It seems like profit is secondary to investment rounds at startups. Id software was able to remain independent and in control of the partners by making world class products and selling them directly to the consumer
They call this a “lifestyle” business apparently - and part of the issue is that those who do that kind of bootstrapping are often comfortable stopping at some small millions. Who needs more?
An example from another industry is successful restaurants - if you don’t franchise you’re basically capped, and some are quite content with that. A local bar “franchised” - each of the kids of the original owner has their own variation on the bar/restaurant.
They call this a “lifestyle” business apparently - and part of the issue is that those who do that kind of bootstrapping are often comfortable stopping and some small millions. Who needs more?
"Lifestyle business or scalable business", and "bootstrapping or vc" are largely orthogonal concerns. Not completely as there's basically no path to taking VC funding to build a lifestyle business. But the converse does not hold - you can certainly bootstrap a company that is meant to grow into far more than a "lifestyle company". Is it easy? No, but nothing worth doing ever is...
It just seems like what you're taught about how business works in high school (make a product, sell it, reinvest money to make more products and make more money) is at odds with the tech industry. In tech, ideas can often be worth more than their execution. Virtual teenagers are given millions of dollars for an idea they have some specialization in from a bachelor's or masters degree, and often the companies go belly up because 24 year olds don't have the requisite life experience to run a business
How is this different than what any new market entrant encounters? This is what sales and marketing is for; business as usual. I’ve never launched a product that the world was familiar with before I launched it.
