As an ultimate service to newsboards all over, dang should consider writing a book at some point distilling all his thoughts, practices, advice, lessons learnt.
I'm getting a novel optical illusion with the spinning line in the box that shows up near the beginning: Whichever end I'm looking at looks normal, but the other end looks like a split hair, or an open pair of chopsticks. Like what's spinning isn't actually a "/" but actually a very narrow "V" .. only, if I try to look at the split part of the V, that part closes up and the opposite end splits.
Buried deep in the article, what the clickbait headline alludes to: Car chargers are too complicated and expensive. We can make them simpler and cheaper while keeping them safe, which would let us build many more charging stations.
I must say I'm a little confused by their proposal: yes, the later stages of the power conversion in the charger provide the galvanic isolation, but they also provide a more essential role of voltage conversion and current regulation. Connecting a battery directly to a grid-connected rectifier is likely to get melty and or explodey pretty quick, as huge amounts of current will flow in either direction to try to equalise the almost certainly quite-unequal voltages.
Fast chargers work because they can regulate the current flowing into the battery and convert the grid voltage to allow that to happen. Batteries are charged by feeding them with a constant current until you reach a certain voltage near 100% charge, then letting the current drop to get to a complete charge (which is part of why 20% to 80% charges are much faster than complete charges). This is 100% not what you get if you just cut out the charge circuit completely, you instead get a blown fuse at best or a fire at worst. There may be cheaper options for the charge circuit if you don't need them to provide the isolation, but they don't really discuss that, they just talk as if the cost would go to zero.
(For slow charging, this circuit still exists, it's just in the car instead. But it's quite hard to fit something that can handle the power involved in fast charging into a car, which is why it's in the charger side instead).
They propose to address this with a buck regulator:
> [If] we are to get rid of galvanic isolation [there's still a ] need to prevent mismatches between the utility’s AC line voltage and that of the EV battery.
> The solution to this problem is a device called a buck regulator (or buck converter). A buck regulator is similar, functionally, to a step-down transformer, except that it handles DC current rather than AC. In the event that the utility’s AC voltage exceeds the battery voltage, the buck regulator operates like a transformer and steps it down. In comparison with an isolation link of the same power rating, a buck regulator would cost less than 10 percent and the power loss would be less than 20 percent.
What do you mean buried? The article says that at the end of the introduction section.
And it's pretty reasonable to explain how current chargers exist before suggesting the alternative. There are nicely labeled sections to help with skipping forward.
Where I live the electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuels. The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!).
Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs?
I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
EVs emit less carbon even when powered by a fossil fuel dominated grid. The power plant is more efficient than your car, and often uses LNG rather than petrol or diesel, and there are still some renewables in almost any grid. In addition, air pollution close to where you live will be lower. In addition, the grid can be decarbonised over time and your car will become greener as it does.
All of this is true, but it's not the main reason why EVs have taken off. Electricity generation is very flexible. You can use coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and so on. Every country has something.
However, not every country has oil or gas. In fact, only a minority does. China is investing in EVs to avoid being dependent on energy imports. Many other countries are following. Russia and the US being laggards in EV adoption isn't really surprising.
The convenience to me of being able to refuel anywhere quickly, plus the dubious carbon savings, plus the immediate discount on the car purchase (without any subsidies), makes it a moral purchase rather than a practical one. I am not very impressed by the benefits.
I like how EVs accelerate faster. Otherwise it would make my life way more inconvenient, which I surmise is a major blocker for most potential EV purchasers
I guess it depends on your driving habits and homecharging situation, but after a year with my EV, I wouldn't go back if God came down and personally told me that every EV resulted in a baby seal being clubbed. Among the many advantages, never having to go to a gas station is so much better.
Yeah that was my experience (not the seal clubbing) with my Model X in Europe in 2019. Great for the daily commute, never had to hit a gas station but on longer trips it's more planning. Sales of Teslas definitely increased faster than the charging network expanded, so while I never had to wait in 2019, the situation was different in 2022. Now I'm back at 13mpg and similar bhp. Still have good memories of the Tesla but in the states distances are longer and I just can't haul an RV with an EV. Even small trailers have quite the range impact.
It's not difficult, but it's something extra. Now I just plug my car in the garage and it's always charged. Plus it drives so so much better (constant torque at any speed feels amazing, you can control the car very precisely), and doesn't stink and make noise.
I wouldn't go back either, even with the occasional 20-minute charge break on a very long trip.
If you can charge at home overnight, then your "tank" is full every morning. The logistics are a bit more complicated for long distance road trips though.
The gas stations are on the main road that passes through the town, I don't use it for my commute, I literally have to go out of my way to hit a gas station - which is owned by my uncle (small town, I know)
Being able to charge nightly (when needed) at home has been a game changer for us. No more waiting in line at Costco or "we need to fill up the car before X". Car is always fully charged.
Plus for us at least, because we have a very low KwH _night_ rate, our EV is 10x cheaper to run than our ICE. It's a significant difference.
And that's not counting the environmental concerns.
Multi-day trips are another story. But we take very few of those.
While a power plant is more efficient than my car, transmission reduces that efficiency sigificantly (I think here in the UK transmission accounts for 40%-50% of usage, although I may be misremembering).
Does that affect the calculation at all?
EDIT: I was totally wrong - it's more like 7%. Still interested whether that affects the calculation, although it's much less likely to!
Usually, yes. The break even point depends on how clean your energy source is but 15-40k km is about where they even out even considering batteries. Remember if you live somewhere like Norway or Scotland where it’s dark for 6 months, it’s also very very bright for the other 6 months.
Electric engines are 90-95 efficient in converting power to motion.
Even the very best experimental gasoline engines in Toyota's labs are around 30-35% efficient.
Even if all gasoline and diesel was used in massive generator units to produce electricity, EVs would still be better for the environment and the total gasoline/diesel usage would go down.
But the power plant has only slightly higher efficiency off the fossil fuels it burns. So you need to use the ev to store excess grid solar generated during the day to truly get an advantage
At least the power plant is burning that fuel and spewing garbage into the air in a place that isn't your home. And power plants capture more of that pollution than cars do, not to mention that many of them burn cleaner fuel than gasoline or diesel.
And most people tend to keep their cars for 10+ years. The power grid is changing all the time, and it's likely in the time that you own your EV, the sources it gets powered from will become cleaner.
It's also easier to regulate a few dozen power plants to become more efficient and force them to capture more pollution vs. doing that to 100 million cars on the road after the fact.
As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.
As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)
As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.
As far as
> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)
Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].
There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.
Lift sofa upright, so i stands on one of the sides. If you look at it from above (like the animations), it’s now an L-shape (U-shape in the animations) with more space to move it around the corner.
If a door opens to a narrow hallway, it may be possible to put the couch upright (making an L shaped footprint viewed from above) and then work it through the doorway into the hall. If it's a really narrow hallway, you may have to continue like that.
I said arms and back (I had to double check I didn't misspeak). The arms stick up higher than the seat. So the concave surface defined by the back and the arms is most of what will limit you getting through the straight edges of a doorway.
There are a few couches where the seat sticking out past the front of the arms causes problems, and a few handrails in stairways that you can sneak between the arms of course, but probably nine times out of ten it's just the obtuse angle between the back and the arms that is your constraint. And that angle plus the rest of the couch around it looks a lot more like the cutout in the linked article than an L. Which is kinda the reason I brought it up.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose governance is very different from a typical company in that it doesn’t put shareholder ROI above all else. A majority of its board seats are reserved for people who hold no equity whatsoever and whose explicit mandate is to look out for humanity.
This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.
In the case they don't get high salaries from this activity, there is also a solution. The next step in ~10 years could be to offer their services to governments to offer "automated court decisions".
Then the people who funded / trained this "justice" out of their good heart, would actually have leverage, in terms of concrete power.
It's a much more subtle way to capture power, if you can replace the judges with your software.
Anthropic pays their engineers pretty well. They're doing just fine, at least for as long as people are pouring money into their company. But that's everyone in this space, isn't it?
I guess they can get them to rewrite the US Constitution to remove that pesky "fair trial" bit and, since they would control the narrative, delete 1000+ years of common law.
That isn't silly, that's one of the only ways to exercise agency under hypercapitalism. I recently cancelled my Amazon Prime membership and got a Costco membership for the same reason. I don't get every product I want, but I'm also okay with that.
It's a 500B company that undercuts everyone else with incredible efficiency, just like Amazon. It's an example of how capitalism can be great. If you really want to get of out of capitalism, you can just buy directly from farmers or grow your own food.
The whole thing about no ethical consumption under capitalism is a just a way to enjoy the conveniences of capitalism on a moral high ground. It's totally doable, you just might not enjoy it haha.
I guess the angle I was coming at it from is that they pay their employees a living wage. I need to buy toilet paper from somewhere, and between Amazon and Costco I would much rather give my money to Costco.
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but the practical upshot of this new "Public Benefit Corporation" thing, with or without a trust or non-profit attached, is that you can tell both the public and your investors to fuck off. The reason why all the big AI startups suddenly want to use it is because they can. Normally no sane investor would actually invest in such a structure, but right now the fear that you might be left out of the race for humanity's "last invention" is so acute that they do it anyway. But if Dario Amodei actually cared about humanity any more than Sam Altman, that would be the surprise of the year to me.
Being available for use by militaries is incredibly irresponsible, regardless of what scope is specifically claimed, because of the inherent gravity of the situation when a military is wrong. The US military maintains a good deal of infrastructure in the US; putting into their hands an unreliable, incompetent calculator puts lives at risk.
It would be structured as a non-profit (there are no teeth to a PBC; the structure is entirely to avoid liability, and if you have no trust in the executive body of an organization, it has zero meaningful signal).
It would have a different leadership team.
It would have a leader who could steelman his own position competently. Machines of Loving Grace was less redeeming than Lenat's old stump speeches for his position, despite Amodei starting up in an industry significantly more geared for what he had to say, and Lenat having an incredibly flexible sense of morality. Its leader would not have a history working for Chinese companies and jingoistically begin advocating for export controls.
It would have different employees than the people I know who are working there, who have a history of picking the most unethical employers they can find, in a fashion not dissimilar to how Illumination Entertainment's "Minions" select employers.
You seem to misunderstand benefit corporations. They remain committed to profit and are just as subject to their board and officers as any other corporation.
There are sane investors that prefer investing in companies that adopt these corporate structures. Based on data, those investors see public benefit corporations as more profitable and resilient. They are able to attract employees and customers that would otherwise not be interested or might be less interested.
Stock based compensation mix evolved from this thesis, and quite common in the valley and why almost all OpenAI staff wanted Sam Altman back even though the non profit board did not.
Aligning key talent's compensation to enterprise value is only viable in unrestricted for profit entities any other structure with limits (capped profit, public benefit corporation, non profit, trust, 501c's etc) does not work as well.
Talent will then leave to a for-profit entity who can offer better compensation than a restricted entity can because they share a % of their enterprise value which restricted ones either cannot or not have same liquidity/value [1] etc.
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[1]This is why public companies are more valuable for RSU/options than private companies, and why cash flow positive companies like Stripe still raise private money to just give liquidity to employees .
The coffee is made with the assistance of AI, which means some nonzero portion will be something other than coffee, but at least it means every sip is an adventure.
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