Skip Navigation
CATL battery successfully powers electric plane with 1,800-mile civil aircraft expected
  • The US really doesn't understand that there is simply no competing with these batteries. To try to block the import of them is only going to set our own local industry back in their ability to compete in the global economy. And ironically the BMS systems for CATL are still using American semiconductors, so the US still gets some revenue from their massive expansion.

    The most viable competitors to CATL are all in China too. I'd be somewhat supportive of a CATL specific ban due to their notoriously terrible employee working conditions and crazy NDAs/non-competes, but to ban all Chinese batteries in the US would be a huge mistake.

  • Death toll from heat at hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia passes 900
  • At least in what they say they certainly recognize this. The middle East as a whole talks about climate change much more than the US in my experience, mostly because to them it is an actual existential threat. Money is money so I'm sure they'll keep extracting oil while it makes money, but every single middle Eastern economy's goal has been to diversify from oil for many decades now.

  • The US healthcare system is broken...
  • Exactly this. The only annoying part is that it then doesn't count toward your deductable and out of pocket maximum. It's crazy how nominally $1k+ medicines become like $30 when you pay without insurance.

  • Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs?
  • The problem is that this isn't really even trickle charging. Customers would absolutely complain and say it's not working because it couldn't charge the battery more than 1-2% in an entire day of sun. EV batteries are 60kWh+ yet getting more than 2kWh/sq meter daily from residential panels is hard for much of the US. Add to that the:

    • weight of panels
    • cost of panels
    • heat trapped in the car from having a roof literally designed to absorb solar radiation
    • fragility of panels (although all these glass roof EVs have that problem already) And it's really not worthwhile.

    One solution to the apartment street parking problem is adding charging ports to streetlights (they do this in Europe). But for most of US apartments there's already dedicated parking space so also space for chargers. The unruly size of new vehicles is a much bigger problem in my mind, if there were actual motivation to fix this problem in government it would already be solved through some tax credits.

  • Naming is hard
  • New outlook is less functional but much better UI design (it's just outlook web access after all). Outlook hasn't changed in forever because so many corporate high ups use it and think they know how it works. They always respond to emails that are already answered because they didn't see the newer reply in their inbox. I suspect this resistance is why it's a totally separate program to the old outlook. Yes, there are settings to group threads in outlook, but the interface is still pretty unintuitive and the vast majority of these users don't change their default settings anyway. In my experience the terrible defaults create more problems than outlook solves. And the server syncing can be really slow at times. Personally, I'm very happy that MS is finally showing some interest to modernize outlook, the more people who use it the easier my job will get.

    Also ya the name is stupid. Teams (New) gets me the most. Idk who possibly thought this naming scheme was a good idea.

  • Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week
  • Just ublock origin with default configuration. My complaints aren't for page loading so much as scrolling. Stutter when scrolling is really annoying to me. Interestingly as mentioned the nightly version fixes this, even when ublock is also installed on it.

    My occasional page related complaints are for stuff animating correctly. This is very rare and a minor inconvenience usually, but sometimes stops you from being able to do what you came to accomplish (usually on jank websites, rental car companies for example).

    Pretending Firefox mobile is already great is counterproductive to fixing it's issues. They don't have extensive development resources particularly for the mobile version so it makes sense it's worse. But to a non-techie switching to it isn't a good experience yet. It definitely can be in the future but without at least acknowledging it's current flaws why would anyone switch who has previously tried switching?

  • Oh tell me again how it loads faster and takes up less resources
  • Firefox mobile isn't there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it's resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don't deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there's hope for the future, but for now it's not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.

  • Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week
  • So maybe my experience is unique but websites don't always test with Firefox now and some simply don't work with it. I use it anyway out of principle but occasionally I need to open Chrome.

    On mobile it's even worse. Firefox is stuttery on my Pixel 8 Pro and doesn't handle more than ~20 open tabs well. The nightly version fixes the stutter but crashes all the time (it's a nightly build after all so this is expected).

  • Visitor to Taiwan hit with $9,000 fine over 'roast chicken and pork combo' lunch box
  • Almost no countries allow meat products due to potential exposure that couldn't be easily seen. Sometimes for commercially prepared meats there are exceptions but these are in relatively few countries. For countries with substantial livestock keeping diseases out is critical to their economy and therefore treated with such a high level of urgency.

  • Visitor to Taiwan hit with $9,000 fine over 'roast chicken and pork combo' lunch box
  • They take pork products particularly seriously. At least on their flag carrier, China Airlines, it would be incredibly hard to ignore the video played prior to landing with the talking pigs specifically pointing this out.

  • California says restaurants must bake all of their add-on fees into menu prices
  • This has been the case forever. Itemizing receipts for hotels is always a pain and at least my company's expense tool has buttons for more than 7 different tax fields each night. It's like filling out a whole spreadsheet it the nightly rate varies.

  • China launches world’s largest electric container ship with 50 MWh battery
  • True but efficiency is not the same and not as simple to compare since we don't know how much of the ship's battery is converted into motion. Similarly we don't directly know it's mass. ICE cars can use ~20% of the energy in fuel while EVs 90%+ of the energy in a battery. But now much can that ship effectively use? I have no idea how efficient boats are or aren't, hence the roundabout method above.

  • China launches world’s largest electric container ship with 50 MWh battery
  • It's still not a lot of energy though. Some rough napkin math for how far this would get you is below:

    Typical medium size cargo ships in the Panama Canal travel around 25 knots burning 63000 gallons per day of fuel with 5000TEU of cargo. That's roughly 600mi/63000gal or 1142miles per ton gallon. That Silverado EV somehow weighs 4 tons (totally safe to be driving at highway speeds), so this is the equivalent of roughly 285.5mpg per Silverado. The Silverado is 67mpge on its own, so the ship is just over 4x as efficient (and slower which is ignored here but would impact the vehicle efficiency).

    So using the Silverado's 450 mile optimal range we can say it has at most an optimistic 7 gallons equivalent fuel in its 200kWh battery. 50 MWH would be enough for a theoretical 1750 gallons equivalent if efficiency were the same. But for the efficiency difference this corresponds to a 4.2x improvement to 7350 gallons equivalent. Therefore this is enough to run that typical ship above for 2.8 hours. So with 65000 tons of cargo in the above ship to do a 200 mile route this ship would need roughly 3x as large a battery. More likely it will just carry ~1/3 the cargo or have charging stops en-route.

    The 19.4km/h top speed of this ship suggests they're well aware of the extremely limited range this will have for its size and it sounds like the Shanghai to Nanjing route will be pushing it's limits despite being less than 200 miles.

  • [not a meme] anyone I should add?
  • Posy has many videos along the lines of technology connections with incredible macro footage as well as lots of other random interesting stuff.

    mitxela for well documented high quality projects blending mechanical and electrical engineering.

    The Tim Traveller is basically Tom Scott if only covering strange historical things. And unlike Tom Scott he's still making videos.

    Cathode Ray Dude does a mix of long form content like technology connections, but focusing on relatively modern computers.

  • Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM
  • Part of the difference is that the Apple silicon Macs aggressively use SSD swap to make up for limited memory. But that's at expense of the SSD lifespan, which of course isn't replaceable.

    I'd never recommend a Mac, but the prices they charge to get a little more RAM or SSD over base are crazy. The only configurations offering any "value" are the base models with 8gb RAM.

  • Microsoft reveals costs of Windows 10 end of life security update — and it might be more than you'd expect
  • This is just going to lead to people using outdated Windows 10 for various reasons. I don't use Windows much but have it installed. The trackpad gesture customization is basically gone in Windows 11 but was at least serviceable in Windows 10 (to change virtual desktops and volume easily).

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)CO
    COASTER1921 @lemmy.ml
    Posts 0
    Comments 88