This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.
People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you’re limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they’re bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.
Not just that, we don’t have enough lithium deposits atm to build enough lithium evs to last more than a few decades if we act smart (which we generally do not).
People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types
Compared to other battery chemistry types using lithium makes tons of sense.
Lead acid type batteries like sealed and AGM are cheap but not power dense and do not offer the same discharge ability that lithium offers without damaging the battery (AGM fixes this but it’s still an issue). Some lead acid batteries require continuous maintenance and vent toxic gasses which may be an issue depending on your encloser.
Nickel cadmium batteries solve a lot of issues that lead acid batteries are plagued with however they suffer from moisture intrusion issues causing self discharge. Nickel cadmium also suffers from memory effect which may completely ruin pour battery depending on your use. The elephant in the room with nickel cadmium is that it’s banned in some countries including the European union due to how toxic cadmium is.
Now with lithium, it’s a very energy dense battery which means you need less batteries to meet a capacity or you can fit more capacity into an encloser. There isn’t any electrolyte or water maintenance you need to worry about. You can discharge and recharge as you wish with minimal damage. Really the only downsides is that they do not like charging in the cold, are just as toxic as cadmium, and are much much much more expensive.
The original comment was about lithium and their popularity for backup power. Sodium ion batteries are so new that you can’t purchase them yet (blueitte supposedly released the NA300 but I can’t find any in stock and it’s no longer on their site).
It wouldn’t be fair to compare a chemistry you cannot purchase and which it’s strengths and weaknesses haven’t been tested outside of controlled laboratory testing.
However good luck finding a BMS that works for it’s particular voltage range, don’t think AliExpress has any yet.
I haven’t seen any posts from those diy type folks experimenting with them yet. Sodium ion cells just became available within the last few months or so.
I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.
Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.
I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.
Yes, just what we need is more vehicles on the road that weigh as much as a tank but accelerate like a Ferrari. I’m sure that won’t cause any problems.
My partner’s best friend helped pen the legislation for this and specifically took it on because she knows how much this shit pisses my partner off lol
AI isn’t the only game in town, as this is also a traditional OS update with the usual quality of life improvements. There’s finally native support for RAR and 7-zip file formats, so you can get rid of those third-party archiving apps.
LMAO It just hit me that Windows STILL did not have native ways to do this. We’ve been using .rar for 30 years and for this whole time, Microsoft never released their own utility for opening them until now. Wow.
EDIT: Mb. I meant to say the .rar files. I have corrected my comment. It’s still ridiculous, though.
I’m not too worried about that, just glad the few people I know who’ll still use windows after this update will be able to open them without me making sure it’s a file type they can manage
Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews.
Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews.
Yelp places temporary alerts on businesses’ pages when it discovers fake reviews, and regularly releases transparency reports detailing its moderation efforts.
“We’d love to get to a place where this new index develops into a regular resource for others, whether it’s FTC, consumers, regulators or other sites,” Malik tells Engadget.
But she’s also quick to point out that the index is also meant to help Yelp users make “educated decisions” about where to spend their money.
While you may not think much about visiting a coffee shop with a history of paying people to leave positive Yelp reviews, your feelings may be very different if you’re looking for a contractor to remodel your home, or for a daycare or moving company (all of which appear in the index).
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Any time a gaming company does something stupid, leave it to gamers to out-stupid the company and prove that they deserved to get shit on in the first place
It’s interesting to think about the position that Caesar’s is in, with regard to trust. How do you determine that you can trust the hackers enough to pay them, that they won’t release the data anyway? Like… do the hackers have prior exploits they can point to saying “Hey, we took company X’s data, they paid up, and we didn’t release their info, so you can trust us?”
I mean, there’s also the thought that if they don’t pay up, it will definitely be released, so it comes down to something of a risk analysis.
WTF. Luckily it isn’t an issue for me right now, but I guess I won’t be using Unity in future like I once thought I might.
I couldn’t find it in the article, but I assume this is only going forward and not somehow retroactive? Lots of amazing indie titles I’ve played run on Unity.
They where only popular bc the other options where also crappy or very expensive. Also I highly doubt anyone bought a roku tv bc it was roku, it’s more like they didnt have a choice.
I definitely did. It’s the best of the interfaces I’ve worked with. Samsung and LG both have abysmal built in OS’s and I do want an internet connected TV.
They’re privacy nightmares, but they work a whole lot better than the competition.
I love the Roku remote and interface. But I have a Google TV and even though I’m sure it’s sending my viewing habits to Google it’s also basically and Android device so you can do many more things with it than a Roku. You can’t install anything on a Roku that Roku doesn’t specifically authorize.
engadget.com
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