DennisP

29 ms·

631.
by DennisP 2y ago
Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway. It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker tran
632.
by DennisP 2y ago
In fact, GP quotes "350 nJ" which is a tiny fraction of a watt-second.
633.
by DennisP 2y ago
I agree with your general points, but if we can trust Vox, the Anthem situation wasn't quite what people thought. The policy was to prevent overpayment to anesthesiologists, because they get paid partly by the hour and there's evi
634.
by DennisP 2y ago
Agreed. France, Germany, and Japan have health systems similar to the ACA, with the following differences: insurance is nonprofit with an effective mandate, there's a national price list for medical services, and claim denials are proh
635.
by DennisP 2y ago
Definitely not me. I was a huge Musk fan back in 2014. These days I'm less thrilled with his new focus on politics, but Tesla and SpaceX are more than just Musk and we're far better off having them. If not for these companies, we&
636.
by DennisP 2y ago
And at more than double the energy density of today's EV batteries, its range could be considerably longer.
637.
by DennisP 2y ago
For cars the US does have Tesla, Lucid, and Rivian. The first two are vertically integrated, making as many of their own components as possible. We also have Intel, and a pretty great rocket company.
638.
by DennisP 2y ago
It's not "both" systems, it's at least four. Canada is private doctors, public insurance. In the UK, the public system includes the doctors as well. France is not single-payer but has a system somewhat similar to the ACA
639.
by DennisP 2y ago
> websites will need to be able to set their price based on their costs Most businesses don't really get to do that. They set their price based on what customers are willing to pay. Then they try to keep their variable costs low eno
640.
by DennisP 2y ago
I agree that 40 different subscriptions is unreasonable. I use adblockers because I think user-hostile advertising is also unreasonable. I would happily pay a subscription that gets divided among whatever sites I visit. In the absence of th
641.
by DennisP 2y ago
Proving performance is improving at a rapid pace though, like 10X/year. And converting to circuits is automatic now; there are compilers that can do it for arbitrary Rust code.
642.
by DennisP 2y ago
I think "experimentally equivalent" is what GP meant, and as of today, it holds true. Google's results are predicted by other interpretations just as well as by Everett. Maybe someday there will be a clever experiment to dist
643.
by DennisP 2y ago
One simple application is making blockchains vastly more scalable. For a blockchain to be secure you have to store each transaction on chain, with enough information so everyone can verify that it's valid. Normally this means storing t
644.
by DennisP 2y ago
Just occurred to me: if on the energy-producing side you're dropping sodium into seawater, then effectively you're getting desalination for free.
645.
by DennisP 2y ago
For grid storage, maybe the downside compared to batteries is you're limited to turbine efficiency, but it still seems like a good idea.
646.
by DennisP 2y ago
Sure, if you're Canada, you probably need to go ahead and build nuclear. Even if solar keeps getting exponentially cheaper, it'd be nice to be reasonably efficient with land use. What has surprised me is that a solar/wind&#x2
647.
by DennisP 2y ago
I don't have any special sources, but since sodium-ion batteries are already being installed in BEVs and power grids, I guess we'll all find out how it's going before long. No reason a power grid can't restrict their bat
648.
by DennisP 2y ago
Despite everybody's cynicism, batteries have gotten a lot better over the past three decades. It just hasn't happened with any sudden drama. No reason it can't happen for sodium batteries, just as it has for lithium.
649.
by DennisP 2y ago
Absolutely, I don't see batteries being helpful for annual cycles, just for daily. Hence my mention of getting through windless nights. The article I referenced was mainly about that too, suggesting we'd need about a week of batte
650.
by DennisP 2y ago
But the history of lithium-ion is thirty years long, and over that period, their price did drop by 99%: https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-... The drop has been a fairly steady exponential, so if yo
651.
by DennisP 2y ago
Wikipedia's page on sodium-ion lists several commercially-available batteries capable of several thousand cycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
652.
by DennisP 2y ago
For a long time after reading "A Nation-Sized Battery"[1] I thought there was no way we could run a grid on wind/solar/battery without plenty of hydro/geothermal/nuclear for the windless nights, just due to the
653.
by DennisP 2y ago
Fwiw, the second-largest blockchain barely uses any energy. The real problem is that it's still not scalable enough for something like this, but it's improving pretty rapidly. As for why blockchain: if you did this on a regular da
654.
by DennisP 2y ago
I'm no fan of Musk's political activities either but SpaceX is still working on going to Mars. Starship is the key ingredient for that and they have 25 launches approved for next year.
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by DennisP 2y ago
This is why I buy my honey from a local beekeeper I trust.
656.
by DennisP 2y ago
Bezos did start a rocket company, and it's been in business longer than SpaceX, but he hasn't managed to get a rocket to orbit with it. Apparently it's not as trivial as you make out. Meanwhile SpaceX launched 87% of the worl
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by DennisP 2y ago
And again today. There are lots of analog polysynths available now for reasonable prices.
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by DennisP 2y ago
Physical modeling is gaining steam these days. A good example is the Osmose, which combines a physical modeling sound engine with a keyboard that not only has polyphonic aftertouch, but lets you wiggle the keys sideways to individually shif
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by DennisP 2y ago
Which makes me wonder whether typing with both hands, hence using both hemispheres, actually results in more widespread connectivity in the brain.
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by DennisP 2y ago
That's not "the average electric car," it's just a Leaf. It doesn't necessarily imply anything about a modern Tesla, Lucid, or BYD.

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