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partial_accumen

@ partial_accumen @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
1763
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • A new liquid battery stores solar heat for weeks

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  • I'm all for new technology and approaches, and it looks like this is just at the beginning for this approach so I would assume it could grow in efficiency in the future.

    However, as it stands today its pretty far away from a good replacement for existing solutions or approaches.

    The new material, called a pyrimidone, can store more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram. That is almost double the energy density of a conventional lithium-ion battery, which is about 0.9 MJ/kg.

    1.6 MJ/kg..that's....not very dense for a thermal solution for this new material. This is especially true with the likely increase complexity of adding a plumbing system and heat exchanger to extract the energy. With the lithium battery its a pair of wires going in and the same wires coming out to move the stored energy. Further, the lithium battery energy is electrical which certainly can be converted to thermal energy at 100% efficiency with a simple coil of wire (resistor), but it can also be used electrically for all the fun things we use electrical energy for. The new technology solution looks to only be a thermal storage medium.

    For reference 1 kg of gasoline has 45 MJ/kg. Keep in mind I'm not saying gasoline is a replacement, I just wanted to offer a scale for reference. Another approach suggested for storing sun energy in chemical form is ammonia which has about 19 MJ/kg. Yet another approach for storing solar thermal energy is sand batteries. A sand battery has a density of .4 to .8 MJ/kg ( 500 °C to 1000 °C respectively). Sand batteries would come with the same burden of a plumbing system and heat exchanger though but without any exotic materials.

    None of this is to discourage the basic reseach these folks are doing. They could be onto the "next big thing", but I just wanted to put it in perspective as to where it is today.

  • Not a good sign

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  • I would imagine a system you're suggesting would first have to eliminate scarcity of resources. We certainly have the ability to do that with our technology today but choose not to do so. Wouldn't it require a turn to benevolence by all involved in the society to achieve that? If so, that doesn't sound like a likely outcome. What, in your opinion, would it take to escape the Tragedy of Commons that is likely to actually occur?

  • Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

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  • This should be your call to read communist theory. Education should be about learning and creating knowledge, not cramming and being put off from pursuing your passsions!

    I had never read Marx's Communist Manifesto before going to college. It was assigned reading for a class. I don't necessarily agree with the validity of it all (it depends too much the decency and incorruptibility of humanity of which we have too little of both). Even though I don't agree with much of it, I very much appreciate being exposed to it so I have a better understanding of the perspective of its origins and those that believe in it more than I do.

    That probably wouldn't have occurred without me going to college.

  • Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

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  • Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university.

    This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.

    Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week.

    That's part of it, but its more that you have a basic education with the fundamentals of your field. More importantly, college teaches you how to learn. A Bachelors degree will make you no expert. However the effort you undergo to get the degree exposes you to the various resources and bodies of information that exist. It sets up opportunities for critical thinking usually with pretty vast resources at your disposal to research, answer questions, and build something on your own from start to finish.

    A degree usually also means you have a passable command of your native language and can put together a report or presentation that is on-topic and not embarrass yourself or your superiors when your work comes under scrutiny from others. I sometimes remember a couple of my myopic proposals I made before my degree and didn't understand why they were shot down. Today I completely understand. I was out of my depth before, yet I didn't have the self-awareness to even know that.

    For those 10 years prior to my degree, I didn't understand why the company made decisions that it made. It made, to my eye, wrong/inefficient decisions. What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.

    None of this that if you go to college you'll come away with all of this. If you skate through doing the absolute minimum you might pass with your degree (and debt!) but you'll have wasted an immense opportunity to learn and better yourself.

    Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.

    While I completely agree that a corporate culture is good to learn to be successful in operating in it, I have doubts a designed curriculum would accurately capture the various "good old boys" or crony decision making processes or those that embrace rules not to end in a good result but just to slow you down from affecting change. Nor would that course explain the simmering resentment of below-average of middle managers that have been passed over again and again as they see their better or more agile peers continue to surpass them and how that can negatively affect your personal productivity or chances of advancement.

  • Virginia court blocks voter-approved redistricting, appeal coming

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  • Sure, but when they played their strongest card it has quite a weak showing.

  • Anthropic nuked a company's access to Claude, stopping 60 employees dead in their tracks — support via Google Form is the only recourse for vague usage policy violation

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  • Everyone could tell you that once they had your overbuilt shit locked in to their very specific apis and services they had you by the short and curlies and by god were they gonna squeeze for all you were worth.

    On-prem solutions don't necessarily protect companies from this either though. Anyone staring down the barrel of a Broadcom renewal for on-prem VMware licenses knows this pain.

    Broadcom's screwing over of VMware has been the biggest accelerator of migration into the cloud in the last 5 years.

  • Virginia court blocks voter-approved redistricting, appeal coming

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  • The court’s decision hinges on procedural and constitutional arguments about how the amendment was passed, including timing requirements and legislative steps, the kinds of disputes appellate courts often revisit, especially when they collide with a direct vote of the people.

    So they're arguing timing, not validity it sounds like. I'd be interested to hear exactly what these timing issues are they're hanging their objection on.

  • SHOCK POLL: Trump Approval Craters to 33% in New AP Poll, Whopping 67% Disapprove

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  • Who could have possibly seen this coming for trump?

    That’s worse than Carter’s low by 4 pts and outside the MoE.

    Carter's lowest approval rating was received with the arrival of checks notes military unrest in Iran. Simply impossible for trump to have see this coming as trump is completely ignorant of history.

  • Texas can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, US appeals court rules

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  • Why has Trump broken all 10 commandments, for instance.

    trump treated it like a to-do list until he got all ten.

  • Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data

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  • Here's a sneak peek into a management review meeting in the near future:

    "Why is our AI browsing porn in the middle of the workday and constantly writing 'It fucking sucks ass here' in corporate documents?"

  • Democrats urged to link clean energy to affordability as Iran war hikes up prices | Climate leaders say Democrats need to extol clean energy as a way to cut costs for Americans as war roils oil market

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  • The problem with that approach is that the "rugged energy individualist" idea would only a thin veneer and as soon as you scratch the surface you see it isn't true.

    Currently technology solar isn't able to affordably support the amount of energy consumption most Americans have or want. It would be either astronomically expensive for a single American household to have enough energy systems to be completely 100% self sufficient (in most States in the Union) or the American household would have to drastically reduce its energy consumption. I don't know if you know us Americans, but we don't like to cut back on anything.

    The feasible technology we have today that is still expensive, but at least attainable by many, is for 30% to 70% household energy generation. The remainder (depending on the time of year) comes from our socialized system of central energy generation and distribution (the power grid).

    I say this as someone with solar panels and EVs that has gone carbon free energy at home. Its expensive for the equipment and installation and still doesn't cover all the energy needs year-round. Nine months out of the year we have no energy bills. Three months of the year, we do. That's just physics and the limits of my wallet.

  • Microsoft now offering chance to win $1 million or a car if you switch to Edge

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  • I'd need a reason to use Edge. If it used a different browser engine, that would be a compelling reason.

  • Microsoft now offering chance to win $1 million or a car if you switch to Edge

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  • Thats the description of both Vivaldi and Brave browsers, which also haven't out-Chromed Chrome. Both are Chrome engine with built in ad blockers.

  • Microsoft now offering chance to win $1 million or a car if you switch to Edge

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  • Hey Microsoft, how about innovating instead? Edge is a Chrome engine browser like dozens of others out there. Why not write a new browser engine to give customers a choice? Or at worst, how about contract with Apple to license Webkit bringing a third solid choice for a browser engine to Windows. You're not going to out-Chrome Google Chrome browser, so stop trying.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Ifs been awhile since I've seen the first DS9 episode, but wasn't the assignment to of Sisko to DS9 supposed to be a low burden job? He's lost his wife at Wolf359 and was raising a young son by himself. It just turned into a hotbed of interest with the discovery of the worm hole.

  • Less than a year after being fired, former FEMA chief is set to be reinstalled by Trump

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  • 'Addicted to hacking': Young hacker behind historic breach speaks out for 1st time, before reporting to prison

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  • "evil maid" attacks need to be renamed to "evil students" attack.

  • With Linux, are you using secure boot?

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  • Well, I'm running Asahi Linux on a Macbook which can't boot from USB even if I wanted to.

    However, if you're really worried about state-level threat actors, like FBI or CIA, I don't believe there is much you could do to protect yourself anyway. They likely have entire catalogs of unpublished and undisclosed side-band attack exploits they could draw from to gain access to your machine and execute a privilege escalation to install whatever they want.

  • PSA: If you use the Meta AI app, your friends will find out and it will be embarrassing | TechCrunch

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  • For some reason its very popular in Asia, according to my partner who is Thai and 23 years old.

    Facebook subsidized mobile internet access specifically to facebook properties for a decade or so in many parts of the world. If you went to Google.com you'd get charged for mobile data. if you went to any Facebook company sites, it was free data. This is also why Whatapp is so embedded in many parts of the world. Text messages were charged, while Whatapp messages were free.

  • A hacker has allegedly breached one of China’s supercomputers and is attempting to sell a trove of stolen data

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