Cue Pieter Thiel explaining how this message of compassion is actually the word of the ant-christ while setting his software (maybe "built in Rust !) to all the earthly empires.
Soon on HN front page : "How the richest people on earth used VC money and the lever effect to inflate the valuation of their startup (not even 'built in rust !') to kickstart a 'buy - borrow - die' cycle"
> When it comes to new battery chemistries, it takes time to go from a lab breakthrough to mass production. Sodium ion is now being mass produced. A few years ago there was only low volume production. And before that, the technology was stuck in various stages of the R&D pipeline at various companies. From a lab prototype in a university to an actual proof of concept might take several years. And from there to production many years longer.
That's absolutely fine and understandable. But then, why do we keep hearing the word "breakthrough" ?
I hate this word with all my heart.
Batteries are still not ubiquitous. EVs are still expensive.
The "breaktrough" that would be worth mentioning will be when people can buy an EV and never, ever, ever manage to build a scenario where there is _any_ range anxiety.
Or when everyone has a battery in their garage, that's as inconsequential to buy as a fridge, and can store enough energy for them to go through the winter with 2 months of sunshine.
I know we're far away from that. Fair enough. Godspeed to you if you're working on that, in the lab or in the factory. You or your grandkids will get there.
Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
A scientific breakthrough can happen and is news worthy. The consequence might be mass production of some thing enabled through decade of R&D that follows the breakthrough. But there are lots of reasons why that might never happen.
Anyway, catchy click bait news lines sell. And breakthroughs are worth reporting on by themselves. Anyway, the economist didn't do a great job here doing their job. They are all over the place mixing things that are basically on the market (sodium ion) or nearly on the market (solid state) with various scientific progress from research labs.
As for the rest of your comment, I don't think accurate information is your problem.
There will be no single moment when that happens. It will be a stack of years and years of innovations and improvements each of which take time to roll out into mass production, start expensive, and get cheaper.
Then, write your "breakthrough" article when they get to mass production. (Ok, you can write the article when they demo it as the consumer show six months before availability, if you really can't help. They won't ship it in six months, they will ship in a year, maybe that's fine.
I'm a software engineer, I'm not going to lecture anyone about optimistic release dates.)
Write another one when they find a way to make it affordable to the average consumer.
I m asking : don't write it when it's a proof of concept in the lab, or when you just started the workforce that's going to contemplate thinking about thinking of a plan to build a pilot plant for the alpha version of the prototype. I'm sick and tired of those.
Same thing if your "breakthrough" is in curing cancer or making fusion. Please stop using this word. It does not mean what you think it does.
> Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
When exactly though? When the price of the "new" breakthrough technology that's been around for decades at that point drops from $101 per kwH to $100 per kwH?
I totally get your frustration but it seems kinda arbitrary to say a new technology isn't a breakthrough until it's ubiquitous.
When it gets from 1000 to a 100. Or from 100 to 10.
In production. On shelves. That the average consumer can buy.
Do you remember the time where hardly anyone had a mobile phone, and one year later everyone got one for christmas ? I was there. That's a breakthrough.
Then internet in your home. Two or three years from "none has it" to "of course I have it, here's my ICQ number".
Or the day the polio vaccine was announced.
Or when when a rocket booster landed on itself.
"Before / After" moment. They exist. They don't happen overnight - great. You may have "overcame one of the many hurdles on the path to reaching a credible plan that may lead to a before/after."
Write that ! It's not a "breakthrough", though.
Or, is "breakthrough" the word for "tiny incremental change", and there is another word that I should expect to read when something consequential happens ?
Honestly curious: why do you need a generator ? And more to the point, why do "most of you friends" need one (35-45k seems like a huge investment, so it would not be some vanity purchase, right ?)
Is that customary where you live, because the grid is unreliable ?
It's fairly customary for folks who can afford it.
So, there are two issues:
1. The grid is now pretty unreliable. Georgia Power overall is a great company to work with (compared to say PG&E), but power quality has dropped out the past few years in some areas.
I've had plenty of equipment destroyed due to grid spikes and other weirdness that just didn't occur a few years ago. To give a concrete example: About 3 weeks ago, there were 4 days where literally every arc fault breaker in the house would trip randomly. Why? Because the incoming waveform became super noisy[1], and arc fault breakers are tricky beasts :).
They do notice and fix these things eventually, but the practical time to resolution is days, not hours.
2. We live in an area where the power lines are above ground and trees are aging out. They were planted over 150 years ago, and for a lot of these trees, the lifespan is 125-150 years. So we don't just get taken out by storms, but just nature :)
Georgia power puts new lines underground exclusively, and has moved a lot underground even around us, but our street is the last on the line of service that is both above ground and quite long. As a result, literally any issue/disconnect over about a 2 mile length with tons and tons of old trees, takes us out. This is also partially the reason our power quality sucks so much - any issue is more likely to affect us more than others.
Again - when it comes to outages they are quite fast at repair, having dismantled and removed insanely huge trees, and then repaired the line, almost always within 24 hours.
But it's still annoying. Combined with #1, it's just easier to be semi-off grid (IE monitor grid and swap over when grid is gone or sucking) with a generator or equivalent. Note that because we all own historic homes built in the early 1900's, our electricity usage is is significantly higher than normal just due to lack of insulation, etc. Retrofits only help so much for various practical reasons.
In a newly built home, the generator cost would probably be closer to 15-20k. Battery cost would be similarly half.
Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but still.
[1]. I have a very high end fluke power analyzer (a fluke 1775) that i've had for years to debug power quality issues. These are power quality analyzers meant to be used to test service issues like this. I actually bought it when i got tired of having PG&E lie to me in California.
Of course it's easy: such decisions were taken _before_ the feeds where algorithmically built.
You rely on unambigous, "physical" properties of the videos.
There is a physical property of all the videos: the time of publication.
There is a physical property of all the channels: did you subscribe to it, or not ?
So, you show, in (reverse) chronological order of publication, the list of videos published by the channels you subscribed to.
Now, of course, a brand new user would have no subscription - you show them a search box.
But then, now, your search algorithm has to weight the various channels that match - but your algo can be relatively transparent, relatively auditable, and the same for all users (unless given explicit preferences, and of course national laws, etc, etc...)
I'm sorry, but, I have a "subscriptions" page in youtube or substack, and they're chronological, and they show me what I want to watch. You keep that.
There is a "home" page in both service that is algoritmically built, and they show me crap that the algo want me to watch. You get rid of that.
Do this, and I can consider you a "neutral" actor, and accept that you shift the blame to content producer.
Or, keep the algo feed, but don't take money from advertiser when I watch yet another flat earther video because YOU decided it was trending.
If you want to decide what I watch, and make money from that decision - congrats, you are an editor. You get the earnings, and the responsibility.
Please don't tell me, with a straight face, that the people who build the algo don't "decide" what I watch. If they want to tweak the algo to downgrade the flamewars and outrage and conspiracy theories and violence and abuse, they can. They do not want to, for business reasons. [1]
That's fair, up to a point - we need publications with editors that agree on having "edgy" content. I'm not advocating for blanket censorship.
I did not like social network preventing me from _sharing_ articles about Biden's son laptop (this was actually beyond the law, but somehow they managed to find the resources and programmers to implement _that_, because, at the time, the execs where cozying with a different administration.)
I'm advocating for "accepting your responsibility as an editor".
People in the first ~1/2 of middle age (Millennials) slightly favored Harris.
It was the second ~1/2 of middle age (Gen X) that were pro Trump, by 6 points.
Boomers had the best turnout. 31% of eligible voters but 40% of actual voters. Gen X was 28% of eligible voters and 26% of actual voters. Millennials were also 28% of eligible voters and were 25% of actual voters. Gen Z was 13% of eligible voters but only 9% of actual voters.
But also due to the electoral college a small change in turnout in swing states can have a large effect. None of the swing states had higher than average Boomer concentration. Pennsylvania is right about average, and the rest were all lower.
Gen Z went for Biden by 24 points, but the shifted right for 2024 so only went for Harris by 10.
Millennials were similar, going for Biden by 19.
Gen X favored Trump in 2020 by about about 6% and in 2024 by about 8%.
Only Boomers have moved left. They favored Trump by 8% over Clinton, about 5% over Biden, but then only 1-2% over Harris.
> Gen Z went for Biden by 24 points, but the shifted right for 2024 so only went for Harris by 10.
Kinda confirms my point, no ? Sure, not a "majority" of Gen Z went for Trump. But such a shift has to mean _something_ was done wrong.
That being said, I once again got my timing wrong - most of the restrictions of covid happened before Biden was elected, so it would not really make sense for them to blame it on Biden.
Substack tends to select for this kind of author. Not daily posts about their life and their latest hot take, but a few deep articles every few weeks, that make you think "hey, that's interesting". Although there is not necessarily an easy way to know where the author is talking from, whether they're entirely relevant, etc...
Even the "superstars" (Krugman, etc..) are posting this is that could have been posted on twitter, with the same level of outrage and polarization, but at least the content is well structure, and they are allowed to use sentences in paragraph, with quotes, and figures, and links, etc...
Yes, I know, it's called blogging. I'm saying that the new hot thing, in 2026, is blogging.
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