Voyager I and II are 48 years old running on thermoelectric generators. that’s amazing. They are winding down because the half life of plutonium means there is much less power than when new.

I can see future probes lasting even longer with americium as a fuel source

But introducing moving parts for a sterling engine? In space? And expect it to last like that? Seems unlikely

But the point of this video is whether the things you have control over make a significant difference.

You can if you just want the results but the value of a video like this is going over the process and the detail, so you know how much to trust it.

We just spend more and more time on our phones. I still charge every night. Each new phone I’ve gotten has had more battery life than the last but I also use the phone constantly, so it’s no more likely to last the day.

This is somewhat masked because my car has fast wireless charging. I just put my phone down and when I get somewhere my battery is topped off

While that seems obvious, I’ll disagree

• phones have a charging curve that takes into account heat, battery level and probably more factors specific to battery health. Most of the additional charging speed is likely minimal effect
• You can have a battery replaced on even the latest iPhone for $99 or less, and I expect most phones to be cheaper. Yeah it’s not really diy nor replacement cost only, but it’s just not that bad relative to the cost of the device. Sure I’d rather spend $20 and replace my own battery, but if I’m spending $1,000 on a new phone, then $99 every 3-4 years for batteries is just not that bad

That’s no longer true. As reporting quality continues to decline and headlines focus more and more on outrage clicks straying further and further from the content, all too many can now be answered with ”n/a”

I bet thats wrong, but I know ….

There’ve been usage changes

• iPhone has “Optimized Charging” where it predicts usage and tries to keep about 80% charge until it expects you to use it
• iPhone has “Adaptive Performance “. Maybe not charging but tries to gradually ramp to “low power mode” to be gentler on the battery
• all phones likely have refined charging curves to match battery technology

If current “personalized ” advertising is any indication, the new ai ads will push

• whatever you most recently bought
• gambling
• something relevant to whatever demographic it’s hallucinating

But it will never do something useful like advertise things you’re searching for

Not so bad when you think about it …… Ring’s subscription isn’t too expensive and it gives you cloud storage and remote access. Bring on the hatred but I’ve found it one of the few worthwhile subscriptions

User replaceable batteries would be actual cheap, would be nice. But iPhone 15 pro battery replacement at Apple is $100, and I’d expect that to be one of the more expensive battery replacements. Many phones will be cheaper, third parties will be cheaper. While I’d rather do it myself, it’s really not that much for once every three years to keep it above 80% health, and 9% of phone replacement cost.

the argument of “why would you try to save your battery by not using it when it has the same net effect of less battery?” is pretty short-sighted.

The argument is

• why try to save your phone battery when it’s critical to last the day and eventual replacement is cheap?
• it’s much more important to save your car battery because you won’t miss reduced range on normal days, you want max range available for road trips, and replacing the battery is very expensive

Definitely incredible but I still feel like people’s excitement is misdirected.

• they’re less energy dense so not likely to be on phones or many cars
• for cars the extra life is marginal when existing batteries already last more than the life of a typical vehicle
• much cheaper will make a huge difference in low end cars.
• but storage is the killer app! I don’t care about energy density but they’re much cheaper and will last much longer. Huge win!

Imagine if home battery systems cost half as much but last four times as long! Or grid storage! This is huge!

I don’t see this as a valid comparison.

• replacement phone batteries are really not that expensive. Don’t overthink it. Is it really a problem you might spend $50-$100 in three years to replace the battery?
• car batteries are not just much more expensive but they’re also overkill. Charging to 80% is more than enough for almost everyone’s daily driving on most vehicles, so why charge more?

Most of these infamous early failure modes that people are afraid of are entirely possible to repair at home for a DIY guy. On a BEV I’m shit out of luck

In a BEV many of those failure modes don’t exist. It’s quite possible we’ll see them last much longer with essentially no issues

BEVs use conventional suspensions and brake systems, so failure there are likely just as repairable DIY

The batteries have gotten better over time, but they can still fail fairly early

Aside from the OG Nissan Leaf with passive cooling, this really seems like more of a scare tactic than an actual issue.

I don’t know about all EVs, but assuming they’re similar to mine:

• battery warranteed for 8 years, 120,000 miles
• solid history of batteries lasting 250,000 miles or more
• aside from accident or manufacturing defect, batteries rarely actually fail. The above are defined for battery health being above 80%

I’m sure it happens that a few people need to replace the battery but they tend to last beyond the full expected lifetime of most cars and the usual failure mode is to continue working with less range

I didn’t know that. I guess my “English privilege” is showing

Sure there are limitations. The point still stands: an imperfect machine translation is better than no translation, as long as people understand it is.

Can we afford to allow a high bad deprive people of knowledge just because of the language they speak?

The article complains about the affect on languages of poor machine translations, but the affect of no translations is worse. Yes those Greenlanders should be able to read all of Wikipedia without learning English and even if the project has no human translators

Is it even getting misused? Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating. As long as there is transparency so people can judge the results ……

And ai training trusting everything it reads is a larger systemic issue, not limited to this niche.

Perhaps part of the solution is machine readable citations. Maybe a search engine or ai could provide better results if it knew what was human generated vs machine generated. But even then you have huge gaps on one side with untrustworthy humans (like comedy) and on the other side with machine generated facts such as from a database

Maybe they did. We’ll find out in a couple decades

Will it? I’m skeptical of the translation since it’s obviously loose and casual, and more optimistic with the quote from Tesla saying they’re redesigning it …

• article says mechanical release handles inside and out. Tesla model y could already be here depending on the details
• articles says a hand must fit behind the handle, ruling out flush handles, but depending on the details, the model y may a Ready be there, as is the Opel Corsa in this thread
• no mention of the electronic latch. I don’t get it, wouldn’t this be the actual most dangerous part?

Same here but also I don’t want a truck nor something with that low range. Aside from being not what I’m interested in , the “blank slate” concept is compelling enough to be very interesting. I’m definitely going to follow this.

For everyone reflexively hating on this “Bezos Mobile”, I’m well aware of the reputation Amazon built for itself. However they are promising something people could own. For a reasonable price. And even customize. Instead of jumping right to negativity, this warrants some optimism