In fact, the limiting element for Li chemistries is generally the Nickel. Pretty much everything else that goes into these chemistries is highly available. Even something like Cobalt which is touted as unavailable is only that way because the industrial uses of cobalt is basically only li batteries. It's mined by hand not because that's the best way to get it, but because that's the cheapest way to get the small amount that's needed for batteries.
Sodium iron phosphate batteries, if Li prices don't continue to fall, will be some of the cheapest batteries out there. If they can be made solid state then you are looking at batteries that will dominate things like grid and home power storage.
> Even something like Cobalt which is touted as unavailable is only that way because the industrial uses of cobalt is basically only li batteries.
AFAIR Cobalt is also kinda toxic which is a concern.
But as far as that and
> In fact, the limiting element for Li chemistries is generally the Nickel
Isn't that part of why LiFePO was supposed to take off tho? Sure the energy density is a bit lower but theoretically they are cheaper to produce per kWh and don't have any of the toxicity/rarity issues of other lithium designs...
> Isn't that part of why LiFePO was supposed to take off tho? Sure the energy density is a bit lower but theoretically they are cheaper to produce per kWh and don't have any of the toxicity/rarity issues of other lithium designs...
LFP cells have long since taken off. Tesla has been making vehicles with LFP battery packs for half a decade now.
AFAIK, the brine pits are pretty economical, they just require ocean access.
What I'm somewhat surprised about is that we've not seen synergies with desalination and ocean mineral extraction. IDK why the brine from a desalination plant isn't seen as a prime first step in extraction lithium, magnesium, and other precious minerals from ocean water.
As I understand it (which is far from perfectly) it's still not using ocean water, because you can get so much higher lithium concentration in water from other sources. But it's a more environmentally friendly, and they argue cheaper, way to extract the lithium from water than just using the traditional giant evaporation pools.
Do you know how much magnesium you find with silicon and iron as olivine?
It's just the silicon that we haven't yet tamed for large scale mechanical usage that makes them uneconomical to electrolyze.
likely a matter of location. desal tends to be on the coast and near cities which tends to be pretty valuable land, making giant evaporation ponds a tough sell.
You don't use ponds, you run the desalination to as strong as practical and follow up with either electrolysis or distillation of the brine.
But once summer electricity becomes cheap enough due to solar production increasing to handle winter heating loads with the (worse) winter sun, we can afford a lot of electrowinning of "ore" which can be pretty much sea salt or generic rock at that point.
Form Energy is working on grid scale iron air batteries which use the same chemistry as would be used for (excess/spare) solar powered iron ore to iron metal refining.
AFAIK the coal powered traditional iron refining ovens are the largest individual machines humanity operates. (Because if you try to compare to large (ore/oil) ships, it's not very fair to count their passive cargo volume; and if comparing to offshore oil rigs, and including their ancillary appliances and crew berthing, you'd have to include a lot of surrounding infrastructure to the blast furnace itself.)
It will take coal becoming expensive for it's CO2 before we really stop coal fired iron blast furnaces. And before then it's hard to compete even at zero cost electricity when accounting for the duty cycle limitations of only taking curtailed summer peaks.
Not that it's super relevant to this discussion, but I think the largest individual machines operated would probably have to go to high energy particle accelerators like the LHC at CERN or those operated by Fermi Lab.
Billions of dollars in cost, run 24/7 with virtually no downtime during regular operations, in underground tunnels with circumferences in the tens of miles, and all throughout is actively-coordinated super conductors and beam collimation in a high-vacuum tube attached to absurdly complex, ultra-sensitive, massively-scaled instrumentation (not to mention the whole on-site data processing and storage facilities). Certainly open to bring convinced otherwise, but aside from ISS in pure cost, so far it's my understanding that those are the pinnacle of large-scale machines.
Children and adults easily generalized their knowledge to unfamiliar domains, whereas LLMs did not. This key difference between human and AI performance is evidence that these LLMs still struggle with robust human-like analogical transfer.
Let them. Individuals can move but they can't take their properties or companies with them (in any real sense, they can take a piece of paper with their name on it).
> What was the reason to create Epsilon as an alternative?
I wanted to build something fun, I did not check for existing implementations on purpose. I ended up putting more effort than I originally expected into this and now it's starting to look like it could be actually useful, almost by accident.
Electric unicycles (EUC) are an entirely different beast far out of my wheelhouse. I've never ridden one and only once had a fleeting discussion with an EUC rider. I've not previously been asked about them and wouldn't have anything to say. They're pretty different in form factor.
Do self-balancing electric unicycles count? They are a lot like self-balancing electric scooters, but with one larger wheel between your legs. The big advantage of them is better transportability: when you fold the footrests, they are compact enough that you can treat them like a chunky hardshell briefcase.
> Facts: there's abundance of testimony that would secure conviction in court regarding abductions, encounters (of variosu "kinds"), and "multi-sensor data".
'testimony' as in 'statements from people' should not nearly be enough to convince a court. Pretty sure there are also many testimonies that confirm the existence of trolls, elf's, the devil, reincarnation, angels, big foot, Loch Ness monster, etc.
Hmm, interesting point. Where we draw the line? Testimonies/memories/personal experience can certainly secure a conviction in a human court of law. This exists "in abundance" for sightings/abductions/encounters...so are we hypocrites? "Evidence is permitted If-and-only-if it conforms to our priors", or we accept the testimonial standard in play?
For me, it comes down to what you think personally. That's the discriminating factor in such an "contested" topic!
> Testimonies/memories/personal experience can certainly secure a conviction in a human court of law.
I am certain that if I go to the police blaming someone of something bad then even if my story is very very detailed, without any other (!) evidence the other person will not be convicted.
> Where we draw the line?
By requiring more evidence :) Just as an example: it is funny that despite camera’s being ubiquitous nowadays, all video evidence of aliens, big foot, ghosts, etc is very limited and always vague.
Let's hope so! (otherwise anyone could make up anything and accuse anyone!) But I guess we're talking about jury trials here and a preponderance of people confirming the same.
This is objectively incorrect (with the exception of maybe corrupt courts). No court will indict you on any charge based only on "Testimonies/memories/personal experience". Not only that, a more scientifically literate judges know that even if combined real evidence plus testimony, the testimony part is extremely unreliable at >1 year old, practically useless for any factual corroboration. It's just how human mind works, basic biology. Given a few year of time any person can convince themselves of a past event which never actually happened. But a person can imagine that with a lot of details and interactions, so vivid that he/she will truly believe it. It is normal for humans.
It always kind of sucked though. You had to go through the pairing process, and then the transfer was incredibly slow since Bluetooth is very low bandwidth.
It’s still a classic Apple “the open standard sucks so build a proprietary one that’s great but only on iPhone”
You could do it even before phones came with Bluetooth via Infrared. Granted, the two phones had to be placed perfectly for the IR sensors to connect, if you moved them the file transfer would break.
Bluetooth was a huge upgrade because you no longer needed to do that.
i think microsoft really messed up. windows phone could have been huge. i thought they were going to be. i guess things like this didn't help. they really didn't play their cards right.
Yes. When my mom got her first Android phone, she wanted to transfer all her photos from her Motorola Razr flip phone. She said the guy at the AT&T store had a device that would plug in to the data ports of various phones and transfer stuff between them, but it wouldn't do it, so he declared it impossible.
My mom was upset that she would lose her photos, so I puzzled over it for a long time trying to figure out a way. Finally, I realized I was being stupid and missing the obvious: both phones had Bluetooth! I paired them with each other, dug through Razr menus, selected the photos, and did a Bluetooth file send. As expected, the photos went right over. Well, I shouldn't say right over because it was very slow, but it worked just as it should.
When I was in high school we chatted exchanging notes/txt files between Nokias, LGs, Samsungs and Sony Ericsson feature phones and Windows Mobile (I had an HP one) and Symbian (two friends who had a N95) smartphones.
This was just as broadband was getting popular, so those who had it usually downloaded MP3s and then distributed them at school through Bluetooth. I remember one friend using her phone as a bridge to copy files from me using Bluetooth and sending to another friend's phone using IR.
This was across all the classroom, this definitely wasn't restricted to the nerdy clique. We found out that chatting through notes exchange worked pretty well and then it spread like wildfire. SMSes were expensive in my country!
This was like 20 years ago. Maybe 2006-2007. Twenty years later we're commemorating that Bluetooth File Exchange over WiFi is now interoperable between the only two major mobile OS as if it were a revolutionary technology. How backwards it is.
Phones other than iPhones can still share files with each other and with computers using Bluetooth. But people instead use apps like WhatsApp or e-mail for file transfers, even in places where iPhone's market penetration is near zero.
In the year of our lord 2007, my classmates would send (often explicit) videos via bluetooth from their phones (of any manufacturer/model/platform) to teachers' laptops when they were plugged into the projector. They would usually auto-play.
Tommysense creates a sensing mesh between devices, while ESPectre uses your existing Wi-Fi router as the transmitter. As a result, ESPectre needs only one device per area but requires a compatible router with solid 2.4 GHz coverage. The overall goal is similar, but ESPectre is open-source!
It's neat that Tommysense works on top of esphome... I'm currently using Bermuda BLE trilateration, but it doesn't quite work, especially in a multy-story living space (e.g. a townhouse). So I already have a bunch of esphome Bluetooth proxies all over the building.
But no source and "lifetime license if you join our discord" is kinda not my jam.
Founder of TOMMY here. I'm glad you like the ESPHome support. It was one of the most requested features before implementation.
Regarding the lifetime license for Discord members, that's primarily to ensure that beta testers aren't being "used" for testing and then asked to pay. A lot of my users had stories about that with previous companies, and I wanted to give a promise that wasn't going to be the case here. And building a community where people help each other with device placement, hardware suggestions, etc. is a nice addition.
Anyway, I think this project is really cool, francescopace. Many have asked for TOMMY to be open-sourced, so that's definitely something you're going to have success with. I wish you all the best!
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