We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with.

This is such an important point. We are too late in the game to have the luxury of choosing a single sector or a single solution to pursue before the others. We need to hit all sectors with a diverse barrage of solutions, and we need to do it yesterday.

To quote UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts – everything, everywhere, all at once.”

we don’t have the grid capacity

For those not in the industry, “grid capacity” here doesn’t refer to power generation, but power distribution. With renewables, generation is comparatively easy (storage notwithstanding). But getting the power where it needs to go is not. Right now, thanks to a grain-oriented steel squeeze, the lead time on transformers is longer than the commissioning time for an entire solar farm. Switchgear is also hard to get your hands on, especially with SF6 being phased out.

The good news is that these long lead times are caused by demand. Right now, utilities are racing to expand and reinforce the grid in preparation for the next 30 year’s worth of EV demand, renewable storage/transmission, and distributed generation. Utilities are risk-averse by nature, and do not move without conviction, so it’s rare and noteworthy to see this kind of industrial momentum.

Source: I design MV distribution equipment in the US.

In addition, while some companies try to blame workwrs for recordable incidents, safety is always ultimately management’s responsibility. Safety controls or procedures missing? That’s management’s fault. Workers disabling safety controls out of malice or hubris? Managment is at fault for hiring them. Workers so overworked and tired they don’t notice mistakes while operating lethal equipment? Management. Workers having to choose between having a job and doing it safely? Management. Lack of safety culture? Management.

With power comes responsibility, and in modern corporations, management has all the power.

I’m an engineer who works in an industrial environment, and I regularly have to repair or reprogram hazardous equipment. Here are a few takeaways I got from the descriptions of the Tesla incident:

• Lockout/tagout was not being respected. If you don’t have a lock, yank the fuse and stick it in your pocket. But whatever you do, when working on a machine, you must maintain exclusive control so nobody activates it while you’re inside the approach boundary.
• Why was the engineer in the approach boundary for a “software update?” I feel like I’m missing some important context there.
• Where were the hazard indicators? A hazardous device needs sound or light indicators, so nobody forgets they left it plugged in.
• Where was the machine guarding? If it can kill you, entering the hazardous area should shut the machine off with or without LOTO. I’m partial to interlocked gates, but cordons and light curtains are popular for a reason.
• If the machine guarding was disabled, where were the observers? The last time I activated a machine with the light curtains overriden, I had three other engineers on standby, one at the E-Stop, one with a rescue hook, and one just to watch.

Windows 11 needs Secure Boot and/or TPM workarounds, and while Linux is better than it used to be, but it still hates peripherals. Only 5% of Americans work in the tech industry. Fry cooks and forklift operators often lack the education needed to find these workarounds, and are too busy and tired making ends meet to seek out that education.

In the modern corporate environment, most companies would rather replace their machines wholesale than risk unplanned downtime due to unforeseen glitches. They apply the principles of preventative maintenance to IT.

I like Linux (Mint is good stuff), and I believe in what it stands for. But the human desire for simplicity, reliability, and familiarity should never be construed as a lack of virtue.

This.

Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.

The bugs currently plaguing me include:

• Steam’s UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
• Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
• Discord won’t share audio during screen sharing anymore.

But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:

• Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
• Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
• Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
• Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
• Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
• Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
• Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
• Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.

For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.

The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.

“Help, I can’t afford rent!” -> “Buy a house, stupid.”

“Help, this software is buggy and unintuitive!” -> “Try using buggier and more unintuitive software, stupid.”

Seems like a solid metaphor to me.

Correct, Kandi wasn’t involved in this article, it’s just another documented example of this kind of behavior.

China’s system is technically communism in the same way the Bud Light is technically beer.

“No frills” might be a bit gentle.

Judging by other companies with similar outcomes, these are likely products made to meet the minimum legal definition of “vehicle,” and usually nonfunctional or minimally functional. The companies that built the “vehicles” often sell them to themselves (or rideshare subsidiaries), cashed in the Chinese tax credit, and immediately discard them. For an example of this in action, see the SEC filings and investigative articles around Kandi’s fake sales figures. Also see Out of Spec’s Kandi K27 review for what I mean when I say “nonfunctional.”

The silver lining is that since the discarded EVs are basically made of tin foil with tiny batteries, it’s not as bad of a waste of natural resources as you might expect.

Sodium-ion chemistry, material sourcing, and manufacturing techniques are still in flux. Longevity is still an issue. They’re still a breakthrough innovation, not a solved problem.

As it turns out, capitalism is better at driving iteration than innovation. Research into groundbreaking tech is expensive, risky, and the benefits tend to be spread out over entire industries, so private investors find it difficult to capitalize on (read: privatize) the benefits.

There is still investment in optimizing NMC and LFP batteries not because “big lithium” has its hooks in people, but because low-risk patentable iterative improvement is all the private sector is really good for.

This is why, if you dig deep enough, almost every “world-changing” technology you use today has its roots in government research or grants – microchips (US Air Force and NASA), accelerometers (Sandia Natl Labs, NASA), GPS (US DOD), touchscreens (Oak Ridge Natl Labs), the internet (ARPA), and even the lithium battery itself (NASA). The list goes on, and it gets particularly impressive when you look at medical breakthroughs.

Today, the US DOE has its net spread wide, funding dozens of different battery chemistries. Argonne Natl Lab is working on Na-ion right now, among others. For mostly political reasons, US-funded research doesn’t “pick winners,” so they won’t ever truly go all-in on one tech.

TL;DR: Na-ion batteries are still a breakthrough technology, so expect funding/research from state actors like the DOE or CATL to push it over the line before the private-sector investment floodgates open.

Another way to say it is that every movement needs a carrot, a stick, and an ultimatum. The carrot is evangelizing the injustice (MLK), the stick is direct action (Malcolm X), and the ultimatum is an implicit show of force and dedication that demonstrates how many people will resort to the stick if the carrot is not accepted (the mach on Washington).

While I am nearly always in the peaceful outreach camp, I strongly suspect that my efforts will not see fruition until breathless WSJ editorials start describing environmentalists as “dangerous” and “unamerican.”

I’m not 100% convinced by some of the terrestrial applications for H2, on the economics side.

In my opinion, the aviation industry can handle the cost increases inherent to greener fuel. People fly because it’s fast, not because it’s cheap. As long as the planes are still fast, there’s still a market.

By contrast, people ride the bus because it’s cheap. According to Tokyo, H2 busses cost 2.6x as much to operate as diesel. According to Montpellier, H2 busses cost 6.3x as much to run as battery-electric busses (that’s including amortization). So while the tech seems like a great fit, the commercial case is weak.

Shipping with semis is a toss-up. H2 can transport more cargo a longer distance than batteries, and I think some people will pay the premium for next-day shipping. But personally… I’d get the cheap-but-slow shipping 90% of the time.

Hydrogen works pretty well for aviation, though there are three main challenges they’re still working on: size, materals, and fuel source.

Hydrogen is nice and lightweight, but the tanks and plumbing take up a lot of space, which cuts into cargo volume, basically limiting the range if you want to take passengers with you.

The second issue is that fuel cells currently require quite a lot of platinum, and the PEM electrolysis also requires a lot of PGMs and rare metals like Iridium. The material scientists are working on this, and I figure if they can take the cobalt out of batteries, they can take the platinum out of fuel cells.

The question that comes up the most when talking about hydrogen is where the hydrogen itself comes from. Right now, it’s mostly made by steam methane reformation or similar fossil fuel processing, which is nearly as bad for the environment as burning the fossil fuel directly. But there are promising advances in renewable electrolysis (such as taking advantage of peak solar for “free” electricity) which are closing the gap between SMR and renewable H2. It’ll never be as cheap as jet fuel, but it’s at least economically feasible.

It is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate – that’s why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for “creative activities” as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.

It’s absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images

This is the process I was referring to when I said it makes copies. We’re on the same page there.

I don’t know what the solution to the problem is, and I doubt I’m the right person to propose one. I don’t think copyright law applies here, but I’m certainly not arguing that copyright should be expanded to include the statistical matrices used in LLMs and DPMs. I suppose plagiarism law might apply for copying a specific style, but that’s not the argument I’m trying to make, either.

The argument I’m trying to make is that while it might be true that artificial minds should have the same rights as human minds, the LLMs and DPMs of today absolutely aren’t artificial minds. Allowing them to run amok as if they were is not just unfair to living artists… it could deal irreparable damage to our culture because those LLMs and DPMs of today cannot take up the mantle of the artists they hedge out or pass down their knowledge to the next generation.

It doesn’t change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not “a virtual brain” that creates “art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it.” What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.

Today’s large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don’t make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers – they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They’re not striving to make the correct answer. They’re just producing the most statistically average output given the input.

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn’t create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person’t style, it must make a copy of that person’s work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.

None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.

As of last month, SAE is making NACS an open standard (properly open, not just in name). So if you want to make an NACS charger, you get permission from SAE, not Tesla.

https://www.sae.org/news/press-room/2023/06/sae-international-announces-standard-for-nacs-connector

I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know for sure that there isn’t any patent-pledge sneakery involved here, but I would be a lot more comfortable using those designs myself if they were published by a standards body like ISO, IEC, or SAE.