> I will say that it is wild, if not somewhat problematic that two users have such disparate views of seemingly the same product.
This happens all the time on HN. Before opening this thread, I was expecting that the top comment would be 100% positive about the product or its competitor, and one of the top replies would be exactly the opposite, and sure enough...
I don't know why it is. It's honestly a bit disappointing that the most upvoted comments often have the least nuance.
How much nuance can one person's experience have? If the top two most visible things are detailed, contrary experiences of the same product, that seems a pretty good outcome?
Also, why introduce nuance for the sake of nuance? For every single use case, Gemini (and Claude) has performed better. I can’t give ChatGPT even the slightest credit when it doesnt deserve any
I reviewed the last twelve months of generation history for all balancing areas in California using electricitymaps.com before making my statement, and while one balancing area has any coal generation capacity remaining (WAPA Desert Southwest with 204MW), there is no evidence it has been fired in the last twelve months [1]. This is a bit tricky, because of the balancing areas's service area [2] and it doesn't appear there is a coal generation in their service area [3]. I'll make a note to call their media number to get more detail about generation mix and review EIA's latest EIA-860M [4]. It may be Apache Station [5] near Tucson from a quick glance before I've had coffee, but they are owned by Arizona Electric Power Cooperative.
> Best advice I got in school is -- at least early in your career-- work in the main line of business for your company
Related advice I got - work in the head office for your company if possible. Definitely turned out to be a good call in my case as the satellite offices closed one by one over time.
> The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
No. It's for both reasons, cheaper and cleaner. The pollution in cities was absolutely dire and a real health hazard as well as an embarrassment internationally. EVs including scooters and trucks are a large part of the reason the air is cleaner now.
When I was in Wuhan, I talked with an engineer who was having his second child. I asked what he thought about raising kids in such bad air pollution. He said at least it is getting better each year.
Wrote a mini adventure game in BASIC for the ZX-81. Since it only had 1K of RAM, each room in the game had to be a separate program (max around 25 lines of code or so), and at the end of the room, depending on what actions you took, it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room. When I could finally afford the 16K RAM pack, I rewrote it as a single application. Couldn't believe how nice it was to have that much memory.
> it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room.
Wow, that's dedication!
I wrote my own adventure game for my Commodore PET, which had 8K of RAM. It worked well, but after three rooms of content, I ran out of RAM, so then I gave up.
Who owned these key LFP patents? It was not clearly laid out in the article which countries owned them, let alone which companies.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
A foundational research team in a Canadian university in Quebec, if I recall correctly. They licenced these patents to the Chinese companies royalty free when used the Chinese domestic market. The Chinese spent the time developing LFP to where it's now a bleeding edge of batteries, while practically no-one else was interested.
In a retaliatory fight over the EVs, in October 2025, the CCP issued a ban on transfer of advanced technology for LFP batteries, and battery manufacturing equipment.
I've talked to people from that very lab at the Université de Montréal many years ago, before the parent expired.
The IP was licensed by Hydro-Quebec first, and some of it was also held by UT. A123 was a US company manufacturing LFP batteries in 2005 in infringement of the patents.
A123, Hydro-Quebec, UT spent 15 years suing each other (and also suing BAK technology in China and other companies that used the technology), complete with secondary patents, etc...
Hydro-Quebec actually was producing LFP batteries commercially, along with an EV program. Those ventures were cancelled, in no small part because of the political issues when Canadian SoEs compete with American businesses (but also for other reasons). HQ is restarting the LFP manufacturing program now, though, through a new spinoff.
Anyways, this is not like Nortel at all - we had two decades of a headstart and we didn't give the license to Chinese companies until quite a few years later. A big part of the issue is because an American company violated the IP, then filed secondary pattents and tried to get the originals invalidated, which led to a huge legal battle strongly discouraging investment. There was really no mistake done in licensing it to Chinese companies.
Man if that is anything close to the truth, it would explain a lot and be pretty depressing. It would imply leadership doesn’t understand software at all, and considers it a liability rather than an asset.
I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things?
The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly:
- The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past.
- Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)
- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.
- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.
So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.
That's speculation, and probably good speculation.
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
I'm in Beijing right now. I was also here 20+years ago. The difference is astonishing. Back then the air was filthy, it was hard to breathe, you never saw the sun. Today it is blue sky most days, EVs everywhere, electric scooters, busses, even garbage trucks. The roads are quiet. The air is clean. The high speed rail system is astonishingly good. This really feels in some ways like living in the future. The West is years behind.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
I don't understand why you think I am making this argument you're referring to, when I SPECIFICALLY said "I don't understand the Chinese motivation" AND I presented the US side, which I am familiar with.
My whole post was an ask for more information on the Chinese side (each of my 3 phrases were asking this!), which you have provided thank you very much, but I could do without the "you're dumb" when I ask a question.
This happens all the time on HN. Before opening this thread, I was expecting that the top comment would be 100% positive about the product or its competitor, and one of the top replies would be exactly the opposite, and sure enough...
I don't know why it is. It's honestly a bit disappointing that the most upvoted comments often have the least nuance.
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