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Voting is one of those things that people care very little about but it's extremely important as it can determine who is the head of state (a position that has a lot of power an influence).

A single compromise once can have incredibly bad long term consequences for the majority of a ruling elite gain power indefinitely.


You're being downvoted because not everyone has CLI access to a server and the required ghostscript binaries etc.

Realistically, most 'normal users' have PDF needs like these links and we as tech people can safely give these sites to non-technical people and have confidence their data isn't being stolen on remote dodgy servers (think gas / electricity bills, invoices, bank statements etc which is a PII gold pot).


Server? what server? Ghostscript is available in virtually any Linux distro, on Mac with and without brew and even on Windows.

I have no confidence in any website, especially the one that claims to be local-only but can technically change on a whim of the developer once it starts getting enough traffic from users.

OTOH, I trust 30+ years old software sitting on on my hard drive not to phone home on every keystroke.


100%

People forget this is also a place of discussion and the comment section is usually peak value as opposed to the article itself.


Wrong.

Energy usage goes up for all societies, no matter how efficient we make things to be.

Our living standard goes up with more electricity (EVs for example require more energy, as would more electrification of things).

The real problem is no investment in alternative sources like Nuclear.

We've had this debate before and the usual renewable only crowd only see as far as today's usage to say what we 'need'.


And we're officially going down the drain with linux / command line:

``` #!/usr/bin/env claude-run --permission-mode bypassPermissions ```


Claude Code supports a set of flags to control behaviour such as permissions, and both `--permission-mode bypassPermissions` and `--dangerously-skip-permissions` are examples of those.

The claude-run helper supports passing in those flags supported by Claude Code itself that are relevant to a shell-scripting like context.

It also adds a couple of convenience flags (`--aws`, `--azure`, `--vercel`, `--vertex` for cloud API key use).


I'm very skeptical of any company that just 'pops up' and makes a bunch of claims that will shake up the industry.

I doubt they'd sell to endusers, but not having any partnerships with established brands with sales figures is a big red flag.

No mention of manufacturing capabilities either so I think it's just hype (or worse a rug pull for early investors)


if you look at the history of the lithium ion battery [1], this is exactly what happened, except from a single man. none of the existing manufacturers could stomach the shift to something new, except for sony, which needed a better battery for their camcorder, eventually resulting in a nobel prize.

[1] https://youtu.be/AGglJehON5g


No company involved in lithium ion batteries just popped up out of nowhere.

Whittingham worked for ExxonMobil. Akira Yoshino worked at a joint venture of Toshiba and Asahi Kasei. And Yoshio Nishi worked at Sony.

They were all giant well-established companies.


Plus, every major battery and car company is chasing solid state battery technology as the holy grail. And lots of startups.


When I was buying lithium ion cells a few years ago for a custom off-grid battery build, CATL cells had the best reviews and testing results around.

They were founded in 2011 as a spin-off from ATL, itself founded in 1999 by a Chinese billionaire (Robin Zeng). They definitely didn't pop up out of nowhere.


Some poking around suggests it's a subsidiary of "Verge Motorcycles", which are electric and have much more of a web presence.


Agreed. But you can supposedly book a test ride on a Verge motorcycle with this battery.[1] Verge has three stores in California, two of which are in Silicon Valley.

Base price $35,000 with the good battery.

Solid state batteries have been working for a while now, but they're still far too expensive. Mercedes has one demo car. Ducati has one demo motorcycle. Maybe they just decided to accept the high cost and sell a high-end product.

[1] https://www.vergemotorcycles.com/


Yeah, I’m wondering if it could be a Tesla strategy of starting with the something imperfect but niche.

If the product is on the market and you can buy one and walk out the door, I feel like claims can easily be validated or invalidated with a tear down.


Not even a teardown. Just a few charge + discharge cycles, measuring the energy.


I'm not sure the test rides are for the version of the bike with this battery. The bike already exists with a more conventional battery pack.

I've had a brief test ride on a pre-production version of the Verge TS. All seemed OK but I thought the handling seemed weird - maybe due to the rear tyre size and geometry.


Let's wait until Q2 when the first bikes with ssb would roll out


They didn't just pop up. Oems & their sister company Verge are already using their axial flux motors. And you can order the latest Verge motorcycle with the solid state battery today.


Um... Did nobody see the Verge motorbike which is now shipping as standard with this battery? And the three companies which are also deploying the new battery tech? If this is a scam, it's definitely a very very sophisticated one.


The Verge was discussed at least 2 times, most recently yesterday, on the Wheel Bearings podcast (which I enjoy for the simple motorhead banter). https://overcast.fm/+AA7tJqdxHkE

Robbie from SAE International, who is of the hosts, and an avid motorcyclist, is impressed with the bike and the promise of SSBs. I only ride bicycles, can’t comment on the bike itself, but thought to share and widen their audience. It was kind of a mini shallow yet “deep dive”. It doesn’t seem to be mentioned on their own site for this episode, but the chapter in Overcast is the last one, linking to https://sustainablecareers.sae.org/article/donut-lab-verge-s...


"Now shipping?" I do not see evidence of that. I am not even convinced the one you can test ride has this battery tech. They announced this same bike at least a year ago with regular LIon batteries.


I don't know about a scam, but the EV skateboard they're using has been available for other companies to use for a few years, while the other two companies share the same leadership as Donut/Verge and appear to be founded within the last few months. The battery may be great, but the multiple company launch seems a bit of a marketing gimmick.


not too sure of your point. The skateboard has been available with conventional lithium ion batteries. What they're saying here is they've just upgraded it to the new solid state ones. Fairly logical.And I'm totally mystified by the shared leadership comment. What shared leadership?


According to press releases, the CEO of Donut/Verge founded Cova and ESOX in October/November. They're newly formed companies that haven't done anything yet, so I don't really think it would require much sophistication to say that three companies have already adopted this technology. Again, this doesn't say anything about the "realness" of the battery technology, I just wouldn't rely on the idea that multiple companies adopting it means that the technology is real, since right now it's tending to look more like businessmen throwing out multiple shell startups in different industries to lend weight to the announcement.


Hmm..not really. Cova Power is a joint venture between Donut Labs and Ahola which is a huge Finnish freight company formed in 1955 - which makes sense since they are both based in Finland. The involvement of the University of Oulu suggests that this is clearly a Finnish project. I wouldn't be surprised to find some Nokia money in there as well. ESOX is just the military product arm of Donut Labs, which I guess has connections with the Finnish military.


How would you do it, instead?


Not necessarily a scam, but it smells like more hype that reality. For example, the web page boasts "2000+ test rides complete", which basically says nothing.

I hope this battery tech and the statements on the web page are true (370-mile range from an electric motorcycle!), but I'm not writing any checks just yet.


One thing that most people have missed is that in the Verge small print they discuss the range of the motorbike as being 217 miles for around town driving, which plummets to 127 at 56 mph per hour on the highway. That seems quite a big drop to me, but there again I'm not a battery expert.


See you in 2027 with the same prediction!


I don't think this is how it would have played out at all.

I'm no expert on IPv4 or IPv6, but if they had designed IPv6 to be able to route fine to IPv4, we'd be OK.

It would at least give people an upgrade path where their old stuff that couldn't be patched / updated and were stuck on IPv4 could be slowly killed off in the path of least resistance down the dependency line.

This 'dual stack' approach doubled up on everything up front and meant we all had to do both during the transition (which has taken 30 years).


IPv6 explicitly supports all sorts of transitional technology, including being able to map v4 addresses to v6 that are used with translation gateways connecting from v6 to v4 (widely used in mobile networks to provide any v4 access).

That still requires that if you have used BSD Sockets before getaddrinfo was added (or like many, didn't learn about it for years) then you had to rewrite the parts of your application that are responsible for handling connections.

So the very thing you're advocating for exists


Yep I suspect this too from the benchmarks. The linux kernel doesn't send the instructions to the right cores and likely sees them all as the same and not 'high power' vs 'low power' cores


Article quotes `40 megawatt-hours of installed capacity.` - Surely this can get you pretty far from Tasmania to South America.


apparently, 40MWh of capacity is enough to travel 40 nautical miles. The distance between Tasmania and South America is around 6,500–7,500 nautical miles.


For comparison, a wide body airliner needs ~0.15MWh to travel 1 nautical mile.


A wide body airliner doesn't carry "up to 2,100 passengers and 225 vehicles".


It also does so in a medium where the main drag force is induced by air rather than water, which is probably a comparably significant factor


It also needs to beat up that air enough to make the resultant forces overcome gravity acting on the airliner whereas the ship just gets to float there.

Apples to orages.


Yup.

Or to structure it a the earlier comment: for comparison, it takes me about 0.000065 MWh to cycle 1 nautical mile.

That's a couple of apples.


You also aren’t doing so while carrying 2100 passengers sms 225 cars, I imagine.


Plus they are going to get very waterlogged cycling that nautical mile.


Some dedicated cyclists will cycle in any weather.




I would be extremely surprised if the ship were designed to use 100% of its capacity in one way of its intended route.


The drag on a vessel is orders of magnitude larger than the drag on a car.


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