On a side track, I wish to express my fears regarding AI
Unfortunately for the general populace, most technological improvements in information technology, for the past 5 decades, has lead to loss of political control and lessened their leverage for political change.
With AI, this change is going to be accelerated a 100 times.
With current AI slop, and more importantly, almost indistinguishable from reality, AI based content, the populace is going slowly learning to reject what they see and what they hear from mass media.
AI has muddied the pool so much, that every fish, us, cannot see the whole pool. What this will lead to, is for political figures and bad actors to, much more easily almost with no effort at all, create isolation among people.
No event will create a mass uprising, because no event can be believed by a common mass. It will be easy to generate an alternative reality using the same AI.
Now, the political class and the billionaire class, are free to act with impunity, because the last check on their power, the power of mass media to form public opinion, to inspire the masses to demand change or accountability, has eroded to the point of no return. (They have already captured the institutions of public power)
I fear for the future of humanity.
Edit : There are already troubling signs from the billionaire class regarding this. There is a narrative to "ensure guardrails" for AI, sort of giving the populace the idea that once that is done, AI is acceptable. This is like saying, "better have a sleeve on the knife, so that no one can cut with it, but use it as a prop in a movie"
They are creating this narrative that AI is inevitable.
They are fear mongering that AI is going to take jobs, which it will, but it also goads the capable ones to get on to the bandwagon and advance AI further.
Mass media has been going to shit for a long time anyway. People have always chosen to believe tons of insane things.
AI will cause plenty of problems of course, because it puts a powerful tool in the hands of those who shouldn't use it, but also, many people shouldn't drive cars or use the internet.
AI is inevitable, just as calculators and computers were. I suspect that no humans will write code by hand in a not so distant future. The machines will be far too effective.
Personally, I love the acceleration we're seeing since the coming of computers. The internet is a big black mirror, scary, beautiful, and ugly, just like us. AI feels similar to me.
Will some things get worse because of AI? Probably. But maybe it'll also help to save us from ourselves. If nothing else, it will probably force some investment into long overdue security, identity, and trust issues.
Good luck trying to take something back from the populace once already given for decades, even if it is in a limited form.
It's a desperate attempt, that really shows how cornered the administration is.
Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.
This has been the administration's response to such events for multiple times over the last 6 years (3 times to be exact, plus during the time of war with Israel) and the claim has always been Iran wants to shutdown internet forever. But in all those cases the access was re-enabled after a few or several weeks.
Right now the internet access is widening and some areas are already back to normal internet — but it hasn't been stable over the past week. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/ir
"In addition to the central bank, it seems as though regular Iranians are seeking the perceived safety of cryptocurrencies as unrest disrupts the country and the economy collapses."
The camera would probably only need to look at a very small section at high speed. They could be specifically made to film the tracks or the wheels of the train. Such cameras exist. Not cheap, but even some YouTubers have similar ones, to film high speed impact videos of things going much faster than trains. Might be worth it for trains.
Utility-scale Li-ion batteries are good for an order of magnitude more than that.
"LFP chemistry offers a considerably longer cycle life than other lithium-ion chemistries. Under most conditions, it supports more than 3,000 cycles; under optimal conditions, more than 10,000 cycles."
This is the paper that claims 10,000 cycles under optimal conditions.
But if you read it, they measure Equivalent Full Cycles, and it seems that implies 10000 cycles at partial discharge, not full discharge.
The paper calculates everything at nominal discharge upto 80%. Meaning, the installed capacity has to be 25% more than paper value, leading to increased costs.
Add to that, batteries are complex to manufacture, degrade, lose capacity, etc. You need high level of quality control to actually ensure you are getting good batteries. This means, the cost of QA and expertise increases. They are costly to replace, even at an avg of 3000 cycles (roughly 10 years). Bad cells in one batch accelerate degradation and are difficult to trace out. Batteries operate best at low temperatures, so the numbers may vary based on installed location and climatic conditions.
A turbine and co2 compressor system is dead simple to manufacture, control and maintain. A simple PLC system and some automation can make them run quite well. Manufacturing complexity is low, as there are tried and tested tech. Basically piping, valves, turbines and generators. These things can be reliably run for 30 to 40 years. Meaning, the economics and cost efficiency is wildly different.
With such simplicity, they can be deployed across the world, especially in places like Africa, middle east, etc.
On the whole, batteries are not explicitly superior as such. There are pros and cons on both sides.
In evaluating the importance of this, you need to consider not only the time value of money, but also what one might call the "time value of technology". Does it make sense to make the technology long lived when it's improving so quickly? Or do you just replace it in a decade when things are much cheaper? Was "this PC will last 20 years!" ever a selling point?
When evaluating these technologies, you have to look at not just what they cost now, but how rapidly the cost is improving. Batteries are likely improving more quickly than turbines and heat exchangers.
Basically, have a highly reflective white coat on your roof, to reduce temperatures by about 3 Degrees Celsius.
Almost all homes in Urban India are made from concrete and bricks, which can hold a lot of heat.
I myself have been in houses that use this to cover only some rooms of the house (mainly the bedroom), and the temperature difference is definitely noticeable. It also makes the room livable in the extreme hot summers in India.
This is the opposite. It says, "Refelects [sic] 90% of solar infrared rays," because of its "High IR reflective Pigments [sic]," so its emissivity in the infrared is 0.1, but the IR-selective paints we're talking about here are optimized for high infrared emissivity, which means they absorb a lot of infrared.
Maybe there's some wiggle room here because solar infrared is mostly near IR and MWIR, and the place where we want high emissivity (absorptivity) is longwave IR, but to the extent that the advertisement makes any claims about infrared emissivity, it claims very low infrared emissivity, not high.
A paint with low emissivity across the spectrum will slow down the temperature rise when the sun is up, but also slow down the temperature drop when the sun is down. This can still make rooms livable, but it isn't the same as what you get with regular whitewash, where the temperature of the roof is actually lower than the temperature of the air around it.
It kind of blew my mind when I first learned about this whole phenomenon (mostly from the YouTube series I posted). Not all white paints are equal and it’s kind of interesting to think that something that looks mostly identical to our eyes has very different (passive) properties in the infrared.
I think one of the things in the paints that Ben adds is a set of microspheres that reject incident incoming infrared beyond a certain angle but allow it to pass through when radiated. Something like that.
He usually garbles the scientific theory in his videos, but I trust that he's honestly reporting his experiments, and that his theoretical errors are honest mistakes rather than intentional attempts to mislead.
You should be aware that there are rigorous constraints on how much absorptance can differ from emittance, known as Kirchhoff's Law of Thermal Radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity#Absorptance because without them you could get mechanical power generation from a uniform bath of thermal radiation, which would give you a perpetual-motion machine.
Thank you for finding this! I was wrong, and I'm pleased that the product is in fact what the great-grandparent claimed. And the NASA publication is very helpful for putting this in context.
Unfortunately for the general populace, most technological improvements in information technology, for the past 5 decades, has lead to loss of political control and lessened their leverage for political change.
With AI, this change is going to be accelerated a 100 times.
With current AI slop, and more importantly, almost indistinguishable from reality, AI based content, the populace is going slowly learning to reject what they see and what they hear from mass media.
AI has muddied the pool so much, that every fish, us, cannot see the whole pool. What this will lead to, is for political figures and bad actors to, much more easily almost with no effort at all, create isolation among people.
No event will create a mass uprising, because no event can be believed by a common mass. It will be easy to generate an alternative reality using the same AI.
Now, the political class and the billionaire class, are free to act with impunity, because the last check on their power, the power of mass media to form public opinion, to inspire the masses to demand change or accountability, has eroded to the point of no return. (They have already captured the institutions of public power)
I fear for the future of humanity.
Edit : There are already troubling signs from the billionaire class regarding this. There is a narrative to "ensure guardrails" for AI, sort of giving the populace the idea that once that is done, AI is acceptable. This is like saying, "better have a sleeve on the knife, so that no one can cut with it, but use it as a prop in a movie"
They are creating this narrative that AI is inevitable.
They are fear mongering that AI is going to take jobs, which it will, but it also goads the capable ones to get on to the bandwagon and advance AI further.
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