I’m not an expert on this topic, but I think it comes down to cost and scalability. You have to construct a new project with custom specs for the exact site you’re on, and the permitting for a large environmental change is another drag. For large scale batteries, they all are a somewhat complex power electronic wrapper around mass produced battery cell cans or pouches that can be dropped anywhere. The cost declines of batteries are undeniable and are not stopping anytime soon.
No grid operator going to mess with scrap batteries. Even for home player new cells are so cheap that it's not worth messing around with used ones (esp when considering liability and insurance). Might work in third world countries tho who have even more appetite for reliable power.
Grid battery deployment is faster than EV market penetration in the USA. This is not something that can siphon off a fraction of EV batteries. It is a huge market in its own right.
What would be considered ruined Leaf EV batteries that have significant range loss (20% to 50% degradation, for a car that went around 60 miles with a full battery) are being used to cover peak load right now in California and have been used to do so for years.
But that isn't a mainstream case. It's notable for being weird. The 1000x larger Moss Landing battery facility just uses new, off-the shelf BESS units from LG.
Sodium Ion is looking promising for a cheaper alternative, with currently lower energy density than LFP (lithium iron phosphate) and NMC (high nickel li ion). BYD is trying to scale sodium ion, but based on analysis (I’m open to other points of view) from The Limiting Factor on YouTube, it won’t be at the same scale as lithium or make a meaningful dent in world battery production in GWh units until the late 2020s or early 2030s.
Google audio search not only does speech to text, but can give you the song if you hum. I was with some friends who tried it outside in SF and it was a noisy environment on the sidewalk, and it was able to identify the song from their hums. Magic.
I think this is the big open question of evolution as a whole, and language and art can be seen as the evolution of ideas/memes as Dawkin wrote about in the Selfish Gene. Were these developments sufficiently iterative, or was there some great leap that came out of nowhere? Was the wing merely just a stump on an animal that allowed it to leap tree to tree a foot further, or was it some process unknown to us? Was art just a splatter of blood on a cave that looked like a face to our brain’s face neural network, or did some inventive genius paint a mosaic when nothing else was ever on the cave wall?
This is why I think concerts might be a killer app in the Metaverse. Imagine you could attend a super immersive and compelling concert experience with your headset and a special audio setup for $5, and for that price, millions upon millions of people could attend. The artists could still make tons of money since so many people can go at a low price. The only problem I think would be that concerts could be VR “videos” that could easily be pirated and shared, since a digital livestream may not matter as much as going in person.
Since the topic here is Blink-182... I grew up listening to them and managed to go to a special show of theirs in a very small (for them) venue in NYC about 10 years ago. I'm optimistic about the future of VR, but the only aspect of that show that I think would benefit from it was the experience of getting to see the band members up close with just a general admission ticket, since they usually play giant arenas.
Everything else about it was a multi-sensory experience that I think would be totally flat in even the most advanced VR systems: the electric buzz running through the crowd at the opening notes to their biggest hit songs, the mass of people pressing together to get close to the stage, jumping up and down together to the beat, hundreds of others around you screaming along to the lyrics of their favorite songs, people crowd surfing, friends bringing over one too many rounds of beers, the band interacting with the crowd as a whole, feeding off the energy of the room...
Overall I'm not even a huge fan of live music, but it's hard for me to imagine a VR experience that captures all of the energy and human revelry of a great concert.
I wish I could be more helpful, but this was during a period I was distance running everyday for years without much concern on what I was consuming so long as I found it interesting.
In terms of popular podcasts maybe I could say Lex Friedman, but then I might search for one of his guests, or specific topics I wanted to learn more about, on YouTube and look for lectures or panel discussions in the results that looked like they might be high quality.
Check out the app Sorted on iOS (not sure if on Android). You can set all your tasks for the day and all their lengths (great for timeblocking), a default buffer between each task, and then autoschedule all the tasks throughout the day. If one gets interrupted, you can re-schedule them for the rest of the day after a certain time.
You could say that it’s optimized brute forcing. It seems to me that machine learning applied to combinatorial search problems of this nature cut down the search space massively by recognizing patterns of combinations that have a high probability of being good, and then traversing those paths, similar to AlphaGo. This is a completely naive take, I’d like to hear other thoughts on this.
