qupada

It is a good question.

Where I live, electricity costs around $0.28/kWh, but generation is typically >85% renewable (predominantly hydroelectric).

My heat pump (4.7 COP when heating) would cost $0.06 to run for every 1kWh of heat it produces, with only 0.03kWh of that electricity coming from fossil fuel sources.

Gas - which I don't have at my house - would have pricing in the neighbourhood of $0.15/kWh. Even at 95% efficiency getting 1kWh of heat from gas would cost $0.16, using 1.05kWh of gas.

35x the fossil fuel usage and 2.5x the price, for the same quantity of heat. Some luck of living in a moderate climate where an air-source heat pump almost never loses efficiency, to be fair.

Unfortunately what's shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.

For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.

Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.

Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:

Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.

I genuinely hope you enjoy all the negative reviews you're about to receive, Sony.

I've been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.

While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.

Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.

Without giving Amazon too much of the benefit of the doubt here, I've noticed they love to offer you "coupons", generally with a midnight expiry.

I expect it's 100% a tactic to get you to commit to something you've looked at a couple of times but might be on the fence about buying.

I get the same as OP's logged-out price (nothing hidden) while logged in, perhaps if they are offering a coupon it would take it below the minimum advertised price.

Definitely stupid, but it's the only way I can see of arriving at this situation.

It does however affect getting updates from government agencies, and others who insist on only disseminating real-time information to the public via Twitter.

For instance: https://twitter.com/WakaKotahiWgtn

This is the account for traffic events (road closures, traffic accidents, etc) in my city. Not signed in, the latest visible post is from February 2023.

Since I don't have a twitter account, this is now functionally useless.

Since the realistic competitor here is probably magnetic tape, current-generation (LTO9) media can transfer at around 400MB/s, taking 12 hours and change to fill an 18TB tape.

Earlier archival optical disk formats (https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/798) claimed 360MB/s, but I believe that is six, double-sided discs writing both sides simultaneously, so 30MB/s per stream. Filling the same six (300GB) discs would take about an hour and a half.

Building the library to handle and read/write in bulk is always the issue though. The above optical system fit 1.9PB in the space of a server rack (and I didn't see any options to expand further when that was current technology), and by the looks is 7 units that each can be writing a set of discs (call that 2.5GB/s total).

In the same single rack you'd fit 560 LTO tapes (10.1PB for LTO9) and 21 drives (8.4GB/s).

So they have a bit of catching up to do, especially with LTO10 (due in the next year or so) doubling the capacity and further increasing the throughput.

There's also the small matter that every one of these massive increases in optical disc capacity in recent years has turned out to be vapourware. I mean I don't doubt that they will achieve it someday, but they always seem to go nowhere.

From the video description:

I have been a Samsung product user for many years, and I don't plan to stop anytime soon

And all sympathy I had for this person just vanished. If you don't demand better, they will keep doing - and getting away with - shit like this.

Voting with your wallet might be the one voice you have left in this world, what a way to squander it by continuing to buy products from companies whose representatives behave in this manner.

I was going to say out of Half Life (as in the 1998 original), so we're clearly thinking about much the same era :)

I think it's the slightly crispy edges where the blurred background starts, combined with the overall... flat... appearance.

Cute cat though.

The estimated training time for GPT-4 is 90 days though.

Assuming you could scale that linearly with the amount of hardware, you'd get it down to about 3.5 days. From four times a year to twice a week.

If you're scrambling to get ahead of the competition, being able to iterate that quickly could very much be worth the money.

And spatulas. Don't forget the spatulas.

Fortunately, there's an extension that solves that: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/ajgodcbbfnpdbopgmfcgdbfhabbnilbp