Interesting. Now that you mention it, i remember listening to a podcast that mentioned financing being a big obstacle for wind turbines, particularly the offshore projects, due to exactly that upfront cost. And i can imagine that for developing countries that is even worse.

Still i’d have thought that solar wouldn’t quite have this same kind of problem, but i guess as the article suggests fossil fuels were cheaper, there’s a political angle, and things are slowly improving.

Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables.

For coal the summary definitely seems to support the reduction in themand, but at least for the next few years gas and oil still seem quite stable to me.

I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure;

Shouldn’t it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.

Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and ‘other’: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked

Imo the recent events have made it a bit hard to judge trends just from a few years. 2021 you are right in the middle of covid screwing over global trade, following that you have russia invading ukraine and the subsequent shift in europe (will be interesting how that plays out once the conflict ends), and as the main article of this thread suggests hydro was heavily affected by recent droughts (although those might become the norm). Only nuclear might be somewhat easier to extrapolate, since new capacity doesn’t just magically appear, but involves long term planning.

One thing to keep mind is that while the percentage share of renewables is growing, in absolute terms electricity production from coal and gas still increased. Looking at this data, which I assume to be the base of this article.

HDR vs no HDR makes a big difference in colours to me. And if you compare compressed low Bitrate footage vs higher Bitrate there will often be artifacts or color banding, particularly in darker scenes or wherever you have gradients.

It ofc also depends on what device you are watching it on. But I would say that yes if you have a movie (made up example) that is compressed to 5gb total size vs 25gb vs 70gb for the uncompressed Blu-ray quality, then the first jump will be a very noticeable difference assuming you have capable hardware. Whereas the second one will be much much less noticeable and also come with other drawbacks that need to weighted off, e.g. storage requirements.

Is that actually the case? I was under the impression that at least under US teenagers the iPhone usage was insanely high. And those are far from cheap, so at least there parents seem fine in spending big.

Also the cited article mentions $250 for the se watch vs $200 for the Samsung (although I guess that one might have bigger discounts). $50 difference doesn’t seem large for the “Apple tax”.

To me the plastic part would just seem like a risky gamble. Apple has the premium image and it might cheapen it. Especially on a device that is constantly visible, has skin contact and isn’t used with any case.

The question is if they actually need more land or just more resources. I imagine they already get the latter for dirt cheap, so why bother actually invading.

Doesn’t look great:

• No progress with health features, which seem like the most exciting evolution.

• Who truly needs the larger screen and faster chip. Especially the former will presumably reduce battery life, something that very much matters with watches.

The company is also working on a new version of its lower-cost Apple Watch SE model, which it last updated in 2022. One idea the company has tested is swapping the aluminium shell for rigid plastic. It’s likely to lower the cost to something that could better rival Samsung’s cheapest watch, the $199 Galaxy Watch FE. The SE currently starts at $249.

That really doesn’t sound like Apple.

The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down.

I fully agree with the first sentence, but i don’t think the second quite hits the mark. The real reason is simply cost.

If Nintendo was concerned with battery life, then they’d still go with a modern processor, but as you say clock it down to hit the efficiency sweet spot over chasing performance. But instead they usually choose something that is already dated at release (even accounting for development time), as opposed to a company like Apple that pays a premium to get first dibs on any new processing node.

But are those notifications and pop ups directly saying something like “from now on we will start to train ai on your information”?

Or is is one of the hundredth change of terms and conditions that people usually just skip, which mentions the major change in some fine print. Or a pop up designed with dark patterns to influence people into just accepting without actual informed consent?

Is that the one they recently moved from Moscow to Crimera? First article I found on the topic

If so that didn’t take long and is pretty embarrassing.

From my understanding, ist rivian Kind of a Truck company?

I think it’s split between delivery vans and SUVs. Amazon has a stake in them aswell. I think at some point they owned like 20%? Not sure how much they currently hold.

Software has to be the main draw. I am not sure how interested they are in the delivery vans, and one has to think that they have enough SUVs themself.

Thanks for digging this up.

It would make sense if at least the vans would make some profit, otherwise it looks like madness (kinda still does to me) to spend this much money on getting into an industry that is actually imo not that attractive.

Even with the switch from combustion to EV, car manufacturing is still a capital intensive and low margin business. And they don’t seem to go for the potential jackpot that is autonomous driving

I’d like to think that I have a reasonably decent understanding of economics for a laymen, but in this case I’m a bit stumped.

Seems to me that for 5 billion dollar (+however much VW spent on their own software) you should be able to develop a good operating system for your own cars. But I guess VW somehow failed and now would rather license Rivians through this joint venture?

Is a car OS really that expensive and complex to develop? Especially when android auto and Apple car play will do a lot of the heavy lifting for most people.

Even with losses of nearly $40,000 for every vehicle it delivers, Rivian has been on a steadier footing than other EV makers that have been forced to slash prices to stimulate demand or file for bankruptcy protection.

Rivian’s cash and short-term investments fell by about $1.5 billion in the first quarter to just under $8 billion.

Nearly 40k loss per vehicle? That seems insane. How has that company been going on until now? They also say that they even before this deal they had enough reserves to last until their next models release and things were moving up, but still that is seems like an absurd rate to burn cash.

I get that it sometimes makes sense for companies to burn through heaps of cash to scaley capture market share or drive out competition, but is the car manufacturing market at this point in time one where this play still makes any sense?

Fallout probably got a boost from the new series, that was quite well received.

I wonder if this method doesn’t overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.

You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.

Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.

Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.

Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.

And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.

Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.

Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.

I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.

Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides

But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:

For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.

For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.

Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.

Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.

The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.

The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.

Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.

but it’s utterly useless.

That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.

Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.