The Saudis have been investing in solar, batteries, and generally diversifying away from oil income for a while now. They can see which way the wind is blowing and would rather prepare for the future than try to cling to the past, which is rather ironic, with regard to their religion. But even the recent change with women driving is an example of that, having half the population home-bound, not participating in the economy takes a heavy toll.
Tesla has been investing in some research into longevity of the batteries. So far it looks like they can maintain 80% charge after 800,000km traveled for the car batteries. I'm not sure how that translates to the stationary batteries, because they have different power cycles, and a different chemistry optimized for their use, but overall should be pretty good.
Tesla has stated that battery recycling is part of the design of the factory that manufactures them, though I doubt it's become an issue yet. Generally, I find it really hard to imagine that mining and refining the raw materials would be cheaper than getting them in the exact quantities and purity you need in per-packaged form.
Not very significantly yet, the solar roof is not being mass-produced yet, and most of the battery production capacity is being used for the cars. But I believe they're showing something like 50% annual growth rate for the energy division. The 50,000 home Australian distributed power system should be a pretty big step forward.
I think proper exposure to coding is the main issue.
I think that if you can show a kid in high school that there's a class of problems that a computer can do a lot more quickly and accurately and save them time by writing a few lines of code, they'd be more likely to code later in life. And I think one good way to achieve that is to give them a project that's relevant to their interests and have them work their way to a solution.
When I was in grade school I remember this really annoying class, they made us walk all the way to the other end of the school and sit in front of a computer, and move a fucking monochrome icon of a turtle around to draw various shapes from our work sheet. Only when I was in college did I think back on it and realize they were supposed the be teaching us a programming language called Logo.
There's nothing special about Boolean operators, loops, functions, this stuff is simpler than most grade-school math, it just tends to be classified in a different category. An AND operator is a lot simpler than long-division.
I studied computers in high school because I liked computer games. I remember how, after being taught the basics of printing text and accepting a keyboard input in Pascal, I figured out I could partially solve a puzzle in BBS game called Legend of the Red Dragon using a loop and some basic math, then I figured out how to add menus, colors, blinking to make my app look nicer.
Years later, working as an artist, I was given the task of assembling some 3D rendered text, each letter came in maybe 6 different layers that needed to be assembled in a certain way, some color correction applied, some modifications made, it was really tedious work, half the time was spent doing nothing creative whatsoever, a waste of a human brain. So i figured out Photoshop has this feature called 'Actions' which basically records a set of steps you perform and then you can play it back again. A couple of months later a representative from Adobe came around to tell use about the new exciting ways they're going to charge the company more money, and during the meeting I asked him if there's a more powerful tool than 'Actions' and he pointed me to some documentation for their Javascript-based scripting language. I left that job several years ago, but I still hear from people who do freelance work for them that when they come in they are told 'We use this tool to export our work, a guy who worked for us a while back wrote it'.
Anyway, I see a lot of people who just do the same tedious job over and over again because they don't realize they can just solve it once and free themselves to do the creative work their human brain is meant for, the reason they got into the field in the first place. Or maybe they do realize but they'd rather do this 20 minute job today and tomorrow, and the next day, rather than spend a couple of hours now to figure out how scripting works.
I've never been a professional coder. I did some pascal and VB6 in highschool, I took some programming classes in college, but my career is in art and design.
It has always been useful to know a bit of programming, picked up Flash when I needed, wrote some tools to optimize my workflow in Photoshop with Javascript, and recently started helping out with the broader pipeline at the studio using Python and Qt.
You may never write an OS, or a large higher-performance application in it, but it's great for a personal project, a mock up, or glue for transferring data between various disparate pieces of software.
The industry I'm in (VFX, Animation) has basically standardized on Python as the scripting language most applications use internally and between themselves (Except for Adobe who have their own personal flavor of Javascript, because, fuck everyone else, build that garden wall)
Yeah, I've had that too for a while. It's essentially like having your work week subdivided into two 2-day mini work weeks, which are a lot easier to stomach. And when I would go to work It would be with an attitude of 'Let's get some shit done, wonder what they'll give me next, wonder what I've missed', rather than 'Oh shit, now I have to get through five days of this until I get to relax'. Of course there's also the added bonus of being able to run all my errands, buy groceries, deal with the bank at my own leisure and without the crowds. I've also shed some of my geeky pallor because I can take a long bicycle ride in the middle of the day and catch some sun.
I say 'had' because right now I've reduced my work week to 3 days at that company and am working two 5-hour shifts for another company from home, with flexible hours due to a difference in timezones, to test things out before I decide to switch to them full time.
My computer is six years old, but I'm not running into any issues that are frustrating enough to actively try to solve. My six year old GPU still runs today's games, can handle my three monitors. My six year old SSD still handles files fine. My six year old CPU still handles the workload. The 32GB RAM limit of my MOBO is starting to be a bit irksome, but not really a big issue.
So maybe if I wait a few more years CPU manufacturers will handle their security issues, their process shrink issues. GPU manufacturers will return to pre-crypto-bubble prices. Maybe that whole non-volatile-memory Xpoint thing will mature into a viable option. Maybe, and this is a long shot, Microsoft will sort the whole Windows 10 situation out.
3D ray tracing shoots out photons with a certain degree of randomness to build up the image. The more photons you collect, the less grainy the picture gets, which is great for this type of training because you can generate the training data to as high or low a quality as you like. The end result is a black box you run your image through that maybe cuts your render time in half (I don't remember what the actual improvement rates are), essentially for free.
I believe the battery chemistry IP is at least shared between Tesla and Panasonic. Tesla is funding some research in stuff like battery longevity, reducing reliance on scarce resources, etc.
The production of the cells is done by Panasonic with Tesla as the client, but with Panasonic investing in the infrastructure.
Everything above the cell level, integration of the cells into larger modules, cooling, software, electronics, etc is done by Tesla.
This has nothing to do with solar. When the solar roofs are installed they'll have their own batteries installed at the house. This is about backup an load balancing. When you have a battery farm that can instantly start providing power to the grid and run for four hours, you can save a whole lot of money. This is cold hard capitalism at work.
I've seen short sellers jumping on this, claiming Tesla's energy division is failing, claiming that this is confirmation that the Solar City buyout was a bailout for Elon's cousins.
What I see here is Tesla restructuring to be more efficient and consistent. Tesla is a company that grew very quickly and incorporated into itself a few smaller companies, the largest of which is Solar City. As a result of that past there are a lot of roles that grew out of a structure that fit a much smaller company that don't make sense now, roles that are redundant between Tesla and SC, etc.
As far as I understand, SC was more of a distributed solar power company that dealt with all aspects of installation, maintenance, financing, etc. Tesla's residential energy division is transitioning more towards having solar and battery products being something the consumer or the house builder buys directly as product. So they sold off the maintenance/upkeep contracts to other solar companies and they're bringing all their sales people inhouse, into the same stores they display and sell their cars in.
Tesla's battery storage division is growing significantly. And sure, like the with the Model 3 production, their new solar tile/panel factory might be taking longer than expected to ramp up, but I wouldn't take that as failure by any stretch, I often see analysts looking at last year's number, comparing it to this year's number and deciding that because it's lower or higher it is worse, without even considering it in the actual context of how the company is run.
While BO in general has pretty good potential to do interesting things in the future, and this is a learning opportunity toward that, in itself it's just a joy ride for rich people, at best a testbed for experiments that require a limited duration freefall that might be cheaper than sending them up to the ISS.
Well, they've definitely had a couple of bumps on the road, but they're getting there. They said they're pretty much locking down the design of the current iteration of the Falcon 9 and will continue flying it unchanged as they shift focus to the BFR.
I think if you look a little bit further ahead, you'll have to ask the reverse question, does ULA's record of reliability hold when they retire their current rocket families (Which they must, one for being too expensive, and the other for using Russian engines) and start launching on a newly designed rocket with newly designed engines when SpaceX will have more than a hundred launches under their belt?
Sure, if true it's an issue for the SEC, and an incredibly stupid and pointless act of fraud for a company already under fire from many directions.
Does it seem like the kind of thing to weigh on a person's conscience to turn whistleblower? Misreporting sales by 120 units? Having more scrap widgets than expected?
"And he claims that Tesla inflated the number of Model 3's it made when it said it had built 2,020 of the cars in the seven days prior to a much anticipated April 3 report. Tripp said the actual number is closer to 1,900."
A true whistleblower, the world needs to know! Think of all those poor shareholders being lead astray.
Yeah, Elon recently tweeted this: 'Germany is a leading choice for Europe. Perhaps on the German-French border makes sense, near the Benelux countries'
Or maybe Twitter is just full of assholes being assholes to anyone they don't agree with and this particular person has a personal agenda to engage in selection bias about pee-pee parts.
My impression is he's well aware of financial realities, he just wants to make the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time and is willing to take as much risk as the market will bear for accelerating short-medium term growth.
Slashdot Mirror
The Saudis have been investing in solar, batteries, and generally diversifying away from oil income for a while now.
They can see which way the wind is blowing and would rather prepare for the future than try to cling to the past, which is rather ironic, with regard to their religion.
But even the recent change with women driving is an example of that, having half the population home-bound, not participating in the economy takes a heavy toll.
Tesla has been investing in some research into longevity of the batteries.
So far it looks like they can maintain 80% charge after 800,000km traveled for the car batteries.
I'm not sure how that translates to the stationary batteries, because they have different power cycles, and a different chemistry optimized for their use, but overall should be pretty good.
Tesla has stated that battery recycling is part of the design of the factory that manufactures them, though I doubt it's become an issue yet.
Generally, I find it really hard to imagine that mining and refining the raw materials would be cheaper than getting them in the exact quantities and purity you need in per-packaged form.
Not very significantly yet, the solar roof is not being mass-produced yet, and most of the battery production capacity is being used for the cars.
But I believe they're showing something like 50% annual growth rate for the energy division.
The 50,000 home Australian distributed power system should be a pretty big step forward.
I think proper exposure to coding is the main issue.
I think that if you can show a kid in high school that there's a class of problems that a computer can do a lot more quickly and accurately and save them time by writing a few lines of code, they'd be more likely to code later in life.
And I think one good way to achieve that is to give them a project that's relevant to their interests and have them work their way to a solution.
When I was in grade school I remember this really annoying class, they made us walk all the way to the other end of the school and sit in front of a computer, and move a fucking monochrome icon of a turtle around to draw various shapes from our work sheet.
Only when I was in college did I think back on it and realize they were supposed the be teaching us a programming language called Logo.
There's nothing special about Boolean operators, loops, functions, this stuff is simpler than most grade-school math, it just tends to be classified in a different category.
An AND operator is a lot simpler than long-division.
I studied computers in high school because I liked computer games.
I remember how, after being taught the basics of printing text and accepting a keyboard input in Pascal, I figured out I could partially solve a puzzle in BBS game called Legend of the Red Dragon using a loop and some basic math, then I figured out how to add menus, colors, blinking to make my app look nicer.
Years later, working as an artist, I was given the task of assembling some 3D rendered text, each letter came in maybe 6 different layers that needed to be assembled in a certain way, some color correction applied, some modifications made, it was really tedious work, half the time was spent doing nothing creative whatsoever, a waste of a human brain.
So i figured out Photoshop has this feature called 'Actions' which basically records a set of steps you perform and then you can play it back again.
A couple of months later a representative from Adobe came around to tell use about the new exciting ways they're going to charge the company more money, and during the meeting I asked him if there's a more powerful tool than 'Actions' and he pointed me to some documentation for their Javascript-based scripting language.
I left that job several years ago, but I still hear from people who do freelance work for them that when they come in they are told 'We use this tool to export our work, a guy who worked for us a while back wrote it'.
Anyway, I see a lot of people who just do the same tedious job over and over again because they don't realize they can just solve it once and free themselves to do the creative work their human brain is meant for, the reason they got into the field in the first place.
Or maybe they do realize but they'd rather do this 20 minute job today and tomorrow, and the next day, rather than spend a couple of hours now to figure out how scripting works.
Why would we want to permanently get rid of the resources that we use the most?
I've never been a professional coder.
I did some pascal and VB6 in highschool, I took some programming classes in college, but my career is in art and design.
It has always been useful to know a bit of programming, picked up Flash when I needed, wrote some tools to optimize my workflow in Photoshop with Javascript, and recently started helping out with the broader pipeline at the studio using Python and Qt.
You may never write an OS, or a large higher-performance application in it, but it's great for a personal project, a mock up, or glue for transferring data between various disparate pieces of software.
The industry I'm in (VFX, Animation) has basically standardized on Python as the scripting language most applications use internally and between themselves (Except for Adobe who have their own personal flavor of Javascript, because, fuck everyone else, build that garden wall)
Yeah, I've had that too for a while.
It's essentially like having your work week subdivided into two 2-day mini work weeks, which are a lot easier to stomach.
And when I would go to work It would be with an attitude of 'Let's get some shit done, wonder what they'll give me next, wonder what I've missed', rather than 'Oh shit, now I have to get through five days of this until I get to relax'.
Of course there's also the added bonus of being able to run all my errands, buy groceries, deal with the bank at my own leisure and without the crowds.
I've also shed some of my geeky pallor because I can take a long bicycle ride in the middle of the day and catch some sun.
I say 'had' because right now I've reduced my work week to 3 days at that company and am working two 5-hour shifts for another company from home, with flexible hours due to a difference in timezones, to test things out before I decide to switch to them full time.
It's like someone looked at communism and thought 'Woah woah, nice idea, but we don't want to get carried away with all the practical stuff'.
It's like filling up a bucket of water and pouring it into the ocean through a sieve.
So everyone gets a $1 participation trophy for fulfilling the requirements to be listed?
Well, except for those who don't actually reach the funding goal, they get nothing, this is utterly meaningless for them.
And for those who do reach it, great, they can maybe buy a stick of gum.
It takes courage not to bother putting a GPU in your unupgradable computer.
Next step is obviously making it wireless.
You haven't lived until you've had 40Gbps piped through the air near your head an nether region.
My computer is six years old, but I'm not running into any issues that are frustrating enough to actively try to solve.
My six year old GPU still runs today's games, can handle my three monitors.
My six year old SSD still handles files fine.
My six year old CPU still handles the workload.
The 32GB RAM limit of my MOBO is starting to be a bit irksome, but not really a big issue.
So maybe if I wait a few more years CPU manufacturers will handle their security issues, their process shrink issues.
GPU manufacturers will return to pre-crypto-bubble prices.
Maybe that whole non-volatile-memory Xpoint thing will mature into a viable option.
Maybe, and this is a long shot, Microsoft will sort the whole Windows 10 situation out.
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
3D ray tracing shoots out photons with a certain degree of randomness to build up the image.
The more photons you collect, the less grainy the picture gets, which is great for this type of training because you can generate the training data to as high or low a quality as you like.
The end result is a black box you run your image through that maybe cuts your render time in half (I don't remember what the actual improvement rates are), essentially for free.
I believe the battery chemistry IP is at least shared between Tesla and Panasonic.
Tesla is funding some research in stuff like battery longevity, reducing reliance on scarce resources, etc.
The production of the cells is done by Panasonic with Tesla as the client, but with Panasonic investing in the infrastructure.
Everything above the cell level, integration of the cells into larger modules, cooling, software, electronics, etc is done by Tesla.
This has nothing to do with solar.
When the solar roofs are installed they'll have their own batteries installed at the house.
This is about backup an load balancing.
When you have a battery farm that can instantly start providing power to the grid and run for four hours, you can save a whole lot of money.
This is cold hard capitalism at work.
I've seen short sellers jumping on this, claiming Tesla's energy division is failing, claiming that this is confirmation that the Solar City buyout was a bailout for Elon's cousins.
What I see here is Tesla restructuring to be more efficient and consistent.
Tesla is a company that grew very quickly and incorporated into itself a few smaller companies, the largest of which is Solar City.
As a result of that past there are a lot of roles that grew out of a structure that fit a much smaller company that don't make sense now, roles that are redundant between Tesla and SC, etc.
As far as I understand, SC was more of a distributed solar power company that dealt with all aspects of installation, maintenance, financing, etc.
Tesla's residential energy division is transitioning more towards having solar and battery products being something the consumer or the house builder buys directly as product.
So they sold off the maintenance/upkeep contracts to other solar companies and they're bringing all their sales people inhouse, into the same stores they display and sell their cars in.
Tesla's battery storage division is growing significantly.
And sure, like the with the Model 3 production, their new solar tile/panel factory might be taking longer than expected to ramp up, but I wouldn't take that as failure by any stretch, I often see analysts looking at last year's number, comparing it to this year's number and deciding that because it's lower or higher it is worse, without even considering it in the actual context of how the company is run.
While BO in general has pretty good potential to do interesting things in the future, and this is a learning opportunity toward that, in itself it's just a joy ride for rich people, at best a testbed for experiments that require a limited duration freefall that might be cheaper than sending them up to the ISS.
Well, they've definitely had a couple of bumps on the road, but they're getting there.
They said they're pretty much locking down the design of the current iteration of the Falcon 9 and will continue flying it unchanged as they shift focus to the BFR.
I think if you look a little bit further ahead, you'll have to ask the reverse question, does ULA's record of reliability hold when they retire their current rocket families (Which they must, one for being too expensive, and the other for using Russian engines) and start launching on a newly designed rocket with newly designed engines when SpaceX will have more than a hundred launches under their belt?
Sure, if true it's an issue for the SEC, and an incredibly stupid and pointless act of fraud for a company already under fire from many directions.
Does it seem like the kind of thing to weigh on a person's conscience to turn whistleblower? Misreporting sales by 120 units? Having more scrap widgets than expected?
"And he claims that Tesla inflated the number of Model 3's it made when it said it had built 2,020 of the cars in the seven days prior to a much anticipated April 3 report. Tripp said the actual number is closer to 1,900."
A true whistleblower, the world needs to know!
Think of all those poor shareholders being lead astray.
Highlander was a cautionary tale about the corporate ecosystem.
Yeah, Elon recently tweeted this:
'Germany is a leading choice for Europe. Perhaps on the German-French border makes sense, near the Benelux countries'
Or maybe Twitter is just full of assholes being assholes to anyone they don't agree with and this particular person has a personal agenda to engage in selection bias about pee-pee parts.
One way in which it is different is it allows companies to get funding by issuing stock, thus allowing them to grow faster.
Another is, as opposed to playing at a casino, investing in a diverse portfolio actually gives you positive gains over a long period of time.
My impression is he's well aware of financial realities, he just wants to make the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time and is willing to take as much risk as the market will bear for accelerating short-medium term growth.