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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • The US really doesn’t understand that there is simply no competing with these batteries. To try to block the import of them is only going to set our own local industry back in their ability to compete in the global economy. And ironically the BMS systems for CATL are still using American semiconductors, so the US still gets some revenue from their massive expansion.

    The most viable competitors to CATL are all in China too. I’d be somewhat supportive of a CATL specific ban due to their notoriously terrible employee working conditions and crazy NDAs/non-competes, but to ban all Chinese batteries in the US would be a huge mistake.


  • Just ublock origin with default configuration. My complaints aren’t for page loading so much as scrolling. Stutter when scrolling is really annoying to me. Interestingly as mentioned the nightly version fixes this, even when ublock is also installed on it.

    My occasional page related complaints are for stuff animating correctly. This is very rare and a minor inconvenience usually, but sometimes stops you from being able to do what you came to accomplish (usually on jank websites, rental car companies for example).

    Pretending Firefox mobile is already great is counterproductive to fixing it’s issues. They don’t have extensive development resources particularly for the mobile version so it makes sense it’s worse. But to a non-techie switching to it isn’t a good experience yet. It definitely can be in the future but without at least acknowledging it’s current flaws why would anyone switch who has previously tried switching?


  • Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.









  • Yes, but to increase longevity energy density goes down substantially. Manufacturers (and many users including myself) would not make this decision for something as weight and size sensitive as a phone. The lithium ion batteries currently used already last for 2 years after all and are relatively small. A single model S battery contains 7104 individual cells for comparison. Further, lithium battery recycling has made substantial progress over the last year and will already need to be done at scale when higher volumes of EV batteries have reached their end of life. The impact of the of life phone batteries even from the entire world will be dwarfed by that of the 26 million EVs already on the roads today with thousands of cells each (or equivalent if using prismatic cells).

    Some cars use LiFePO4 batteries for the superior longevity. But the range is reduced to somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 their lithium ion counterparts. The industry is moving away from this trend in recent years in favor of traditional lithium ion with a software limited charge/discharge range.



  • The chemistry from holding that last 20% of charge for a while is what causes the degradation. The BMS can tell the system to stop charging before it’s full but it can’t do anything itself to prevent the cell from slowly being degraded by full charging.

    This is is a problem that occurs on the order of years and that’s why the EV companies care but phones historically don’t. More easily replaceable batteries is the real solution here, not software stopping you from fully charging.


  • To be fair to Netflix before other networks took streaming seriously they were charging very little to license their content on Netflix. That’s why it had everything and was so good to be better than piracy. The royalties from Netflix couldn’t be enough to fund these networks. Even Netflix themselves as the studio has struggled substantially promoting these price hikes and the effective recreation of cable TV.

    As they lose more of the licensed content they’re forced to focus on their own. Unfortunately for the just part they can’t compete with constant new mediocre shows and movies. The streaming industry as a whole has lost sight of what made it popular in the first place.




  • AA is the last United States based airline to even have one. This move is an industry-wide trend now that lie-flat business class seats are standard. Business class has gotten much nicer in the past 10 years and taken away the customers that previously would have flown in first.

    I’d rather fly Qatar qsuites or many other si-enclosed business class seats than the first class ones remaining on European airlines like British Airways, Lufthansa, of air France. And doing so is a fraction of the price.



  • I personally had no problem with them charging for API access, the rate was my bigger issue. I suspect they were basing it off of the money and hype behind the large language models that were previously training using their data for free rather than the relatively few 3rd party app users. I don’t get how there weren’t more people using them considering how bad the official Android app is, but there’s no way it was substantially impacting their bottom line.

    Charging comparable rates or even 2-3x what they would get from users of the official app seeing ads also wouldn’t be an issue to me, paying to support software is generally good as it aligns user and developer interests. But with 20x higher rates than they’d get from the user using the official app that couldn’t genuinely be the case.