It looks like peak oil will arrive faster than predicted. Demand growth was already projected to be under 600,000 barrels a day this year, but the blockade and rising prices have pushed it into negative territory, accelerated by the rise of cheap Chinese EVs, solar, and batteries.
Oil is now trapped in an economic squeeze: at high prices, it is undercut by renewables and EVs; at low prices, extraction costs eliminate any profit margin. So, we are witnessing the end of the oil age and transitioning into the age of electricity. The chinese curse may you live in interesting times come to mind as this transition will not be peaceful
the life span stat with the current battery tech is mostly useless for a normal car. 300 mile range most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. The battery degradation is not that bad in the first place.
> most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years.
When it comes to as-fast-as-possible charging, I think you can divide that number by at least 10. Slow charging while parked overnight or during the day should still be the most common case by far for most users. Very fast charging is important for road trips, but it is not the usual case.
First, with range decreasing, number of charge cycles per mile, and therefore rate of wear, will increase.
Second, average age of car on the road is above 10 years in most countries; and those that drive old cars definitely do not have €26,500* spare to swap their EV's battery for a new one.
*That's what Audi charges here for e-tron 50 battery replacement, which are already starting to fail for many owners
That's a theoretical / marketing number. In real life I am yet to see meet an EV owner who reports >80% of range after 5 years / 100 000 km of mostly-at-home charging. I see those on internet forums, but on internet forums, anyone can write anything, so I do not take those reports too seriously.
From my personal family anecdotes: my mothers' 4 year old Hyundai Ioniq 5 had complete battery failure. Thankfully under warranty. And my fathers' 5 year old Audi e-tron 50 already has <80% range remaining, with very rare fast charging.
Western car manufactures scamming their customer should not be what you look at for costs. Batteries pack costs have gone from $130-150/kwh in 2023 $80-90/kwh in 2026. Price for a pack will likely be under $50/kwh in another 3-4 years. Ie battery packs are becoming competitive with engines already and will be cheaper by 30-40% ie replacing a battery will be cheaper than replacing an engine/
Nio already has a service to swap to higher capacity battery if you want to go on a long road trip etc. It prices its cars according to battery capacity so even people that chose lower capacity car on purchase still have the option to swap to a higher capacity battery.
Though I think the main use for battery swap technology will be for commercial trucking and if I recall correctly Chinese government and OEM are working on standardisation for that so all those truck batteries are swappable no matter which company builds the battery.
Solar generation capacity is growing by 30+% a year with the cheaper grid batteries and the current world political situation the growth might even accelerate. Solar will get ahead of Natural gas by end of 2028 I predict as the next 2 years there will be huge move to renewables in Asia from gas and oil.
Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.
New electricity generation has been 90% clean for a few years now and solar the biggest part of it for 3 or 4 years. This new landmark is about energy.
That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.
EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.
Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.
We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.
A recent Danish research[1] found that the cheapest energy mix (that includes system costs like energy storage) right now for them is offshore wind power (66%), natural gas CCGT (26%), and solar PV (8%). Solar panels are cheap, but their system cost is the highest.
Is this the cheaper way to get to extreme uv lithography as from what I understand the largest bottle neck for China has been to get the exact wavelength needed to go small enough?
No, the problem is getting a high power (hundreds of watts) and high uptime EUV source, there's no reason to think this is a step towards that at the moment.
I am betting the pendulum swings faster to the other side to excess capacity as all the construction lies of Altman fall through with financiers waking up the the fact they can't build the infrasctructure as fast nor make any profits on that infrastructure that will get built.
What if it takes 100 years to get to AGI or we never achieve it? All bets on AGI will just fail over and over again for decades in that case. It seems a bit like saying financiers can't risk not being involved with Faster-than-light travel technology. Yeah, it would change everything if we got it, but betting that we'll get it soon over and over again is probably not going to get you a lot of money.
We've been projecting both FTL and AGI as future possibilities for almost 100 years now. Do LLMs get us a lot closer to AGI? I think they get us a little closer and Moore's "law" making compute faster probably is a much bigger factor, but I think we're still a very very long ways away.
Who has been projecting FTL as a realistic technology ever? FTL is not possible according to the current laws of Physics, while AGI is at least not forbidden by them.
I think this should be something you can answer for yourself by looking at human media and news over the lasy 100 years. I find it hard to belive you haven't ever noticed anyone seriously saying we may possibly have FTL sometime in the future. Incidentially I think I read on HackerNews that Sam Altman has been talking about building Dyson Spheres in the future. I suppose they're not forbidden by the current laws of phyisics either, but I don't know if I would call them a realistic technology.
The IQ of the smartest human, the perfect memory storing and recollection of computers, the fact that it never tires. I don't know if it's AGI but it's already something greater than us.
To show ads you need people to stay on your platform. This is especially true once ads become more intrusive or of lower quality, something the big players seem to gravitate towards to keep revenue up. Google and Meta have ways to lock in users (networking effects, the best search engine available, having your data stored there).
I am not sure if OpenAI has that. Their edge regarding models is small, their strategy currently seems to be "buy ALL the hardware so nobody else can". Users can quite easily switch to other models.
If only there were privacy laws and working antitrust laws. There could also be a law straight up banning chat uses of llms and only allow agentic uses with human review. Would solve a lot of problems for lawmakers worried about AI I think.
Imagine russia or china sponsoring and arming protesters in US. The last time US was actualyl attacked it put 120k japanese people into concentration camps just because they were japanese.
It's ironic that a country ruled by a pedophile and mass child murderer talks about how good or bad another country ruling class is. Wtf look at you own rulers and ruling class before worrying about what other countries rulers are doing. Most of you buy the bullshit of you being the good guys vs them being the bad guys there is no such thing.
You are both wrong and this is why they win the salary of the coder is not high the taxes on bezos and co are less and the public workers pay less. That what needs to be change not labour be paid less no matter what kind of labour
Oil is now trapped in an economic squeeze: at high prices, it is undercut by renewables and EVs; at low prices, extraction costs eliminate any profit margin. So, we are witnessing the end of the oil age and transitioning into the age of electricity. The chinese curse may you live in interesting times come to mind as this transition will not be peaceful
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