Unlike bitcoin, gold is a tangible asset. It has value as an industrial commodity, but it's present price is far above that. The difference in the two prices is the "collectable" part fueled only by demand, the same as Bitcoin. There is one difference. Should a catastrophe make the internet unavailable, your gold will still be there.

The point was quite obvious in context. You stated, and I quote:

"Two years of testing and development doesn't seem unrealistic."

I pointed out the obvious. It's been over 50% longer than that.

But beyond that, "solid state battery is eternally a few years away" has been a thing for well over a decade at this point. It's the same marketing category as "fusion on planet's surface is 50 years away" and "lithium air batteries are 20 years away".

Water is wet.

This sort of "let's state the obvious and pretend something so profound was uttered so it can stand on its own with no other commentary"-posting is not helpful.

Racing gliders are a specific subset of gliders that are optimized for higher speed gliding. They generally are single seaters (with some exceptions of two seaters in one behind the other configuration).

Most important difference is fuselage and wing shaping to generate optimal laminar flow at different speeds compared to normal gliders. I.e. those are the ones that get best glide ratios at 100kt and up.

Most people don't seem to know that the reason why gliders have that distinct shape is because they're optimized for laminar flow around at a very specific subset of speeds. Going off that subset in either direction disrupts the flow, generating eddies and therefore increasing turbulence and drag.

I suspect you're thinking racing gliders. This is a side by side seating glider with a wide canopy.

Well over three years.

For the record, this is a modded powered glider. These can fly way more than 600 miles, provided that terrain and weather conditions are suitable. Current record for a glider is over 3000km.

But you need specific geographic conditions for that sort of flight, where winds hit the mountains sitting next to a large body of water causing incoming wind to reliably rise up on one side of the mountains, and then going down the other side. Glider rides this constantly rising air. I.e you need something like Andes.

Propulsion is something you use to take off and give glider a push up when it can't find rising air for a prolonged period of time.

The problem is that this is another "we totally have a solid state battery, honest" claim. We've been seeing this claim for at least last half a decade. They are universally followed by "no details on actual battery chemistry, and absolutely nothing on the solid electrolyte".

If the claimed "solid state" battery ever makes it into public's hands (most never do), someone cuts it open and universally, every single time we found liquid electrolyte inside.

The usual marketing spiel for that battery (if they even try to keep up the charade instead of just pivoting to "but our next one is solid state") is "well some parts of the battery have some parts that are sorta kinda solid sometimes, maybe, in very specific (non-operating) conditions, so we advertised it as solid state which is totally not a lie but marketing".

We'll see how it goes in this case, but frankly if anyone is to crack this one, it's probably going to be CATL. They threw everything and a kitchen sink at the problem with nearly limitless supply of money both from government "strategic industry" funding in PRC and profits (CATL is basically the only meaningfully profitable part of PRC's EV sector, it's profits comfortably exceed entire rest of EV automotive sector in PRC combined).

They have announced their one over three years ago, and it's been permanently stuck in "testing phase" ever since:

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6...

So take all these amazing battery claims with a boatload of salt.

Musk is now worth more than bottom half of the most wealthy people on the planet combined.

Won't everyone please think of #6-#10 richest people on the planet and the fact Bernie can now finally say what he really thinks about trillionnaires?

Plug is standardized, but everything else is not.

The "get the specific app if you want to charge" is a very real problem here. As is "shit is broken". From app back end to chargers. All of this is very real.

You're not following. Everyone in EU is on CCS2. It's mandated by regulation from 2014.

Only legacy cars are on other connectors.

However globally, everyone is on their own thing.

You don't need a converter to use Tesla Superchargers. In EU, Tesla uses CCS2 (as does pretty much everyone else, because EU made a regulation forcing that connector back in 2014).

It's ok to hate microsoft. But I still remember the time when just forgetting to unplug ethernet cable from your PC while installing XP led to it starting to spew ads at you within 30 seconds of hitting desktop after installation being finished.

Today, you could install a barebones basic bitch win 10 home/pro 1607, and hit it with common script kiddie kit exploits and it will be just fine out of the box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Part of that is MS working together with router manufacturers, and part of it is MS genuinely hardening Windows as an OS.

Bitch about MS all you want, they took security problems very seriously after XP and fixed almost all of it. The main reason why WannaCry was a massive scandal isn't because it hit quite a few critical machines. It's because in era after win7 came out, we forgot that machines can just get owned en masse. Because microsoft fixed almost everything that caused that by that time, and it was actually safe to just hook up a win7 PC directly to the internet with just build in settings, and it would not get owned within a minute on a good day.

Penetration and vulnerability testing has accelerated massively, to the tunes of hundreds if not thousands of times with modern AI.

The fact that they managed to keep up with this and publish massive amount of patches is a sign of excellence.

And they want this testing to continue, so these are found before they're exploited to any significant degree.

It's not really hard ball. Everyone's favorite fascist grandma Thierry Breton, the author of relevant AI regulation made history in EU.

He was the first Frenchman that French president let German head of Commission remove by her request. Because after Breton started boasting about regulating AI before it even came to EU, a lot of national elites realized how badly they fucked up putting him in a position to do that.

There have been many efforts to reduce AI regulation in EU since, with at least one major initiative having been successful in reducing EU regulation. But it's still excessively onerous, and so EU is basically irrelevant in world of AI. Best we have is specific language focused LLMs like Mistral that are vastly inferior to US and PRC models.

In large part because of limits on training data and applications included in the EU level AI regulation.