I get frustrated when i get home and have to flip on the light swithc then find the remote to turn on the other light switch. I have a HA setup but the light/fan is controlled by some RF nonsense which I bought a RM4 PRo for that home assitant can talk to - but it doesnt, so i have to use the app for the rm4 pro.It's all bad. I dont use it lol
What right wing news source is that? They paint a pretty one sided picture here. Some truths but not all. Germany was on its way to be energy independent with wind but that was blocked by Merkel and right leaning governments since 2010. Without that intervention we could be big in wind and having a lot of people work in that sector. Instead they turned back to gas and coal.
The dependence on cars and the incompetence to get excellent on software are a huge problem here in Germany. But the educated part of the people here saw that coming.
The will to change is what is dragging us down in Germany.
What left-wing ideology is that? If wind was so promising (providing cheap energy at scale 24/7) nobody would turn away from it.
Maybe it was "blocked" because it wasn't working?
Comments from insiders in Swedish[1] and Dutch[2]. Some snippets:
... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ...
... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ...
...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ...
To be fair, the referenced comment (in Dutch) blames management:
> Helaas is het probleem bij Northvolt echt gewoon te herleiden naar slecht management (ex-Tesla), en bijgevolg een slechte keuze van leverancier van productiemachines (Wuxi Lead).
Main equipment manufacture was Wuxi Lead, where naturally everyone speaks almost exclusively Chinese and all docs are in Chinese. Not a problem of course when most customers are also Chinese, much more so when they're European.
He also mentioned they didn't specify certain details when ordering, leaving the Chinese to make choices, and that caused issues they had trouble with once delivered.
This might be a culture thing. At least next door here in Norway, a decent supplier will definitely ask when needed, offer suggestions and even resist if you try to order something stupid.
Having a supplier/disti work with you to get the best deal doesn't happen very often. Mostly due to the fact that they could leave money on the table. If you order something with the wrong configuration they can always sell you another thing with the right configuration...
There is also a possibility of cultural differences and who knows what the Chinese thought the Europeans wanted when they did not send complete specs for the equipment. In some countries it is not customary to challenge the client - but I do not know if it applies to China as well.
I've seen how they build stuff in China, and most likely Nothvolt thought it could do some things on their own without understanding what those things would entail. Maybe if they would have asked the supplier to come in and setup the factory and also run the first batches of finished batteries the situation would have been different.
Somehow I think now they're trying to find a scapegoat for the whole debacle and blame on the usual suspects.
If you are spending billions, surely you can bring in some people that speak both Chinese and the local language. Heck, there are even real-time translation services now. No, the problem is not technical, it's that it was a scam from the get go.
The goal of a scam is to make the scammer richer. Who gets richer in this case? No one. So that’s not a scam. I’m disappointed seeing that kind of accusations stated without evidences on HN, a forum about entrepreneurship and tech, where we used to celebrate success as much as learn from failure.
Most of the money went into the pocket of extraordinary dedicated employees who were paid market salaries (actually often slightly below market), and suppliers as well.
The difference is that Airbus didn't as much build new factories (and certainly not several at the same time) as it is a consortium (and later a unified company) of formerly independent European aerospace companies. E. g. their current German plants, Hamburg (commercial aircraft) and Donauwörth (helicopters) used to belong to MBB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Bloh...) and then DASA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA). That's a consolidation similar to what happened in the US, albeit maybe with more "state interference".
And also kinda required from an economies-of-scale point of view. The US is spoilt by havbing a massive, culturally-and-language homogenous country. Despite their wealth, If you want to hit those scales in Europe you need many countries on your customer list. And since each country (usually) has it's own language, laws, norms, sometimes currency, it gets way complicated, way fast.
I think i read that they could not deliver the quality and quantity expected for automobile production. Bad product, overextension and I won’t be surprised if some graft will show up once they start digging. Norway has another such venture where the executive suite pays themselves handily and delivered nothing.
Northvolt also counted on cheap materials from Russia, e.g. infamously environment unfriendly nickel from Norilsk, which clearly didn't pan out after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
I found a post supposedly written by a Chinese supplier of Northvolt. Not sure how true it is though so you will have to find some insiders to validate the story. You will need some software to translate the picture into English/other languages.
This is somewhat true, but I don’t think it is necessarily fair to them. Their strategy was to try to do everything themselves (except raw material mining). By having vertical integration across the battery space, they would be able to hopefully compete on price with the battery giants in China like CATL, while still working out of Europe, which is a lot more expensive in terms of labor costs, and regulation, and everything else. But they didn’t get that far and their biggest customers like BMW started abandoning them while waiting for deliveries to begin. This began the doom spiral. But it is possible that with more money and time this would’ve been the right strategy for the long term competitiveness of the company. Otherwise, if it’s going to be permanently uncompetitive what’s the point? Maybe this was indeed, some kind of scam for government subsidies. But I think it’s more about the difficulty of finding funding to do big things, and to do them properly.
Doing anything in the EU is hard, and since CABM is not even live yet it was unnecessarily extra-hard.
And then it seems they were completely incompetent. (Custom middling quality machines ordered from Asia, they then weren't able to scale up the process and/or quality.)
Of course, if it had worked it would have made a lot of money to a lot of people.
I don't get why whole developer circles didn't leave the platform yet. You can't ask people something via DMs without paying for the blue checkmark and it's totally unhelpful, plus it sends the message you care not enough about the right wing messaging that is send by the platform now. Or these people are just ok with that, I don't know.
They have. Lots and lots of developers are now on the Fediverse. But there's a cultural schism between the types of developers that frequent Silicon Valley cafes and the ones that frequent the Chaos Computer Club.
It's not network effect. There is nothing valuable that happens on twitter that doesn't make it's way out of twitter to the rest of the internet and reality. Avoiding twitter is actually a great way to filter out literal nation-state produced misinfo and propaganda that doesn't pass the smell test, but seems rampant on twitter.
People are addicted to twitter because of FOMO, because god forbid they learn about breaking news an hour later than anyone else.
It's good that we go in a direction where we have accessibility to the devices components and the high end technology. I can't assess how easy it is for the layman to repair an iPhone, but the inertia is there to make a device longer usable.
Only 3% of the 30% go to payment processing. Hence why they still want 27% when developers choose their own payment system.
The 27% are seen similar to Sony and Nintendo as fees to be on a platform which has wide reach but also gives tools and does stuff to enable app distribution.
Is that too much? I don‘t know but it‘s what all appear to do. The platform politics didn‘t evolve as fast as the tech though. So what about apps like Patreon, Netflix, Spotify, that was never on the table in 2008.
The 3% payment charge is the transaction fee, but that doesn’t take into account the actual handling of the rest of the transaction lifecycle, like managing refunds, or chargebacks. A single chargeback will cost you $25 whether it’s successful or not (plus refunding the transaction if you lose), but on google play and co it’s just refunded.
And there you have it. The "technology industry" hasn't had anything
to do with computer scientists, engineers or technology people in
about 20 years. It's run entirely by marketing people.
I'd imagine there is quite a lot of legal pressure against doing that. Not knowing who your customers are seems like the sort of thing that would eventually involve lawyers.
mullvad.net was interesting to me because I could pay with Monero, meaning that they may actually have no data about me whatsoever except whatever is technically required for a VPN connection. Pretty cool company but it seems like the sort of model that would struggle in most countries with the amount of financial monitoring that tends to be in place.
You're taking it too far. KYC concerns legal entities, that's a different story. In regards to individuals and their privacy, there are ways to greatly minimize personal information processing in "plain" form while keeping records (or access to records) to fulfill legal obligations.
Having had conversations with people on security and anti-fraud teams, many experts clearly share this view.
Could still be done by re-incorporating companies in countries without kyc laws. And if fines for being breached get high enough, that's probably what would happen.
That would probably be bad for tax receipts though, so it's more realistic that there's an upper bound on infosec related fines
