We need every approach that's viable. Batteries are part of the solution, and will be in future. But I don't see why we we should assume they're better in every way than this approach
A principle in engineering is that for any market niche, only a few, or even one, technology persists. The others are driven to extinction as they can't compete. It's the equivalent of ecology's "one niche, one species" principle.
There are far more technologies going for the hours scale storage market than will survive. Sure, explore them. But expect most to fail to compete.
This is not true for batteries at all. Just take a look at [1]. Many of these battery chemistries are in wide use. Batteries have several performance metrics: total storage, peak/avg power, round-trip efficiency, lifetime, capex, opex,etc. The relative value of these metrics is different for different applications, so we end up with many different types of batteries being used.
Grid level batteries have another very important metric. The actual possibility of buying a particular types of batteries from friendly nations. Simpler technologies like this CO2 battery have a huge advantage here.
Of course it's true for batteries. There's a huge number of potential battery types, most of which never make it out of the lab, never mind to market. Most on your list there are in are in tiny niches.
To steelman the point you're making: perhaps the short term storage niche will fracture into smaller niches, in which different technologies could coexist. This also happens in ecology. For example, in one simple experiment with bacteria, it was found two species coexisted, but on closer examination it was found one species persisted in the top of the flasks, the other in the bottom.
The definition of "market niche" must do too much work for my liking to make this true.
For example, for the market niche "getting people from one location to another" there are quite many technologies, like walking, bicycles, scooters, cars, trains, ships, airplanes, helicopters etc., none of them evolved as a clear winner that displaced the others.
You might say, that's a whole market, not just a market niche, but it's also a niche of the larger transportation market.
When we look at something like grid-scale energy storage, how do we know if it's a winner-takes-all niche? Maybe constraints such as availability of space, availability of funding, weather, climate, grid demands etc. create sub-niches with their own winners. Or maybe not, but how can we known?
* Many breakthroughs from the first research stages never make it into medical application.
* Many breakthroughs are touted as some kind of "novel treatment", but when they get into the hands of the doctor, they talk about it as chemotherapy, because it kills cancer cells. So you might not even notice that you're getting something novel.
* Many breakthroughs take decades until they actually land in mainstream treatment.
* Many breakthroughs are specific to some kinds of cancer.
That said, in most developed countries, survival rates/times for cancer have been steadily improving for decades.
It's a bit like with solar cell and battery tech breakthroughs: you hear about them all the time, but it takes 20 to 30 years until they make it to production. But both have been improving steadily for an impressively long time.
The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.
Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )
Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.
Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.
Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.
I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."
Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.
When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.
It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.
Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum
No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.
But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.
I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin
Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh
I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with today" in that any typical current and working car is not going to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you problems if that's what you were comparing instead.
I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.
I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site rather than Google Analytics, for example.
You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.
That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely.
I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.
I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.
I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.
AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.
You jest, but even in the age of modern warfare, countries still actively declare war and formally notify the other country, even if a bit late, with a formal declaration. The notable exceptions being of course the USA and the USSR and Russia, which like to call their wars "police actions" and "special military operations".
I would contend that we live in an era of “5th Generation” undeclared wars between powers. I don’t personally draw a line between a missile attack and a shipment of fentanyl or cocaine which will kill citizens all the same.
the redcoats didn't wear colorful coats and form nice big lines because they were stupid. They beat Napolean using similar tactics. And they didn't lose to the US because of these tactics.
Maybe you should reflect on why people who have lead others in combat have decided that there should be rules to war before you declare that rules of war are a bad idea.
The Red Coats lost quite a few battles to their aged tactics against the Patriots. So much so that officers complained about the ungentlemanly conduct routinely in their correspondence.
As far as our modern, temporary notion of “rules of war,” go, it’s because it suited the victor and gives them what they feel is an edge and an air of superiority. I don’t say this to be smug either, just look at how well the Geneva Suggestions worked out for the North Vietnamese or the Taliban. They ignored the and won.
Like it or not, the modern nation-state’s notions of Rules of War are going to quickly become a bygone relic of a simpler time, as was a formal British fighting line.
The USA is the strongest military power in the world. They are not the underdog. If they resort to war crimes or unfairness, it's not because they are the underdogs; it's because this is what top dogs do. Let's not make excuses for them.
They can't declare war, that would require approval from congress. They're relying on the post-9/11 authorization granted to the president to use the military to go after terrorists and those that harbor them.
That is why this administration is leaning heavily into calling the drug traffickers "narco-terrorists" and calling fentanyl their "weapon of mass destruction". They're covering their ass legally so they can invade another country without congressional approval.
This is what they're using, the legal theory is basically tren de aragua cartel and their drugs is an "invasion" of the USA and is "sufficiently connected" to the Venezuelan government to trigger the act's wartime powers.
The only powers this act grants is the power to deport foreign nationals without due process, it does not grant them any powers to militarily invade another country.
To be clear, the post-9/11 AUMF is "specific" to people affiliated with the perpetrators of 9/11. Obviously a nexus can be drawn between a gigantic array of people to the perpetrators of 9/11, and this feature has been abused for decades now, but the Venezuelan situation clearly does not actually (or even allegedly) have any nexus whatsoever to 9/11 and so is clearly not authorized by the 2001 AUMF.
Sure, it wouldn't hold up in any reasonable court, but all they really need is to give congress some excuse to not intervene and pretending this falls under the 9/11 AUMF is good enough. And once the U.S. is at war with Venezuela not even a court order from the supreme court is going to be able to reverse that.
Even without a deceleration of war, any use of the military requires congressional approval unless it falls within some authorization congress has already granted.
In the EU there is the "reverse charge" mechanism for VAT when commerce crosses country borders, and it is often used for defrauding EU countries / governments.
The invoicing standard is an attempt to mitigate reverse charge fraud by gathering more machine-readable data. Some countries even demand that b2b invoices are sent to the country, which then dispatches a copy to the recipient.
Knowing this background, it's pretty clear why the EU is making it mandatory.
Personally, in the abstract I like the idea to mandate the use of an open standard, I think we have way too many inefficiencies from treating many things as text documents that could be data structures. I don't like this particular standard though, it's bloated and the result of a typical top-down process.
I much prefer it when there are competing standards for a while, and one or a couple of winner emerge on technical merits. THEN I have no objections to a regulatory body picking a standard and mandating it.
As far as I understand there are multiple XML invoice formats and EN 16931 accepts at least two: UBL and CII. At least in theory. I have no idea how it is going to work out in practice, but I will learn the hard way :-) I have invoicing software as side-project and I have decided to make it usable in EU.
For a database-driven application with sqlalchemy, I've found mixer[0] to be pretty helpful. It gives you an easy way to generate an object, and it automatically creates dummy-objects that your object depends on.
You can also supply defaults and name schemes for individual columns.
For business logic, I prefer to have it structured in a way that it doesn't need the database for testing, but loading and searching stuff from the DB also needs to be tested, and for those, mixer strikes a really good balance. You only need to specify the attributes that are relevant for the test, and you don't need shared fixtures between many tests.
>Mostly the widespread perception that the USA has betrayed the security guarantees given to Europe, and that the USA isn't a reliable partner anymore.
Mostly the widespread perception that the Trump administration has betrayed the security guarantees given to Europe, and that the USA isn't a reliable partner anymore.
Hardly a distinction worth making; if the USA votes for such unstable and highly egoistic politicians TWICE, it's quite clear they aren't a reliable partner anymore.
Even if they vote in a sane president next, we cannot rely on them in the long run, because the one after that could be a lunatic again.
Another aspect to consider: when you reduce the amount of permission anything has (like here the returned token), you risk breaking something.
In a complex system it can be very hard to understand what will break, if anything. In a less complex system, it can still be hard to understand if the person who knows the security model very well isn't available.
reply