• 1 Post
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle

  • You can use superconductors to create Josephson junctions, which can be used for standard logic operations (but also useful in quantum computers). These junctions are much more efficient and much faster than transistors.

    This particular superconductor will not be useful for transmitting power because the effect breaks down at very low current limits in this material, but it will be very useful for studying superconductors.

    So contrary to what you said, this will in fact not be useful for power transmission, but could be useful for CPUs and GPUs, and could lead to computers that are hundreds or thousands of times faster and more efficient than what we have today.

    To be fair this material may never see a practical use though.







  • TLDR; the front side is 23% efficient, and the rear side 20% efficient.

    They don’t actually give an overall efficiency but it implies a total of 43%. They compare this to typical panels also at 23% efficient, so it’s really remarkable if true. Other emerging solar tech is up to about 32% but if that could also benefit from multiple layers then total efficiency could become insane.

    Seems a little too good to be true, really, but great if so.

    Edit: Yeah, I don’t think these efficiencies can be added like that. I guess the overall efficiency will depend on how reflective the ground under the panels is, and they will extract 20% of that. Maybe that’s why they don’t give an overall rating.













  • Not to be dismissive of these deaths, but there should not be any expectation of self-drive cars being perfect, ever. The reality is that if they are safer than humans overall, then they have reached a point where we can (and should?) adopt their use. It’s not a huge surprise that there is some form of bias in the current deaths simply because biases arise in any complex, real-world systems.

    We should, and must, accept some glitches.

    But, uh, yeah Tesla may well try to delay addressing the biases if we don’t call them out, so this info is good.