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jkravitz61

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Seems like a lot is being promised here for a 7 month old startup with one employee- SW, multiple different HW components, high end thermal mechanics delivering all of this by EOY 2024. Best of luck, I am legitimately rooting for this to be a winner (I love the concept of design meets efficient heat pumps and believe there is a substantial market here)... but how can outsiders trust to give you their money for a deposit when it's clear there is very high risk that this ever reaches market?

Holmes never delivered a product that worked. Musk has delivered 4 Tesla models and counting, as well as VTOL rockets among many other accomplishments. Sure, he over-promises and under-delivers (or at least misses his timelines), but I wouldn't compare that to Holmes level fraud by any stretch.

PagerDuty S-1 7 years ago

Even if true, this will largely not affect a business like this. They make small money on each company and scale through the shear number of total companies that pay a few thousand dollars a month to use this service. People are not going to stop going on call because their revenue dropped 20%...

Nuclear has such a terrible reputation, and rightfully,people will always have legitimate complaints about it. We can never fully guarantee that a plant is free from the potential of catastrophe, not to mention we still don’t have a great solution to nuclear waste other than bury it in a mountain. It’s definitely a lot better than slowly suffocating ourselves by injecting hydrocarbons into the air, but we really need a revolution not evolution in energy.

Completely agree. Quote from the article also kind of shows the founder isn't really correlated numbers properly. "Reading that more than 80% of goods are transported by sea, a light bulb went off, says Vollmer. 'We can have a very huge impact,' he remembers thinking." https://www.statista.com/statistics/264024/number-of-merchan... shows that there are roughly 52,000 container ships in existence. 52,000 container ships moving 80% of the world's goods is something I assume people do not want to be automated and want to keep a very watchful eye on- notwithstanding all of the other issues in executing the idea.

From the description, it sounds like a giant Peltier device, not a steam turbine (otherwise why would they care about having a cold tank?). Solar farms also have a ton of space in between turbines so I’m not sure that metric is relevant. Additionally, since this device uses very safe materials (salt and coolant), there’s no reason you couldn’t dig a really big hole and shove the device inside...it would also provide some nice natural thermal insulation. When it comes to storing energy far from urban areas, cost is a much higher priority than energy density.

Think of it like this:

You produce energy at an amortized cost of $X /MW. You store energy efficiently (lithium batteries) at an amortized cost of $Y /MW back into the grid. You store energy inefficiently (Malta?) at an amortized cost of $Z /MW back into the grid.

If Z<< Y, then simply ramp up your input production and you are likely in the money. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "Worse heat has fairly low energy density and cools over time"... energy density is not relevant at all when you have practically unlimited space to store power (GIANT) fields next to your solar/wind farms.

Respectfully, it is absolutely an obstacle. Not every manufacturer wants to play ball and in some cases it requires much more investment than playing around with the compiler settings. I would also argue that a large fraction of research teams/ companies are just looking for a platform to prototype on rather than actually deploy services on tomorrow. Most applications of this processor are such low volume that it’s not in most manufactures interests financially to care at this point.

I would argue that it should scare you. This is targeted towards people who are working in the AI world and are likely not embedded experts. Also, the bigger problem is closed source libraries and drivers that choose not to support arm64.

The development kit has been available for the last month. One of the problems no one talks about is that this platform (along with tx2/tx1) runs arm64 which makes it a HUGE pain for getting many libraries to work. I’ve been using these for a while, and consistently need to hunt down library source code and compile it for arm64 since most libraries are distributed without arm64 support. There’s also plenty of device specific closed source SDKs (such as point grey ladybug cameras) which just don’t support arm64 so your only option is to attempt to write your own or pressure the manufacturer to publish an arm64 version. I do not recommend this platform for hobbyists for this reason- go buy a small x64 computer and spend 1/10th the time designing a better battery system.

In an interview yesterday, the CEO said they were an "Engineering first company". While located in silicon valley, they have no right to subscribe to the "move fast and break things" mentality when they are playing with people's money. Any financial institution that holds external accounts should be a finance first company. Good technology is essential, but not as essential as following rules and regulations to protect your customers.

I imagine that the demographic they are supposedly going after for debit cards is the same demographic that takes advantage of great credit card deals. I don't see debit cards becoming fashionable as the go-to charge card for reasonably well-off millennials that are eligible for great credit cards. Those that aren't eligible for these credit cards likely have inconsequential amounts of savings anyway...