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[Starver]

go to Settings > Accessibility

Oh, bravo. Exactly right. Glad I mentioned it.
(I poked around, in general, mostly looking to see if the Tabs could be restored as a legacy choice, but I would have never looked in that section, for this issue. I would go there to see if I could turn on an Accessibility feature, not to disable one enabled by default.)

I'd also like to point out that I've never purchased anything from an App Store (not in straightforward monetary terms, though I will willingly submit to viewing ads beyond the bare minimum which probably transfers weallth as a back-end aspect) so this proper conversation that I interupted intrigues me no end and leaves me wondering if I'm net better or worse for apparently being such a freeloader.

[Reelya]

I've spent too much time about this... and I have come up with an idea* that is as "free market" as you can get:  In the store, when you make a purchase, there is a slider that starts at 30%/70%. As the purchaser you move the slider to "Store curator" or "App developer" to decide who gets what cut.  I wonder what the "free market" would side.  Starting at 30%/70% is just because that is what it is "today".  Cap it so it can't go further than 98%/2% or 2%/98% or to where the smallest value can be no less than $0.25.

I'd just outright state that whatever you set the sliders as for the default is what 99% of people will leave it at. So it'll fail insofar as you're setting the default and only a few weirdos will change that, so you're not actually measuring the populations preference.

Source: some countries have high rates of organ donors (I'm talking like 99%), some have low (say 2-10%). Very few have rates in the middle. Some of them are countries that should be similar: Netherlands is 28% vs Belgium at 98%; Denmark is 4% vs Sweden at 86%. So what's the cause? in low-rate nations you have to tick the box to be a donor, and in high-rate nations, you have to tick the box to opt out. Hardly anyone bothers to tick the box. So what's an effective campaign strategy to get more donors signed up? Just copy whatever wording countries like Belgium are using on the forms.

[Reelya]

Holy shit, the conspiracy people are going to love this:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/08/28/2338241/a-closer-look-at-elon-musks-neuralink-surgical-robot

Earlier today, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's brain link device working in a pig named Gertrude. While the science and the device itself were front-and-center at the presentation, the surgical robot the company debuted is equally as important because it's designed to handle the full surgical installation process. "That includes opening up the scalp, removing a portion of the skull, inserting the hundreds of 'thread' electrodes 6mm deep along with the accompanying chip, then closing the incision," reports CNET. TechCrunch takes a closer look at the robot:

It's a robot that cuts your scalp, drills a hole and then installs a microchip with hundreds of "thread" electrodes into your brain and stitches up the hole.

[Egan_BW]

And then you start loving elon musk

[Starver]

Well, in a comic book, he'd already be the supervillain that came up with a hyperpheromone schtick to his crimes, so heçs just doing what he can despite the pull of nominative determinism.

[feelotraveller]

Are 'Lego blocks' the energy storage medium of the future?

https://theconversation.com/aussie-invention-could-save-old-coal-stations-by-running-them-on-zero-emissions-lego-blocks-144864

A novel material called miscibility gap alloy can be used to refit existing coal power plants to run on renewable energy.  Blocks of the material store energy in the form of heat enabling the use of steam turbines.  They fill a middle time frame storage option (shorter than hydro, longer than lithium-ion).  The costs are said to be around $50 per kilowatt hour as opposed to the $200 or so for lithium-ion.

[Il Palazzo]

Soo, better rocks?

[feelotraveller]

More heavy metal than rock.

[Maximum Spin]

That's such a dumb headline. You can retrofit existing coal plants to run on renewable energy six ways to Sunday, it's as simple as "insert heat into water". Cutting the roof off and installing solar concentration mirrors could do it, although it sounds like a terrible idea. 

[wierd]

In terms of efficiency, the very existence of the laws of entropy says that any system other than "Stored energy in -> Waste heat out!" is not going to work without adding additional energy to the system.

EG, "But my coal/gas fired power plant runs on biofuel!" just adds an inefficient solar energy collection, and then biomass processing stage, which would ultimately be less efficient than just putting big reflective mirrors around a big water heater.
 The only advantage would be in being able to increase production output based on load demand, like existing powerplants do.  It is up to the logistics fine print to determine if that benefit is outweighed by the efficiency losses of switching to a biofuel.

[Il Palazzo]

You haven't read the article? The new rocks are to address intermittency. They're filling the same niche as batteries, ammonia fuel cells, or gravitational storage.

[wierd]

The only benefit is being able to up-regulate production, on an "as demand dictates" basis.  Yes.

That does not remove the fact that reprocessing the bricks requires more energy than one extracts from one.  (meaning, straight up using that energy to generate power from the get-go, is more efficient-- at least in the vacuum of theoretical efficiency, distanced and displaced from such concerns as grid demand.)

Depending on just how inefficient the process is, vs how much economic gain there is to having the storage, is what determines if this is a viable technology or not.  (EG, how high peak-use pricing is, and how much peak-use pricing disrupts the market-- vs how cheap you can get the energy for off-peak storage/brick reprocessing. If there is a net financial gain, the tech is viable. If not, it dies in the cradle.)

[Il Palazzo]

That's not 'the only benefit', that's the whole point. It's the only thing all those new storage methods people are working on are aiming to address. They're not trying to make the plants run more efficiently or drive the prices down, they're trying to make it so that a fully-renewable grid doesn't get blackouts every night or when it's less windy.

[martinuzz]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

[Starver]

The computer doth protest too much, methinks...

I am marginally more reassured that "Believe me" was revealed to be provided in the seed, and not a spontaneously result of so much insincere use of it out there in its world of original research material.

(Would be interesting to see the eight "original" texts that were then human-edited into this published one. Even/especially if it took less time to do than with human input.)