Mr PoopyButthole

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I wish I remembered the details, but I read a couple years ago about new batteries using the same sort of principal.

    It was being studied as a way to handle a specific part of radioactive byproduct from nuclear power.

    You sandwich the tiny radioactive bit in materials to generate a charge, and the whole thing is encased in conductive man-made diamond.

    A battery the size of a half dollar coin could generate roughly a watt of power for, ostensibly, up to hundreds of years.

    The big seller beyond its lifespan is that the diamond is dense enough to shield the tiny amount of radiation inside.

    Incredible potential that probably wont be realized in consumer goods for decades. Just think about never having to change the battery in a remote ever again. Or even a lot of wireless smart home sensors and devices.

    A shocking amount of things take very little power. Air tags that never die. E-book readers. You could make super dim puck LEDs that are always on and can go anywhere for illuminating pathways.

    You could never scale it much in size/output because the diamond encasing would become disproportionately heavy and expensive, but for anything 1.5 Watts and less, and possibly up to 3 Watts or so, could be totally feasible.


  • I’ve been raving mad about this exact shit for years.

    I’m not a developer, but I remember how long pre-smartphone would last with little 500mAh batteries. Even after 3g and into 4g connectivity and well after the proliferation of less efficient Bluetooth a phone would last anywhere from 3-14 days between charging.

    Now every phone has 3,000-4,000mAh batteries and, besides 5g, the wireless standards have become significantly more efficient.

    The only notable offset is the big touch screens, but even those have gotten more efficient, and seems not to matter because standby time is still trash now too.

    I doubt there’s a continous A/V feed to servers, but 100% our phones are always listening for keywords/phrases locally and then sending “relevant” data back for ads, on top of the always on location tracking.

    It’s hilarious that phones cost as much as they do, considering how unwieldy and low screen-time they’ve become, on top of the idea that we’re paying to be tracked.



  • Ultimately, the primary satisfaction of storytelling comes from the story ending.

    You can do that episode to episode, season to season, etc. I feel like the best shows balance by having plot archs and character archs that can happen independently of each other. That way each episode or two can close one kind of arch while opening another. Because they are different kinds of problems, they’re less likely to conflict, giving you the sense of closure you crave while also creating a sort of cliffhanger.

    That’s really hard to do well though, especially over time. And usually expensive.

    A lot of shows start with 2-3 seasons of concepts in mind, and hope to get picked up for more. At that point it gets exponentially harder to go on without detracting from what you’ve already built.

    I’m glad that most streaming platforms are starting to see value in shows with a fixed ending in mind, it just makes for better storytelling.