Chrome #100: What's New

 

Chrome This Morning

Woke up, fired up the computer, went and made a coffee and came back to 

"What’s new in Chrome

Welcome to the 100th release of Chrome. Check out a few features that can help you stay safe online."

Excellent, we all need help staying safe online, especially with surge in hacktivism (following the Russia-Ukraine war) unleashing all kinds of collateral damage around the planet.

"Protect yourself online with Safety check" Cool, we can always use a sanity check and so - after checking around 800 passwords I was told about a few compromised ones (that were on sites I logged into just to evaluate) and a few more weak ones (same deal, I'm not going to use my industrial-strength pws on evaluations) but overall not bad.

"Safe Browsing is off" - but I never turned it on because I do want to be mostly in control of the browser for testing stuff, and back in the cheery welcome screen another exhortation to turn on Safe Browsing and then the options to "Control website access to your location and device" which is as far as I can see the same "padlock" settings that we've had access to for quite a while. Haven't we? I'm pretty sure they're the same settings. 

But anyway - the 100th release.  I feel old. 

New Battery Technology?

 Red Flags Abound

It would be so nice if this video was bona fides, but I can't find even one single convincing frame in there that suggests the battery is anything but vaporware. Grabs of the Tesla battery factory process, footage of other cylindrical cells when they are laying claim to a flat cell technology and any footage of actually manufacturing cells shows lab techs using tweezers and manually layering up, that does not indicate any kind of manufacturing capacity. 

Testing is carried out on unspecified batteries that are not the ones they claim they're (apparently laboriously assembled over a period of days per cell) 'manufacturing' and most importantly no actual data or spec sheet.

Plenty of stock footage of Musk but all are unrelated to 'Amprius' cells of which there is also coincidentally not a single image of an Amprius branded battery, nothing. I call fake and sham. 

 One more quick thought on EVs

I got hit with what my correspondent must have thought was a great burn: Fossil fuels can achieve an energy density of up to 48MJ/kg, LiIon batteries on the other hand run to about 0.7MJ/kg. 

I just finished writing back to them. 

Fossil fuels achieve their 48MJ/kg energy density ONLY ONCE, Li-ion batteries over and over again. One is a primary energy production technology, the other is a storage technology, it's comparing apples to oranges. 

If you were to consider the 0.7MJ over the lifespan of  batteries, they can achieve a cumulative energy density of 240MJ/kg. 

Point goes to EV technology I think.