I wonder if this could be a good use-case for an LLM: feed it that fire-hose of an RSS-feed and have it group and spit out a short and sweet summary per group with the original links. It’s something I would want from actual journalists, but while they are busy writing about Trump’s latest tweet, this might be a usable substitute?

Hm, what letter comes before A?

I think the problem is that the media reports everything Musk and Trump says, so having an effective way to filter through everything to get at what keeps me informed is not straightforward. This wouldn’t be an issue if news outlets acted more as a filter and reported only on the more essential developments with proper analysis to go with it. In my country, the main page of our main news outlet will report Justin Bieber having a baby as breaking news on the front page, alongside notices of American “celebrities”’ demise (I put it in quotes, because they need to refer to the character they played in a 90s sitcom because nobody knows their names), and five articles about the same unfolding event.

Thanks for a detailed account of your system!

one things i really wish existed is an extension that detects and blocks any site leading to garbage about the current US president, who i despise and want to ignore, despite ignoring it being to my detriment most likely. that vile man needs to go away.

I think that man (and the team around him) is a perfect example of someone who exploits this barrage of “information” to their advantage, and does that very well. I remember how nice the relative silence some months into Biden’s presidency (after the insurrection stopped being a constant headliner in the news cycle). This is one of the reasons I desperately want to find a way to keep on top of things, because it feels like the overall events matter if I can only cut through the noise and understand the big picture. I live in Europe, and current events leads to a lot of uncertainty for the region that I think is better to understand and be prepared for, rather than ignorant of.

additionally, i have a collection of hundreds of map sites bookmarked, with a folder containing a set i check with about the same regularity as my news sites.

This is an interesting source I have not really explored myself (aside from weather and occasionally a flight map). I need to investigate what kinds of local maps could be beneficial to have bookmarked. The event map is already bookmarked now!

My answer: I’m leaning more towards A), getting increasingly desperate to find a better way. I’ve tried for some time to use RSS-feeds to avoid scrolling the front pages of the newspapers I follow. This makes the situation much better (the constant headlines updating is better), but it is still overwhelming. Ideally I would want to have a mixture of daily and weekly digests of the most important news (with descriptive headlines), made by knowledge and trusted teams, with sensible analyses and links to longer reads if I were so inclined. That way I could spend 5-15 minutes a day catching up, and then diving in deeper if I needed that. I just don’t know where to find these. I would also ideally like to be able to follow important events in other regions than my own, such as Africa and Asia. I’ve tried following AfricaNews for events in Africa, which gives me at least a sense of things going on there that I never hear of in domestic news outlets, but have not found similar for Asia or South-America for instance.

What are you referring to when you say “salt batteries”?

This is more accurate than you would think. I’ve seen people synthesize a new inorganic compound, and is then more or less forced by supervisors to test it as an intercalation host for Li- or Na-ion batteries without really having thought through whether that makes sense at all.

Li is small, and as long as there is room for it (sites for it to sit when intercalated and paths to diffuse through the material), and there is some species that can accommodate the additional charge (as one Li+ is introduced into the material, there needs to be a charge compensation to maintain charge neutrality - typically this is a transition metal cation that is reduced from a higher oxidation state to a lower one). In that sense a lot of materials could serve as hosts, and depending on the intercalation potential, it could be used as a cathode (LiCoO2 for instance, where the intercalation potential vs. Li/Li+ is so high that it makes for a good cathode) or an anode (LTO for instance, where the intercalation potential vs. Li/Li+ is so low that it rather makes sense to pair it with a high potential cathode, and instead make for a more niche application where things such as safety is more coveted). That said, only three structure types have been widely used commercially as intercalation hosts for Li-ion batteries: layered rocksalt types (like LiCoO2 and its deriviates, NMC and NCA), spinels (LiMn2O4 or LTO) or olivines (LiFePO4, or LFP).

Li-S is not someone randomly mixing Li with some other elements though, it has been researched for a long time and is considered one of several “holy grails”

In this case, C refers to the current rate, not the unit Coulomb. It is a standard way of giving the current rate in battery research, and 1C is defined, as oldfart says, as the current rate required to charge that particular battery fully (to its nominal capacity) in one hour. 2C is twice this, so it is charged in half an hour, and C/2 is half this, so it is charged in two hours.

It is a convenient way of giving the current rate, because it allows a more application focused comparison (i.e. my EV battery or phone battery should be able to charge fully in one hour), but it hides the actual capacity of the battery (you have no way of knowing, without additional information, if the cell has a small or a large capacity).

ETA: The last point here is what deranger and AwesomeLowlander is getting at. You can have a very small battery with very little active material, and charge that at 10C and achieve reversible cycling for many, many cycles, and it is meaningless if it cannot be scaled to a larger cell (unless we are only considering microbatteries for example). Usually, results at a small scale is not directly transferable to larger scale, and you encounter all kinds of challenges as you scale up.