Shutting down the growth prospects of a company based, not on its behavior, but on the capability of its models right before the IPOs of the companies you're going to profit from is staggeringly dumb. Yes the public is stupid when it comes to investing in stocks, but come on. If these companies growth prospects rest in large part on continuing to improve their products and the government said that if they do they face National Security Cease and Desist letters, then investing is a bad idea.
The selfish / corrupt thing to do is to do this after you've fleeced the public.
"In contrast to conventional radial flux motors, the electromagnetic flux in an axial flux motor runs parallel to the axis of rotation. The key components are arranged in a disc‑shaped layout: two rotors sandwich the stator from the left and right. This design enables an especially compact motor architecture, high power and torque density, and new freedoms in drivetrain packaging. In the new Mercedes‑AMG GT 4‑Door Coupe, the motor at the front axle is just under nine centimetres wide; the two motors at the rear axle each measure around eight centimetres in width. The three axial flux motors are integrated per axle into so‑called High Performance Electric Drive Units (HP.EDU), where they are combined with a compact input planetary gearbox in a single housing."
Really the kind of thing that should be earlier in an article about… that very thing the reader is wondering about, but maybe we arent the target audience?
Yes. If you have a laser printer, that windup sound you hear at the start of a job is the polygon mirror motor spinning up thousands of RPMs - those are PCB stator motors. As were VCR head motors.
"Advantages : A motor can be built upon any flat structure, such as a PCB, by adding coils and a bearing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_flux_motor with image of "A miniature DC brushless axial motor used in a Digital Data Storage drive, showing the integration with PCB construction techniques."
It doesn't make that a good idea. Armature losses are proportional to torque squared - doesn't matter if it is radial or axial design. That's why all the EVs today have gear boxes with ratios like 13:1. Get rid of that gearbox and the steady-state losses go up with the square of that ratio. Then there are the issues of sprung mass, and where to put the mechanical brakes.
> you can integrate all into one hub (breaks, bearings, gears etc) and it weights pretty much the same.
You would get to delete about half the mass of the half-shaft but otherwise you are cramming a lot of stuff into the wheel volume and it all has to survive living out there. Now your HV wiring and any cooling connections to the motor have to flex with the movements of the suspension and probably need guarding against rocks and other road debris. I think all EVs now have the drive electronics tightly coupled to the motors - now that either has to be separated or made compact enough to fit and rugged enough to survive a much higher vibration regime. We do have small amounts of electronics on hub assemblies today (I'm thinking of electronic parking brakes) so there is some precedent but that circuitry is much less challenging than an inverter handling 100s of kW.
>no loss on diff
I doubt there's much loss from differentials in EVs. They don't have the bevel gear of diffs used in longitudinal layout ICE vehicles and mostly the gears in a diff don't move relative to one another (unless you are doing donuts!), so the whole cage mostly acts like a solid gear giving whatever final ratio.
Do they claim enough reliability and peak power capability to delete the mechanical brakes? I know Brembo is working on electric brakes that would eliminate the hydraulic circuits and pistons. I don't know what they plan to do to make sure the electrical side is as robust as the split-diagonal brake system we've been using for 60 years or so.
Having four wheel motors solves any issues that compromise a single unit, but I don't think they've answered how they would mitigate potential system issues that might bring them all down at once.
You could add a short drive shaft behind the springs to put the motor on the car body. That'd give you some additional advantage of moving much of the brake weight off of the wheel as well.
My Ad Limiter add-on is down to 19 users on Firefox. Used to be thousands.
It won't work on Chrome at all now. I'm shutting down SiteTruth, after almost 20 years.[1]
Fwiw, I've been using Firefox for 20+ years, I hate ads with passion and yet I never heard of your add-on until just now.
I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.
You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.
I hate to be the guy to say this, but uBlockOrigin outcompeted you half a decade ago. It's the first extension Install on a fresh install and I have never heard of your extension or site.
It was never intended to be a volume product. It was a demo of a system which fetched background info about companies. I'd hoped to license it to a search company. Then Google turned to the dark side and Yahoo gave up.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Every time I try Vivaldi I am right back at Firefox and I am surely not alone. I have never understood the obsession with tree style tabs or vertical tabs. I don't need to customise my browser at all and I like supporting engine diversity.
The motivation for vertical tabs is pretty straightforward, screens are mostly wider than they are tall, browsers are often used in fullscreen mode, yet much of the web does not use much of the screen's width. So it's a better use of screen space to put tabs on the side than on top.
True. And when I first saw that Tor browser (i.e. Firefox) offered a vertical tabs mode without the tab title (and only the favicons), I thought it was the stupidest vertical tab UI design possible. But then I decided to try it for a week, and guess what - I appreciated the extra space, and it wasn't as hard identifying the tabs through their favicons as I thought it would be. And if needed you can always drag the vertical tab sidebar to reveal the tab title. (Note though that I am not one of these people who opens 100's of tabs and keeps it open. In fact, I find too many tabs cluttering and distracting and if I need to scroll to find my tabs I start closing the tabs).
went from Firefox to Vivaldi, never looked back for many years
on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily
thanks for the tip, I assumed some older version would work but anyway using it only temporarily until I switch to something more modern and can deal with that UI for few days/weeks at worst, anyway Cromite has its cons as well, it regularly exit UbO which need to be relaunched (plus also the UbO menu is cropped and not fully displayed), that's sort of deal breaker compared to UI, I am experiecing it quite frequently, I wish there would be Kiwi Browser successor which would have stable UbO support, Helium doesn't even support MV2 and Ultimatum also didn't work very good to me, so might as well return to FF even on new phone despite the horrible UI
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.
People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.
The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.
If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.
The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.
Maybe "wicked problem" is the new tech buzzword, but browsers certainly are one, and Mozilla messed it up. I blame Mitchell Baker for a big chunk. We don't need a new browser though. We need a new web.
As a user at least I have an option to use ublock origin extension in Firefox. So I'm somewhat grateful I can still browse the net peacefully and safely.
Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
I use Firefox mobile pretty much exclusively. I haven't noticed any meaningful performance difference between it & Chrome. It also seems to perform fine on my Fedora laptop.
Mobile is different. I rarely even use mobile. I do however use a lot of tabs on desktop, and Firefox is found very wanting in the performance department.
I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.
I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.
This does not make sense. Firefox would be taking minutes to open a page that Chrome opens within a second or two. And if Chrome was doing aggressive pre-fetching, then it should be using more memory, no? And yet the opposite is the case.
Not denying your experience but if it is taking "minutes" then that sounds like a highly specific glitch that you should try to debug.
Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.
I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
I've used Firefox across devices, across the years. This just isn't my experience, at all, remotely. And I have had to use Chrome (now it is Edge) for many work functions, so I do have the A/B comparisons. I'm not doubting your experience, fine, but I also know I'm not "pretending" anything in my own experience.
doesn't happen in my case (OnePlus 15/Android 16, Firefox background usage allowed in some "smart" mode whatever that means, doesn't suck the battery in background although it's on most of the time).
I have better battery life on Furi FX1s than any of my Android devices (Pixel 6a, Fairphone 4). This is with closing applications when I no longer need them on all devices.
Anything to back those claims up? I use Firefox and didn't really notice this (although I am rarely on battery), and other than Google Meet making my machine throttle (and I blame that on Google not on Mozilla), I don't use Chrome for anything else for my browsing.
It's not a joke. The Pimpzilla theme stopped working due to changes that Mozilla made to Firefox's layout system, and I dropped Firefox for Safari. Never went back.
Of course anything could happen but Anthropic has always been stingier and more expensive and is getting worse about that, while OpenAI is getting more generous with subscriptions (eg permanently doubling the highest tier allotment, setting policy to not cut off tasks that run past quota, resetting after outages, etc.)
Yeah that payment scheme sounds like they gear up to shift everyone into API token prices, eventually. Time to convert the existing tokens into software, until then.
Bingo. They see this as the future commodity it will be. Customers will choose AI providers much way they choose a car: taste, price, a few other factors.
And to your point, Google has a massive balance sheet, produces their own AI chips, and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Google was the right choice stability and it only cost Apple $1 billion per year that’s pretty much of a no-brainer, and with Apple’s history, they probably will use Gemini for as long as they need it and then use their own model in time.
People will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
> If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
EU has plenty of VC, maybe not enough to sustain crazy rounds rounds like those we see often in the US, but capital is not the biggest blocker to founding your company in Europe, law is.
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
Sure there are. Both Mollie and Adyen are API-first. Mollie developer experience has always been on par with Stripe in my experience. And they existed 6 years earlier.
It’s the whole system. It takes many characteristics for something to happen in a specific manner.
Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.
So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.
But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.
It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.
It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .
And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.
Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!
which are deeply entrenched with the competition (Grok, OpenAI)
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