Huge post on WHY we're seeing everything that can possibly electrify, electrify -- there's a new technology stack, and it's eating the world: batteries, power electronics, electromagnetics, and compute.

TLDR: It's better and CAN BE CONTROLLED BY SOFTWARE. 🧵

https://twitter.com/packyM/status/1960317055665569960

There's a reason why we @ImpulseLabs_ launched a ... stove. This is it.

We're at the inflection point where these four foundational technologies have escaped the "training gym" of consumer electronics and rode the scaling curves of automotive.

Time to put them everywhere else.

We have a giant announcement at @ImpulseLabs_ — we're partnering with Zephyr to launch our technology in showrooms nationwide, starting this year.

Zephyr is a leader in ventilation, refrigeration, and microwaves — and soon will have the highest performance cooking technology.
This is a GIANT deal in the appliance space — distribution is the whole ballgame. Market leaders like Zephyr have global showroom footprints and operate sophisticated logistics networks for distribution and repair.

We can stay lean and tech-focused — but everywhere.

If you or one of your friends want an @ImpulseLabs_ stove ... it's a good time to order.

We're in the last day of a sale (and new orders ship pretty soon -- Q1)

Also have a bit of an engineering update... We've spent a ton of effort across hardware and software to deliver active temperature sensing to stoves for the first time -- and this means the top surface of your pan, not some indirect measurement.

What does that mean in practice?
- oil doesn't smoke
- food doesn't burn

We’re cooking — and I genuinely think we made something super special @ImpulseLabs_

And we mean it — at scale. The team has brought up an incredibly impressive supply chain that let us completely supersede the legacy power electronics suppliers that everyone else uses, enabling our active temperature sensing technology and even our knobs.

Doing a quick thread on the backstory here @ImpulseLabs_

We realized that putting battery packs in appliances made it possible to greatly exceed the available power you'd get from the wall -- and could crush other stoves at boiling water, getting pans up to temp, etc.

BUT

https://twitter.com/sdamico/status/1826094307998314994

Let's imagine you put a dry pan on the stove, or let all the available water boil off. At 10,000 watts -- you would quickly have a glowing red pan (image approximate).

We had to figure out a solution that could track the pan's temperature as it quickly rises.

Why no one has home storage — YET

Battery pack prices have totally collapsed — at high volumes, this means that enough batteries to *totally flatten* a home’s peak electricity demand cost no more than about $1,500. That means never paying for electricity from 4-9PM. Likewise, inverters (how you connect a battery (DC device) to the AC grid, have also been going down in costs (dollars per peak watt), driven by manufacturing volumes and power electronics innovations.

FOUR key things in the past 20-30 years are causing the physical world to electrify:
1) magnets got way better, enabling high torque permanent magnet motors.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1805181793001247159

2) power transistors (what’s needed to power electric motors and convert DC <> AC power) got more power dense and more efficient. Silicon is being displaced by Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride.

So we (@ImpulseLabs_ ) made the highest performing ... stove.
- 3x the performance of induction and ~5x gas (equiv. of ~72,000 BTU/h!).
- A nontrivial advance in temperature sensing, transforming cooking.
- And it ships this year (taking deposits starting ... today). This is enabled via a custom, high-discharge 3 kWh LFP battery pack, which we've co-developed with an industry leading partner. We've also developed fully custom power electronics and controls software that are a step above the rest of the industry.

We’ve raised a $20M Series A from @Lux_Capital @fifthwallvc @lachygroom @constructcap and many others to accelerate decarbonization in the home.

This is in addition to a $5M seed round last year from @Lux_Capital, @constructcap, and @lachygroom.

techcrunch.com/2022/11/15/imp… Our first product is something that’s been in the climate zeitgeist for a while, and the sole reason many homes keep gas lines at all — the stove.

We figured out a huge trick to make the best one.

SF should wait on indoor dining for at least a few more weeks, we literally don’t have enough immunity from prior infection+vaccines to make this work safely yet.

We have the opportunity, by keeping stuff closed a bit longer, to durably crash cases to 0.

sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/02/22/cov… Note to skeptics here:
Miami is probably like 55-60% immune between infections and vaccines
LA is probably 40-45% immune
SF is maybe like 25%
(See COVID19-projections.com)

The sort of pop science view of "spooky aerospace" involves UFOs and Area 51 and stealth planes, but I've been thinking about a different sort of theory of what's plausible with some new evidence: 1. Elon Musk's comments on "structural batteries" for future vehicles, where the cell casings serve the same purpose as hexagonal core materials used in composite construction. This then allows some "dual use" of batteries as structural materials, lessening battery mass impact.

Prediction: vaccine distribution sluggishness in CA will be mostly resolved in about 2 weeks SF dashboard is now up, looks like there was a definite acceleration in vaccination rates over the past 2 weeks data.sfgov.org/stories/s/COVI…

In the theme of this thread, here’s been my experience with going to Taiwan. I’m currently in quarantine for another 14 hours so...

First: how do you go to Taiwan? Aren’t their borders closed?

The government set up a pretty slick digital nomad visa called the gold card. 1/

https://twitter.com/thatalicewu/status/1330287079708893184

This is equivalent to a residence permit and work permit among other things and allows you to effectively move to Taiwan for up to 3 years without renewal. Fairly sweet program - doesn’t require you to change your job and doesn’t automatically have tax implications.

Mandalorian really feels like a Star Wars reboot precisely aimed at fans from the old expanded universe and done in a way that’s similar to how Marvel pulled off the MCU vs. the comics. To be honest this is how they should handle past material, vs the JJ Star Trek reboot method. And I’m not getting into particular decisions with the sequels beyond having a “saga continuation” framing vs a “sandbox” framing seems to be the key to actually being able to be creative. The controversial tradeoffs for the sequel trilogy were in many ways a false choice.

This dude being unambiguously pro mass death, plus the super discredited Santa Clara antibody studies seeding the first wave of arguments against containment means @stanford needs to do some soul searching here. If they keep the Hoover institute they should flush the cranks.

https://twitter.com/justinwolfers/status/1328526393064480773

There’s an entire intellectual history of what I can best describe as “highbrow covid denial” that uses the discredited antibody studies and that much hyped but totally garbage google doc on hydroxychloroquine as articles of faith to claim the virus wasn’t deadly/there was a cure