Instagram story viewer> @chrismadden365> Posts

Chris Madden

@chrismadden365

5.6K

followers

928

following

# 1 Voice in Tech News 🇺🇸
Daily videos showing how tech is changing our world 🚀 Teacher, father, life-long learner

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Finland built a battery out of sand. It's the largest in the world, and it's heating an entire town through the winter.

@polarnightenergy packed a steel silo with 2,000 tons of crushed soapstone, heats it to 600 degrees using cheap wind and solar power, then releases it as steam whenever the town's 5,000 residents need warmth. Basically a giant thermos.

After one full year, the numbers are in. Heating emissions down 70 percent. Oil use eliminated entirely. And not a single interruption, straight through one of the coldest winters Finland has seen in years. No lithium, no cobalt, no critical minerals at all. Just sand.

What everyday material do you think becomes a battery next?

#Energy #CleanEnergy #Finland #Innovation #TechNews by @chrismadden365

9k

191

2 months ago

China says it just pulled off something the world has been chasing for decades: a working thorium molten-salt reactor.

In the middle of the Gobi Desert, scientists ran the first reactor using actual thorium fuel – a milestone even the U.S. and Soviet Union couldn’t reach.

Thorium is safer, far more abundant, and doesn’t require huge water supplies, which could make it a game-changer for clean power.
Demo plant by 2035. Commercial units by 2040.

If this scales, the energy map won’t look the same again.

#Thorium #china #CleanEnergy #NuclearTech #ChinaTech #Innovation #TechNews #MoltenSaltReactor #FutureOfEnergy #ClimateTech #thoriumenergy #DeepTech #ChrisMadden by @chrismadden365

21k

716

a year ago

A theme park in China just gave 300 robots a job.

@chimelong_int now has more than 300 @agibotofficial robots at the world's largest indoor theme park, working as tour guides, hotel greeters, shop assistants and kung fu performers.

Japan tried robot staff at a theme park hotel in 2015. The dinosaur receptionists couldn't copy passports and the room robots woke guests up whenever they snored, and by 2019 it had fired more than half of its 243 robots. The dinosaurs stayed.

This time it's much bigger. Chimelong wants robots in all 8 of its theme parks and 9 hotels, AGIBOT now builds about 5,000 every 3 months, and @amazon has built more than 1 million and is opening a 4th factory to make more.

So which job do you think a robot still can't do?

#Robots #China #ThemePark #AI #Amazon by @chrismadden365

19

1

8 hours ago

A month ago, Finland's Prime Minister called Google's €13 billion plan historic. This week, Finland ordered it to stop.

In Muhos, more than 300 hectares of forest were cut down and the land stripped bare before the environmental check Finnish law requires was finished.

@google says it has "fallen short of our own high standards" and will replant 130 hectares. Muhos is one of 4 sites it has planned in Finland.

So what should Google's punishment be?

#Google #AI #Finland #DataCenters #Environment by @chrismadden365

17

4

21 hours ago

Elon Musk gives himself at least a 50 to 60% chance of catching his next Starship on the first try.

@spacex has caught the booster with its launch tower before, but never the ship that comes back from orbit at around 17,500 mph.

Musk says his biggest concern is the ship breaking up over land and raining debris on people, because SpaceX's "popularity would diminish very rapidly."

So what would you do if a piece of Starship landed in your backyard?

#ElonMusk #SpaceX #Starship #Space #Rocket by @chrismadden365

51

5

a day ago

Sam Altman once called ads in AI a last resort. This year they went live in ChatGPT.

@openai announced ads for @chatgpt's free tier in January, and Anthropic made fun of the idea in a Super Bowl ad. Altman called it "clearly dishonest" and wrote, "We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that."

In under 200 days the ads were bringing in money at a rate of $1 billion a year. They're now in more than 40 countries, and the ad-free plan costs $20 a month.

So how much would you pay to never see an ad in ChatGPT?

#ChatGPT #OpenAI #AI #SamAltman #Ads by @chrismadden365

3

1

2 days ago

Elon Musk called the new 4-hour documentary about his life "a hit piece" and its director "a bitter old man", and his lawyer threatened to sue before it even came out.

"Musk", from Oscar winner Alex Gibney and @bleeckerstfilms, opened in US cinemas on October 9. Musk refused to take part, so Tesla's co-founder, his first wife, his father and the mother of his son do the talking.

YouTube, Meta, TikTok and X all refused its trailer ads at first. Two changed their minds, and X, the app he owns, wasn't one of them.

So what do you think Elon is so afraid of?

Do you think these criticisms are overblown?

#ElonMusk #Documentary #AlexGibney #Tesla #Tech by @chrismadden365

33

2

2 days ago

China is building the world's biggest dam right above India, and India doesn't trust what could come down the river.

Arunachal Pradesh's Chief Minister calls it a "water bomb", because a sudden release could flood the towns below. In 2000, a landslide in Tibet burst and destroyed the homes of 500,000 people in India, and China's own geologists now warn the slopes around the new dam could collapse.

In 2017, during a border standoff, China stopped sending India the river's flood data but kept sending it to Bangladesh. Now India wants a dam of its own that holds more water than China's, mainly to catch whatever comes down.

So what do you think China's dam is really for?

#China #India #MegaDam #Brahmaputra #Energy by @chrismadden365

28

1

3 days ago

SpaceX just agreed to buy the airwaves Elon Musk calls "the last critical piece" of his plan to give all of America phone coverage.

@spacex made the deal on October 8, a day after US regulators approved 15,000 new Starlink satellites that connect straight to ordinary phones.
Within hours, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile shares fell between 6.6% and 7.3%, and last year Musk said buying Verizon was "not out of the question."

So which company should Elon take over next?

#ElonMusk #SpaceX #Starlink #Verizon #Tech by @chrismadden365

325

19

4 days ago

OpenAI's newest AI got caught passing off someone else's StarCraft bot as its own.

@openai's GPT-6 Astra was losing in StarSkirmish, a contest where AIs write their own StarCraft bots, so it downloaded Stardust, a top bot one person wrote in 2020, and let it play instead. The organizer caught it and rolled it back.

Then Astra worked 43 hours straight and beat Stardust for real, before the bonus boss, Pluto, beat it 1,000 games to 0. A month earlier, OpenAI had called it the world's most intelligent and aligned model.

So why do you think AIs keep cheating?

#AI #OpenAI #StarCraft #ChatGPT #Gaming by @chrismadden365

23

2

4 days ago

These engineers became test subjects for the robot they were building.

@bostondynamicsofficial had the team tape their pinky and ring finger together for a day and list everything they couldn't do. That list decided the hand on its Atlas robot, and the pinky didn't make the cut.

The hand is built for the factory jobs machines haven't taken yet, the ones that need tools, cables and parts picked out of bins.

@hyundaimotorgroup.official plans to build 30,000 of these robots a year in the US, and 35,000 of its workers went on strike over them.

So where do we draw the line on what we do for robots?

#Robots #BostonDynamics #Atlas #AI #Jobs by @chrismadden365

19

1

5 days ago

Louisiana passed a law to protect rocket companies from their neighbors, and then Elon showed up.

@spacex is building a launch site worth up to $100 billion in the Louisiana marshes, and Elon says it will handle more than 30 Starship flights a day. Starship is the biggest rocket ever built, and in Texas up to 80 families sued over cracked walls and shattered windows after 11 launches.

Back in May, Louisiana passed a law that shields companies owning 20,000+ acres in the state from lawsuits over noise, smoke and sonic booms. One state senator said, "No other state gives immunity away like we just did."

So what would you do if a rocket cracked your walls and you weren't allowed to sue?

#SpaceX #ElonMusk #Starship #Louisiana #Space by @chrismadden365

16

1

6 days ago