If it’s anything like the electric ferries that cross the Öresund beween Helsingborg and Helsingør, they grab charge while they’re unloading and loading at each terminal:
Each trip consumes approximately 1,175 kWh, which is nearly the same amount a residential home consumes in a month. In each port is a tower with a robot arm that connects the charging cable automatically every time the ship comes to the dock. The system charges 10.5 kV, 600Amp and 10.5MW. The batteries have a total capacity of 4,160 kWh, which means that we always have a surplus of electricity if for some reason we cannot load during a stop or if the transit takes more time than usual.
In Helsingör the ferries charge for approx. 6 minutes and in Helsingborg the ferries charge for approx. 9 minutes. This is enough to suffice for the journey across the strait.[1]
Side note: you can also charge your car on board from the boat’s batteries.
The Cruise Ship Terminal in San Francisco has 12 mW. Apparently it's uncommon in that it's wired with enough power available so the cruise ships don't have to run their on board generators while docked in port here. It's a major pollution thing.
> The ship... will travel between the ports of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. The two cities are 60 kilometers apart, a distance it is expected to travel in 90 minutes.
> Direct-current charging stations will be installed at each port... A full charge is expected to take just 40 minutes.
Something people overlook with these things is that you don't actually need to fully charge batteries because they won't be completely empty and probably a 70-80% charge is more than enough for a single crossing with a healthy safety margin. Also charging speeds are non linear. Charging speeds typically drop when the battery gets closer being full. Charging from 80% to 100% is a lot slower than charging from 20% to 80%. And depending on the battery chemistry, completely discharging or charging them to the max isn't necessarily great for battery longevity.
Another point with battery powered ships is that the rate at which they discharge is speed dependent and that's a non linear relationship because the drag increases quadratic with speed. So, if you are at 30%, you can still make it across. Just not at the full speed. This is less about range anxiety than it is about just being able to stick to schedules. If the ship did not charge enough it would have to go slower. But it would still get there. This ship is designed to go quite fast which means it would have a lot of wiggle room. So they might make it across at full speed even at maybe a 60% charge. The risk is that they'd run low and might have to slow down a bit. It would get there but with a delay if that happens. And then it would have to sit there a bit longer recharging leading to more delays.
The trick is optimizing the amount of batteries to minimize turnover and delays; not around being able to charge them from 0 to 100%. The sweet spot is probably around the 20-80% mark, meaning you'd want to be able do a crossing at full speed using about 50-60% of the battery capacity. The rest is just there as safety margin to avoid delays. If you burn into that, you need to charge a bit more. With 40-50 minutes turnover, there's plenty of time to do that typically.
Indeed, that's why I say "keep charge", i.e. be in a steady state such as always leaving at 80% charge. Not charging from zero, and not necessarily charging to 100%.
People who charge electric vehicles at home emphasise that you plug it in as a matter of routine every night (ABC: Always Be Charging) and since it's software-controlled, you can e.g. tell it to charge up to 80%, and figure out the most cost-effective way to do that by 8am.
The ABC of such a ship, is that it would be plugged whenever it is docked, during the turnarounds. And there is enough time in that turnaround to keep charge. It likely also has some downtime at night as well, but that matters less in this case.
There’s absolutely been a lot of focus on LLMs, but they simply work very well at a lot of things.
That said, Carbon (C++ successor) is an active experimental (open source) project. Fuchsia (operating system, also open) is shipping to consumer products today. Non-LLM AI research capabilities were delivered at a level I’m not sure is matched by any other frontier lab? Hardware (TPUs, opentitan, etc). Beam is mind-blowing and IMO such a sleeper that I can’t wait for people to try.
So whilst LLMs certainly take the limelight, Google is still working on new languages, operating systems, ground-up silicon etc. few (if any?) companies are doing that.
> Sorry, but AI still seems to be trash at anything moderately more complex than baby level tasks.
How familiar are you with the concept of the jagged frontier? That is, AI does indeed fail at things we might expect a third grader to be capable of. However, it is also absolutely exceptional at a lot of things. The trick is A) knowing which is which and B) being able to update yourself when new capabilities are unlocked
So yeah, it’s unsurprising you found a use case it couldn’t trivially do. But being able to one-shot quite complicated applications that may have taken a day to get right previously is an astonishingly useful thing, no?
I don't think so. Let's do a silly experiment: antirez, could you ditch Gemini 2.5 PRO and Claude Opus 4, and instead use llama? Like never again go back to Gemini/Claude. I don't think he can (I don't think he would want to). I this is not on antirez, this is on everyone who's paying for LLMs at the moment: they are paying for them because they are so damn good compared to the open source ones... so there's no incentive to switch. But again, that's like the climate change: there's no incentive to pollute less (well, perhaps to save us, but money is more important).
I never interpreted it as that; interesting way to look at it.
I think it did a good job of setting expectations. Most people would be (and, initially very much were) disappointed to find out the OS was basically just a web browser. At least the name helped make that clear.
The other is: when will they charge? Does this ship not run at night?
reply