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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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Ethereum just got easier to develop on

Starting out as a group of blockchain developers, around before the Ethereum genesis block, we’ve amassed hundreds of the foremost experts in every blockchain sub-discipline. As a result, these engineers have gone on to work at ConsenSys and gather extensive knowledge of what it takes to be successful in the blockchain ecosystem. These developers have created some of the fundamental infrastructure and tools for the Ethereum ecosystem, including Truffle, Infura, MetaMask, Alethio, PegaSys, Mythx, and more.

Between May 30 and June 12, 2019, a handful of devs joined forces to answer unanswered questions on Ethereum Stack Exchange. The goal of this initiative was to help improve the on-boarding and developer experience for the Ethereum community.

ConsenSys Ireland developers answering questions on Ethereum Stack Exchange

Q1. — How to verify the security of a contract?

With self-executing, open-source contracts, where anyone in the world can see inside, know how much money is there, and watch how it works security is a huge risk. One mistake and hundreds of millions of dollars can get stolen or frozen (e.g. the DAO, Parity multi-sig wallet hack). So, of course, a common question is how do I verify the security of my contract?

StackOverflow user Cognus asks:

“Any recommendation for a reliable smart contract auditing/testing service? I need to have my smart contract (written in Ethereum solidity) thoroughly audited for potential security, efficiency problems.”

Oisin, a blockchain architect at ConsenSys Dublin, gave a great answer with the many options available.

“As a good place to start, I would integrate your build/test pipeline with Mythx. If you use truffle for building your smart contracts, you can easily incorporate mythx with this project. If you want to get a professional audit done, you can talk to Consensys Diligence”

You can use MythX API to run analysis on your codebase to check for common security flaws and exploits. They are also working on IDE integration to help you right better Solidity code in real time.

There are also more advanced options out there for smart contract auditing. The most popular in the Ethereum space is formal verification with K. Formal verification is an exhaustive process to define the semantics of your entire program. A great example of what using K looks like is Gnosis who uses it to verify Gnosis Safe, their multi-sig wallet.

A similar question was asked about automated testing of smart contracts to make sure they compile when making PRs and merges before you deploy them. (hint, the answer is Truffle )

Q2. — Why do smart contract languages have to be deterministic?

Satoshi Nakanishi asks, “Why do smart contract languages have to be deterministic?”

This is a pertinent question for any blockchain developer. In essence, smart contract languages have to be deterministic because it is a distributed state machine so all nodes have to arrive at the same answers to ensure consistency across the network.

Nicolas Massart, Ethereum Stack Exchange mod and software engineer at ConsenSys R&D division PegaSys gives an in depth answer:

“As reminded in the first comment from Richard, smart contracts have to be deterministic because each nodes of the network have to be able to find the same result given the same input for a contract method. Otherwise each node that executes the contract method to validate the transaction would end with different results and no consensus would be possible.

But why the smart contract language itself such as Solidity have to be deterministic? It doesn’t have to be.

Solidity is deterministic because it’s a convenient language well designed for its purpose, but the Lisk network for instance uses standard JavaScript which is not deterministic. That means that nothing can avoid the use of a method to generate a random value in Lisk smart contracts. Developers thus have to be very careful to avoid using non deterministic functions. Sometimes this can be tricky. Math.random() function is obvious, but some other math methods can use roundings that won’t always give the same result or some date functions as the new Date() which gives the current date and is thus non deterministic. As you can read in the Lisk documentation developers are warned not to use this functions. But if you are not careful you can completely wreck your contract.

The power of Solidity and other deterministic languages is that developers don’t even have to care about determinism because there is no non deterministic functions in the language.”

Julien Marchand, Tech Lead at ConsenSys Paris added:

“The determinism prevent any fork in the network. The same goes for Solidity which uses the EVM.

To complete @NicolasMassart ‘s answer and @user1870400 comment that proposes to generate random values based on a possible Solidity implementation of the Go code used for random number generation, based on https://golang.org/src/math/rand/rng.go you can notice that this code doesn’t rely on any random at all but uses hard coded entropy.

If you try it twice without specifying entropy, you’ll get the same predictable result. To use this in a concrete use-case, you’re supposed to bring your own source of entropy, i.e.: rand.NewSource(time.Now().UnixNano()) for example.

Hopefully inside the EVM, each source of entropy generate the same value for a single transaction across each node of the network, whether you use the timestamp (aka block.timestamp or now — because it’s the timestamp of the time the block was issue by the single miner of this block) or any other pseudo random value.

So even implementing this algorithm in a smart contract using Solidity will lead to a deterministic result.“

ConsenSys Paris developers answering questions on Ethereum Stack Exchange

Q3. Solidity — How to integrate Drizzle with React?

Blockchain is a globally distributed database that revolutionizes how data and applications are built. But how do you bring that backend to life in your application? React is one of the main web application frameworks with lots of different state management approaches, let’s see what one example of Ethereum -> React data flow.

User51347 asks:

“I have currently set up a truffle project with react, redux and react-router. I just finished writing my first implementation of the smart contract, and now want redux to connect with the smart contract. I have tried reading up on several pages, including this: https://truffleframework.com/docs/drizzle/getting-started/using-an-existing-redux-store However, I can’t seem to figure this out. I have now set up my store as follows:”

import { createStore, applyMiddleware } from ‘redux’; import thunk from ‘redux-thunk’; import rootReducer from ‘./reducers/rootReducer’; import ItemList from “./utils/getItems”; //drizzle import { generateContractsInitialState } from “drizzle”; import ItemOwnershipContract from “./contracts/ItemOwnership.json”;

export default function configureStore() { const options = { contracts: [ ItemOwnershipContract ] } const initialState = { contracts: generateContractsInitialState(options), account: “1”, items: new ItemList().itemList, equipSelector: “0”, raritySelector: “0”, chosenItems: [-1, -1, -1] } const enhancers = applyMiddleware(thunk) && (window.__REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION__ && window.__REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION__());

return createStore( rootReducer, initialState, enhancers ); }

(apologies for the indentation).

How do I now do the following:

1. Get account address from current user?

2. Do I still need to use web3 to see if I have [a] connection with the given blockchain?

3. Will this automatically update the store whenever the content of the smart contract gets updated? Or do I need to force update it?

4. In that article, they simply call generateContractsInitialState() on “./drizzleOptions”, but never shows us the file. What will it contain? A way struct with the contracts array field, and passed in a json file?

5. do drizzle store my current account address, or do I need to use web3 to fetch that?

I am aware there is a lot of questions here, but I am not very familiar with any of these tools, so I don’t quite understand it. Thank you in advance!”

Amal Sudama, a software developer from Truffle answered:

“I also recommend reviewing Truffle’s drizzle box, as an up to date example of integrating with drizzle.

Drizzle is a state manager implemented in Redux that will handle loading web3 and will sync the currently selected address of the web3 provider. It will also sync contract state for registered contracts by automatically scanning transactions for contract updates in newly mined blocks.generateContractsInitialState is called internally when a contract is registered with Drizzle and should not be invoked directly.

Two resources for your consideration:

- Overview of drizzle and its related products

- Contract event Tutorial that makes use of the drizzle box“

Drizzle brings in a powerful mechanism for interacting with contract data inside your dapps front-end. It abstracts away a lot of the work of managing the user’s address you want to interact, keeping your UI synced with contracts data as it’s updated on-chain, and managing async transactions sent by the user or events received from the contracts you specify.

Using React’s data driven rendering plays nicely with the async yet deterministic nature of smart contracts making it an ideal library to use when building dapp front-ends. Truffle has maximized this by offering a simple and easy way to marry the two together, in an easily adaptable library. Like any redux store, Drizzle lets you insert custom middleware to go beyond mere data synchronization and activate external services when contract events are emitted. You can also setup your own sagas, reducers, higher-order components, etc. allowing you to adapt your dapps state management as your contracts develop over time.

List of the tags + sections where Ethereum Stack Exchange questions were answered:

Contract-design

Protocol

Remix

Web3js

Solidity

Geth

Precompiled contracts

Private blockchains

Tokens

ERC-20

Web3j

Infura

Ecdsa

Javascript

Transactions

Cryptocurrencies

Drizzle

Truffle

Arrays

Metamask

Ganache-cli

Dapp development

Contract development

Contract debugging

Contract invocation

Local variables

If you really want to step up your game, check out these resources:

Common attack vectors and hacks on Ethereum contracts

Best smart contract best practices

Blockchain Developer On Demand Program

Blockchain Developer Job Kit

There is no better way to get relevant advice than from the first-hand experience of senior developers. Ethereum is known for our talented, inclusive, supportive developer community willing to take time out of their busy schedules to support developers in need. Ethereum has become the best platform to build on because developers, like these from ConsenSys, continually contribute to open source code and knowledge every day.

Every question and answer counts! Head to the Ethereum Stack Exchange to lend your Web3 expertise. Help developers all over the world, sharpen your skills, and buidl the future.

Ethereum just got easier to develop on was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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Big Little Lies Asks Whether Some Kids Are Too Young to Learn About Climate Change

Everyone learns about climate change eventually—even children. And especially children in Monterey, California, home to one of the nation’s most incredible conservation-focused aquariums.

Related Content:

New Archive Digitizes 80,000 Historic Watercolor Paintings, the Medium Through Which We Documented the World Before Photography

Two Million Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora and Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

In 1886, the US Government Commissioned 7,500 Watercolor Paintings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Download Them in High Resolution is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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20 Hours, $18, and 11 Million Passwords Cracked

Easy Password Cracking

For a number of years I’ve been interested in the security provided by passwords, and the methods being developed to attack password-protected accounts. So I thought I’d see how successfully everyday developers, without specialist knowledge, could hack millions of passwords.

**Ethical Hacking: The real-world passwords used in this experiment were hacked and leaked online by an individual who is not myself. These passwords are now freely available online. Carrying out virtual attacks on leaked passwords like this enables us to educate individuals on the protection provided by their passwords, and can therefore help protect them from real attacks. Before carrying out my work I stripped all personally identifying information from the leaked file.**

People use passwords to protect virtually everything online: from emails to bank accounts, to crypto exchange accounts. While many sites now offer use of two factor authentication (‘2FA’), this often isn’t publicized or enforced, and a huge number of sites still don’t offer 2FA at all. The security passwords provide is therefore critical for protecting the population’s identity and money.

Naturally, the value stored behind passwords has motivated many attacks to be developed against them. There’s a huge number of research papers you can read about complex password cracking algorithms, which use intricate probability and machine learning techniques, and can crack over 90% of passwords.

While it’s scary how good these algorithms are, they don’t feel like a very realistic threat against the general population — how many people really know how to carry these attacks out? Why would they target me?! I decided therefore to take a look at a far more realistic attack: an attacker that knows how to create an AWS instance (or other cloud instance), and can run some open-source software on it.

If you already know about hashing of passwords please skip ‘Brief Background: Storing Passwords’. If you know about offline attacks against hashes please skip ‘Brief Background II: Attacking Hashes’.

Brief Background: Storing Passwords

When logging into a password-protected application, the sequence of events that appears to occur is the following:

User enters a password (which is transmitted for approval)

Entered password is compared to the password on record

Access granted if these match

However transmitting and storing passwords like this is incredibly insecure. For increased security, many systems (though sadly not all) actually store the ‘hash’ of users’ passwords in their database, and not the passwords themselves. You can think of the hash as an irreversible jumbling of the password; if an attacker discovers a password’s hash they cannot reverse the process to discover the password itself.

When a user enters their password in a system like this, the actual sequence of events is the following:

User enters password

Hash (password) is calculated locally and the hash is transmitted

The hash is compared to the hash on record

Access granted if these match

Brief Background II: Brute-forcing Hashes

In a system that uses hashing, if an attacker manages to get their hands on the password database, they still cannot see a user’s password. Attacks against such systems cannot reverse a hash to find the corresponding password, and therefore go as follows:

Guess a password

Calculate the hash of this guess

Compare this to the real hash

Repeat steps 1–3 until a match is found

This sounds pretty time consuming, however with a machine that can guess thousands of passwords in parallel, you can imagine things start to speed up.

The Attack

Software

The software I used is called Hashcat, which is an advanced password recovery tool, and is known as the “world’s fastest password cracker”. Hashcat is open-source, has sources and binaries downloadable from their website, and has an extensive wiki guide to the tool. It’s safe to say you don’t have to be a specialist to use it.

Hardware

I ran Hashcat on a Nvidia Tesla K80 — a GPU with 4992 cores that you can rent on AWS for $0.90 per hour (P2.xlarge). I started off by looking at the hashing capabilities of the K80, just to see how it fairs in comparison to a standard built-in laptop GPU.

The K80 came out 16 times faster than an average Intel graphics card. The K80 can calculate ~800 million SHA-256 hashes per second… that’s nearly 3 trillion per hour.

The passwords

As stated at the top, the passwords I ran my attack on were leaked by an attacker online. There were over 14 million passwords leaked in the attack, all of which was created by real-world users. I won’t provide a link to the passwords — there’s no need to share them unnecessarily — however I found them easily with a quick google search.

The logic of my attack

While Hashcat allows you to perform simple brute-force attacks (where you try every possible password of a specified length), they also have commands for slightly more complex attacks. It’s well known that most people base their password on a word, in various forms:

Just a word (potentially with different capitalizations) — Password

A word followed by some numbers/symbols — monkey! or Coffee12

A word with ‘leet speak’ applied — p4ssw0rd or f4c3b00k

Multiple words stuck together — isthissecure

And what a coincidence… if you can provide a list of words in a file, Hashcat has different modes built in, that can guess:

Every word

Every word with each possible number/symbol appended

Every word with specified rule(s) applied (i.e. ‘replace every o with a 0’)

Every combination of words stuck together

So I downloaded a dictionary file containing millions of English words to use in my attack.

From there you can then get a bit more generic, specifying ‘masks’ that Hashcat should try. This means instead of telling Hashcat to try ‘all passwords of length 8’ — which is 7 quadrillion different combinations — you can try every password that is ‘6 lowercase letters followed by 2 numbers’.

So how well did the attack do?

To be honest… it was far, far more successful than I had possibly imagined. Actually scarily successful…

2 hours: 48% of the passwords were cracked

8 hours: nearly 70% were cracked

20 hours: over 80% had been cracked

Call to action

Let me summarize.

20 hours. $0.90 per hour. That’s just $18. 80% of 14 million passwords cracked.

Let that sink in.

That’s scary. Really scary. People need to make their passwords more secure. Replacing ‘o’ with ‘0’ and ‘e’ with ‘3’ does not make your password secure. Adding numbers and symbols to the end of a word doesn’t either. It’s too predictable.

I’m not a security professional — I can’t give you rules that you can follow to make passwords unhackable. It was people following predictable rules that made these passwords so crackable. Be unpredictable. Or better yet, use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password to be unpredictable for you.

20 Hours, $18, and 11 Million Passwords Cracked was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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Machine boss

For The New York Times, Kevin Roose on the possibility of machines becoming your boss:

The goal of automation has always been efficiency, but in this new kind of workplace, A.I. sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized. Amazon uses complex algorithms to track worker productivity in its fulfillment centers, and can automatically generate the paperwork to fire workers who don’t meet their targets, as The Verge uncovered this year. (Amazon has disputed that it fires workers without human input, saying that managers can intervene in the process.) IBM has used Watson, its A.I. platform, during employee reviews to predict future performance and claims it has a 96 percent accuracy rate.

Splendid.

Tags: artificial intelligence, ethics, management

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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A view on despair

Sonja Kuijpers used abstract imagery to represent some sobering numbers:

You might be wondering what you are viewing here. This landscape, each element in it represents a person who committed suicide in the Netherlands in the year 2017.

The cityscape leads into more traditional views, which in turn feel much more heavy.

Tags: nature, suicide

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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The real reasons why the US refuses to go metric

In 1975, the United States passed the Metric Conversion Act. The legislation was meant to slowly transition its units of measurement from feet and pounds to meters and kilograms, bringing the US up to speed with the rest of the world. There was only one issue: the law was completely voluntary. Of course, that meant it pretty much never took off.

The pesky little clause that derailed metrication in the United States.

Over 40 years later, the US lives in a metric gray area. Sure, it has a few laws requiring that consumer goods list both metric and US customary measures, but it still remains isolated in its US customary measures bubble. So what would it take for that bubble to burst?

In the latest Verge Science video, we take a look at three lesser-known reasons behind the US’s reluctance to adopt the metric system. Apart from the obvious (it just can’t be bothered), there’s a small glimmer of hope for internationalists everywhere.

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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I have never loved Tom Hanks more than watching him butcher this 2009 CES keynote intro

It’s June 25th, and we here at The Verge have already begun getting CES emails in preparation for the best time of the year. (To be clear, that time of year is in January.)

Anyway, CES is coming. And what better way to get excited than to relive CES 10 years ago when Tom Hanks delivered what may be the best keynote introduction in CES history? It all resurfaced yesterday when Talk Film Society editor-in-chief Marcelo Pico tweeted a snippet of the keynote, which got picked up by AV Club.

Even with two Oscars, Tom Hanks couldn't get through the 2009 CES Sony presentation he was contractually obligated to do with a straight face pic.twitter.com/UAXzJ30rgx

— Midsommarcelo (@MarceloJPico) June 24, 2019

In the clip, Tom Hanks starts by making fun of tech keynote presenters, prancing back and forth aggressively around the stage, speaking in varying octaves. He then goes into the full speech that was prewritten for him (but not previously read by Hanks before he took the stage), laughing through the absurdity of whatever the Sony marketing team came up with. Spoiler alert: it includes about 100 mentions of the word “Sony.”

You really do get it all: Hanks nearly fumbling a line about a Sony e-reader as a Kindle, pausing to silently admit he doesn’t actually use a Sony computer (or a Sony anything, really), playfully jabbing Sony CEO Howard Stringer when he finally comes onstage about forcing him to do these types of appearances contractually. Hanks even stays on for a demo of some wonky augmented reality glasses that are clearly terrible and only exist to solve the problem of wanting to watch a Tom Hanks movie in low resolution while the real-life Tom Hanks is standing right in front of you. (Sony has since abandoned its smart glasses project in favor of projector-based AR.)

The video is 12-ish minutes long, but it’s genuinely worth every second. But if you need a TLDR, just know this: Tom Hanks is a savage. Also, I want to buy a pair of shitty Sony AR glasses now.

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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JavaScript Fundamentals: Mastering Loops

Timothy Robards

Jun 25

In JavaScript, we use loops when we want an easy way to handle repetition. In this article, we’re going to take a look at all the different ways we can create loops in our code — and we’ll consider the pros and cons of each method.

A way to think of a loop could be to think of giving commands to a robot. You could tell it to take 10 steps — and rather than issuing 10 separate commands, we can create a loop:

let i; for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { document.write("Take one step!\n"); }

This is an example of a for loop. At first this may be confusing — but we’ll break it all down in the next section! In this article, we’ll be reviewing many different kinds of loop statements, such as: for, do...while, while, labeled statement, break statement, continue statement, for...in & for...of. It’s worth noting that despite their differences in syntax — loops all essentially do the same thing: repeat an action a number of times. The situation dictates which type of loop is best suited.

the for loop

As we’ve seen in the above example, a for loop will repeat until our condition evaluates to false. The logical structure is like so:

for ([initialExpression]; [condition]; [incrementExpression]) statement

We are first initializing the initialExpression, which usually initializes one or more loop counters, but the syntax even allows for more complex expressions such as variables. We next evaluate our condition, if true, the loop statements will execute. If false, the loop terminates.

Then the statement executes. When we wish to execute multiple statements, we use a block statement ({ ... }) to group the together. If present, the update expression incrementExpression is executed. Control then returns to evaluating the condition.

Let’s now return to our previous example:

let i; for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { document.write("Take one step!\n"); }

Here we can see our for statement is counting the number of steps taken up to 10. The variable i will ensure we’re starting from the beginning by initializing to zero. Then it will check that i is less than the number we specify, which in our case is 10. The i++ is the count which will increment i by 1 after each pass through the loop. So our loop knows when to complete!

do...while statement

A do...while statement will repeat until the condition evaluates to false. The structure is like so:

do statement while (condition);

It’s fairly self-explanatory, statement is always executed once prior to the condition being checked. And then again until the while condition returns false. We can execute multiple statements, using a block statement ({ ... }) to group them. If condition is true, the statement executes again. At the end of each execution, the condition is checked. When the condition returns false, the execution stops and control passes to the statement which follows do...while.

Let’s see an example:

let i = 0; do { i += 1; console.log(i); } while (i < 10);

Here our do loop iterates at least once and then reiterates until i is no longer less than 10.

while statement

A while statement executes its statements as long as a specified condition evaluates to true. Its syntax is as follows:

while (condition) statement

If the condition becomes false, the statement within the loop stops executing and control then passes to the statement following the loop.

The condition test occurs before the statement in the loop is executed. And if the condition returns true, the statement is executed and the condition is tested again. If the condition returns false, execution will stop and control is passed to the statement following while.

And as with do...while, we can execute multiple statements using a block statement ({ … }) to group them together.

The following while loop will iterate as long as a is less than three:

let a = 0; let b = 0;

while (a < 3) { a++; b+= a; }

Here with each iteration, the loop increments a and adds that value to b. Therefore, a and b take on the following values:

After the first pass through the loop : a = 1 and b = 1

And the second pass: a = 2 and b = 3

And the third pass: a = 3 and b = 6

After completion of the third pass, the condition a < 3 is no longer true, so that’s where our loop terminates!

Note: When you first start working with loops, you may accidentally create an infinite loop. This is when a loop condition never evaluates to false. The statements in the following while loop execute forever, because the condition is never false:

while (true) { console.log('Hi there!'); }

CAUTION: If you run this code — please be aware that it’s likely to crash your browser!! So make sure you’ve backed up your open tabs - if you want to see what happens.

labeled statement

You can attach a label to any statement to serve as an identifier so you can refer to it elsewhere in your program. As an example, you could use a label to identify a loop, and then use break or continue statements to indicate whether a program should interrupt the loop, or continue its execution (we’ll take a look at these below).

label : statement

The value of label may be anything you like (with the exception of a JavaScript reserved word). Then you provide thestatement to execute.

So for example, you could use the label totalLoop to identify a while loop.

totalLoop: while (total == true) { doSomething(); }

break statement

We use the break statement to terminate a loop or switch, or in conjunction with a labeled statement.

When you use break without a label, it terminates the innermost enclosing while, do-while, for, or switch immediately and transfers control to the following statement.

When you use break with a label, it terminates the specified labeled statement.

A break statement looks like this:

break [label];

For example, let’s loop through an array until we find the index of an element with the value of: foundMe

for (let i = 0; i < a.length; i++) { if (a[i] == foundMe) { break; } }

And let’s use break with a labelled statement:

continue statement

We use the continue statement to restart a while, do-while, for, or label statement.

When you use continue without a label, it terminates the current iteration of the innermost enclosing while, do-while, or for statement and continues execution of the loop with the next iteration. This contrasts with the break statement, as continue doesn’t terminate the execution of the loop entirely. In a while loop, it jumps back to the condition. In a for loop, it jumps to the initial-expression.

When you use continue with a label, it applies to the looping statement identified with that label.

A continue statement looks like so:

continue [label];

For example, the following code block shows a while loop with a continue statement that will execute when the value of i is three. So n takes on the values one, three, seven, and twelve.

let i = 0; let n = 0;

while (i < 5) { i++; if (i == 3) { continue; } n += i; console.log(n); }

// 1,3,7,12

let i = 0; let n = 0;

while (i < 5) { i++; if (i == 3) { // continue; } n += i; console.log(n); }

// 1,3,6,10,15

for...in statement

A for...in statement iterates a specified variable over all the enumerable properties of an object. For each distinct property, JavaScript executes the specified statements. The syntax is as follows:

for (variable in object) { statements }

The following function takes as its argument an object and the object’s name. It then iterates over all the object’s properties and returns a string that lists the property names and their values.

function get_names(obj, obj_name) { let result = ''; for (let i in obj) { result += obj_name + '.' + i + ' = ' + obj[i] + '<br>'; } result += '<hr>'; return result; }

For an object food with properties lunch and dinner, result would be:

food.lunch = Sandwich food.dinner = Lasagna

Note: Given that for...in is built for iterating object properties, its not recommended for use with arrays — where the index order is important. For arrays it’s better to use the more traditional for loop.

for...of statement

A for … of statement creates a loop that iterates over iterable objects, such as Array, Map, Set, arguments and so on. The syntax is like so:

for (variable of object) { statement }

The below example shows the difference between a for...of loop and a for … in loop. While for...in iterates over property names, for...of iterates over property values:

let arr = [10, 20, 30]; arr.greet = 'hello';

for (let i in arr) { console.log(i); // logs "0", "1", "2", "greet" }

for (let i of arr) { console.log(i); // logs 10, 20, 30 }

Conclusion

And that’s it! We’ve learned about many of the different loop statements, such as: for, do...while, while, labeled statement, break statement, continue statement, for..in & for...of. And we’ve looked at a number of examples highlighting ideal use cases for each type of loop. Whichever statements we choose to utilize, we’re now well equipped to add logic and reasoning to our programs.

I hope you found this article useful! You can follow me on Medium. I’m also on Twitter. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below. I’ll be glad to help out!

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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This Camera App Erases the Humans in Every Photo

Want a fast and easy way to shoot photos in without pesky humans ruining the scene? There’s a new iOS app called Bye Bye Camera that automatically removes humans from every photo you snap.

Bye Bye Camera is an art project by artist Damjanski and the collective Do Something Good.

“The app takes out the vanity of any selfie and also the person,” Damjanski tells Artnome. “I consider Bye Bye Camera an app for the post-human era. It’s a gentle nod to a future where complex programs replace human labor and some would argue the human race.”

The app uses an real-time object detection system called YOLO to identify all the humans in the scene. It then does “inpainting,” which is what Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill does, to fill in those human areas with surrounding pixel details.

The results are a bit crude — important parts of the scene may be removed along with the people and the filled-in areas may stand out in the resulting photos — but it’s a quick and dirty way to get the job done.

Because the app only targets humans, it’ll leave other moving things and creatures (such as dogs) intact.

Back in 2015, Adobe showed off a similar technology called “Monument Mode” that’s able to wipe tourists from a scene in real-time as you’re composing your shot. That tech has yet to arrive in the form of a camera app, though.

If you’d like to get started with Bye Bye Camera, you can buy it for $3 over in the iOS App Store.

(via Artnome via TechCrunch)

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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Is 4 GB the Limit For The Raspberry Pi 4?

So you’ve rushed off to your favourite dealer in Raspberry Pi goodies and secured your shiny new Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe you’re anxiously waiting for the postie, or perhaps if you’re lucky enough to live near Cambridge you simply strolled into the Pi shop and bought one over the counter. You’ve got the best of the lot, the 4 GB model, and there’s nothing like the feeling of having the newest toy before everyone else does.

A scan of the Pi 4 user guide, with a tantalising 8GB at the bottom.

You open the box, pull out the Pi, and get busy. The instruction leaflet flutters to the floor, ignored and forgotten. If you’re our tipster [Eric van Zandvoort] though, you read it, notice something unexpected, and send a scan to your friends at Hackaday. Because there at the top, in the regulatory compliance information that nobody reads, is the following text:

Product name: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB + 8 GB variants.

It’s not the lack of an Oxford comma that caught his eye, but the tantalising mention of an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4. Could we one day see an extra model in the range with twice the memory? It would be nice to think so.

There are a couple of inevitable reactions when a new product comes out. First, everyone who has just bought the previous one will be upset, and second there will always be a group of people who say “Ah, don’t buy this one, wait for the super-duper upgrade model!” We’d like to suggest to anyone tempted into the latter group that this news should be no reason not to buy a Raspberry Pi 4 at the moment, because the prospect of an 8 GB variant should come as a shock to nobody.

It makes absolute sense that the Pi people will have equipped their SoC with as much address space as they can get into it, and equally as much sense that they will have fitted the final products with whatever memory chips keep it within their target price point. If you cast your mind back you’ll know that this isn’t the first time this has happened, early boards were shipped with 256 MB of RAM but later upgraded to 512 MB as the economics made it possible. Those with extreme knowledge of Pi trivia will also know that the original Model A was announced with 128 MB and released with 256 MB for the same reason.

There’s another question, would 8 GB make that much difference? The answer depends upon what you are doing with your Pi 4, but it’s worth remembering that this is no high-end workstation but a single-board computer with a stripped-down Linux distro for experimenters. You may be disappointed if you are pushing the limits of computational endeavour, but the majority of users will not be taxing Raspbian on the 4 GB model even if they install Chromium and open up all their favourite bloated social media sites. Perhaps we’ve become conditioned by the excessive demands of Windows on an x86 platform and forgotten just how powerful our computers really are. After all, as the apocryphal Bill Gates quote has it, “640k should be enough for anyone“, right?

We can look forward to an 8 GB Pi 4 then at some point in the future. We’d put our money on next year, since 2020 is a leap year and 2020-02-29 will be the Pi’s 2nd 8th birthday, it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to speculate around that date. But don’t bet on it, save your money for buying a 4 GB Pi 4 right now.

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daveschumaker · 6 years ago

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I went to Australia to test out Tesla’s vision of the future

Elon Musk and his fans may love sports cars, but the company’s biggest contribution may be reassuringly boring

Forget about Tesla’s cars for a minute — about the self-driving taxis or semis or whatever else Tesla CEO Elon Musk is currently hyped about on Twitter. This story is about the virtue of being boring, a perhaps underappreciated thing in our day and age. This is a story about not changing your life and how much better that can make it. That’s what Tesla is selling in terms of renewable energy: your life, but with fewer fossil fuels. Your house, powered by solar.

I wanted to know what that would be like in reality. That’s how I find myself in an Australian mansion powered by Tesla’s solar panels and Powerpack battery, driving a Model X. I can tell you firsthand that renewable energy isn’t exciting. That’s what makes it so compelling.

On the drive to the mansion, signs warn me to be careful of wildlife, complete with a portrait of what I am guessing is a wombat. A representative from Tesla picked me up at the nearest airport to Byron Bay and sat next to me while I figured out how to drive on the left. (Lane tracking helped.) When I arrive, I count the bedrooms. There are five, decorated with a minimum of personality. The master bedroom is entirely white and approximately the size of my last studio apartment. Besides the walk-in closet and king-size bed, there’s also an enormous sunken tub that looks out at what I am told is called the hinterland. Among my neighbors in the hinterland are some manner of Hemsworth brothers.

The tub is big enough that there’s a bench you can sit on. So, naturally, I run a bath and then slide into it to watch the sunset. Here I am, at the very first Tesla Destination in Australia, a home just outside Byron Bay, a surfer / hippie town that’s been overrun by rich people, possibly as a result of Hemsworthiness. The point of a Tesla Destination, as I understand it, is that it’s a place with a charger for your electric car. In my case, this is a Tesla Model X, an SUV that Musk has described as a “Fabergé egg.”

But best of all, you don’t have to think about any of it

Tesla Destinations are mostly hospitality industry locations in the US; the mansion where I am staying is rented out by an Australian company for groups. It can sleep 10, according to the hospitality company, and “starts” (?) at $1,670 AUD a night. It — this has to be said — has about the same aesthetic as a porn mansion: largely empty, echoey, vaguely “high end,” and with a pervading sense that no one actually lives here.

Besides the electric charger, the mansion is also fitted with solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall, a battery for storing the energy they generate. While I live for dumb thrills like driving an expensive car I don’t own on the wrong side of the road, I am, in fact, at the mansion to experience the clean energy lifestyle Tesla is selling.

The Model X and mansion are, in some ways, emblematic of the Tesla lifestyle and approach. The dream of this lifestyle is that you can have everything you already have but without fossil fuels. You can keep on driving a car. You can live in your porn mansion entirely on renewable energy and sell any extra power you harvest to the grid. But best of all, you don’t have to think about any of it.

It takes me a while to sort out the kitchen when it’s time for dinner. Besides the “actual” kitchen, there’s also what appears to be a butler’s pantry, which is where all of the dishes are located. I turn on the stove and heat water for spaghetti.

Instead of focusing on pure do-goodery, which has a kind of limited market, the electric car would be an aspirational good

It’s true that this is a story about Tesla energy, but it’s also true that we all use energy all the time. The mundane tasks I engage in as I settle into the mansion — the bath, cooking dinner — of course, require energy. I can watch the little jiggles of energy required on the Tesla app. All day long, the mansion has been running on solar energy, and it continues to do so right up until I plug in the Model X to charge. That battery draws so much energy that the house switches to the grid.

So I’m running on the grid energy when I wake up the next day and make breakfast. The leather couch in the main room (what the marketing materials call an “open concept living and lounge space”) is sunken in a large rectangular depression called a conversation pit. I decide I’d rather work there than at the table, so I settle in, plug in my laptop, and start working.

During my three-day stay at the mansion, Tesla will abruptly reverse course on its abrupt decision to shutter all of its stores and move all of its sales online. Actually, I wind up writing that story shortly after I arrive at the mansion before I make dinner. The company will increase the price of its cars. Musk will accuse the US Securities and Exchange Commission of making an “unconstitutional power grab” over his tweets. (I will write this story while eating toast in the conversation pit.) Despite living and working for days in what is probably the best example I have seen of a luxury environmentalist lifestyle, I find myself wondering what the catch is.

Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Tesla’s first “master plan,” dated to 2006, involved making a luxury electric car that focused on the fun rather than the environmental prospects of an electric car: a sports car with the kind of pickup that would make gearheads like Jay Leno excited. Instead of focusing on pure do-goodery, which has a kind of limited market, the electric car would be an aspirational good. Then, after proving that it was possible to make an electric car desirable, there would be cheaper versions, and the profits from those could be used by Tesla to provide solar power.

The second master plan, out a decade later, shifted Tesla’s focus from cars to energy. “The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good,” Musk wrote in the document. Published in July, it preceded Tesla’s August 1st, 2016, announcement that the company was acquiring SolarCity, which was then the largest maker of solar panels in the US. (SolarCity was founded by Lyndon and Peter Rive, Musk’s cousins. Musk was chairman of both companies at the time and was SolarCity’s largest shareholder.) By bringing the two companies together, Musk wrote, Tesla could “create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world.” The acquisition was completed that November.

In 2017, Tesla began taking preorders for its solar roof. The pitch was pretty simple: tile-sized solar panels that could be used as a home’s, well, roof. The tiles look the same as normal roof tiles, so it’s not even visually obvious that there’s anything harvesting energy up there. Using Tesla’s calculator, if my landlord were to install the solar tiles on 40 percent of my apartment building’s roof, it would cost $157,100, about five times more than conventional roofing. But, as the energy calculator points out, the high upfront cost can be amortized out — plus, there’s a $27,000 tax credit to help sweeten the deal.

I was staying in a mansion and driving a fancy car in a popular tourist town

Though the mansion had solar panels rather than the tiles, it seems like a pretty good representation of what Tesla’s second master plan hoped to achieve. Living in Tesla’s imagined future, most of the activities of my life weren’t especially changed by switching the source from which the house drew energy. The only thing that might have qualified as a difference was me checking the Tesla app to see what was going on with my energy usage.

It was luxurious, sure. I was also aware of how much shabbier my own lifestyle was by comparison. I was staying in a mansion and driving a fancy car in a popular tourist town. If I weren’t so badly dressed, I would have looked impressive. Whenever I drove into Byron Bay, people asked about the Model X — not about the car��s electric engine, but mostly about the falcon wing doors. I spent most of those days with a low-level growl of anxiety that I would break something worth more than I am.

It’s undeniably seductive to be promised free energy without sacrificing any amenities. In my life, I have made some of those sacrifices because I like the environment and also because I’m cheap. Unlike most Americans, I don’t own a car; I bike or I take public transit. It takes me longer to get where I’m going, and sometimes I arrive sweaty. But I’m healthy, I don’t have any disabilities, and I don’t haul around any kids. Plus, I live in an area where public transit is possible. There are a lot of reasons Americans own cars, but the biggest one is necessity. The next biggest? Convenience. An electric car offers everything a gas car does but without the pollution.

“The only thing stopping it from happening is us — the collective us.”

I am often surprised by the discussion among environmental activists of what people should do. It only rarely takes into account what people might want or what might limit their choices. Here, too, Tesla has suggested that very little needs to change: you can live in your home without pulling energy from the grid or by pulling minimal energy. Engaging in an environmentally friendly lifestyle doesn’t require you, the consumer, to give up comfort or change your values, Tesla’s home energy products promise. You don’t even need to lobby your local government for better transit options.

“We’re moving towards this world of energy abundance... for really, really low cost,” says Drew Baglino, the vice president of technology at Tesla. “These technologies are ready ... The only thing stopping it from happening is us — the collective us.”

Solar and wind energy are basically free once you set up the infrastructure to take advantage of them. Over the last two decades, the cost of that infrastructure has come down. And batteries are a crucial part of that because you can’t get solar energy on a cloudy day or wind energy on a still one. A battery, however, allows you to store energy from a sunny day to run your home on a cloudy one. After all, why should your lifestyle be altered by something as annoying as the weather? Why should your lifestyle change at all?

Photo by Kelly Barnes for The Verge

Heidi and John Lovakovic with their dog Cocco have a Tesla battery and solar panels at their home in Walkley Heights, Adelaide, South Australia.

Free — or at least cheap — energy isn’t likely to make a difference to the people who stay in the mansion. They aren’t paying the electric bills. But for Australians like Heidi Lovakovic, 57, who got fitted out with 17 solar panels and a Powerwall in May 2018, it’s made a massive dent in her energy bill. She gets billed quarterly, and before the installation, her power bill was $800 AUD in the summer.

I meet her in a suburb outside of Adelaide. The solar panels on her house’s roof are immediately visible from the street. Unlike the mansion, her one-story cottage feels lived in from the moment I ring the bell and a small dog begins to bark. Lovakovic shows me in and offers me tea from her neat and unfussy kitchen. The general decor reminds me of the American Midwest — more specifically, Ohio, and even more specifically, my grandmother’s house, right down to the lace table runner on the dining room table. The mansion is a kind of fancy hotel; this is a home.

The installation of the solar panels and the Powerwall eliminated her energy bill, she tells me. And because she sells electricity back to the grid, she sometimes gets a credit on her statements from the electric company. Obligingly, she gets out her bills to show me.

“It’s wonderful. We haven’t had a bill.”

Lovakovic had previously tried to put solar panels on her home, but she wasn’t able to get a line of credit. So when the South Australian government announced in early 2018 that 1,100 people who lived in South Australia Housing Trust properties — as she does — could apply to have Tesla’s solar panels and Powerwall installed in their homes, she signed up. The network was up and running in July. “It’s wonderful,” she says. “We haven’t had a bill.”

Lovakovic’s house is part of a larger-scale attempt to move to sustainable energy: a virtual power plant. Basically, a bunch of Tesla Powerwalls in a bunch of people’s houses in the suburbs of Adelaide are linked together. They gather energy from the solar panels on the residences’ roofs, and they can supply the neighborhood during a blackout. The first phase of 100 homes started in February 2018. When I visit, Tesla is scaling up to the second phase of 1,000 homes.

Okay, sure. But why South Australia? The short answer is that the grid sucks there, and the slightly longer answer is that there’s less energy regulation in Australia than there is in the US. (Though it should be said that there’s a similar project in Vermont with Green Mountain Power.) The even longer answer is that South Australia has had trouble maintaining reliable power for years, and Australia deliberately made an effort to move to renewable energy, says Sam Crafter, 45, the executive director of energy implementation for the South Australian government.

“We’ve ended up being the demonstration place for energy,” he says.

Photo by Kelly Barnes for The Verge

Sherallee Andrews has a Tesla Battery and solar panels at her home in Golden Grove, Adelaide, South Australia.

In 2002, South Australia had very little renewable energy. Concerns about climate change prompted the Australian government to set up incentives for renewable energy in 2006. The country has set an ambitious goal of getting to 75 percent renewable energy in 2025 or 2030. South Australia, in particular, was an ideal place to integrate renewables into the infrastructure: in 2016 and 2017, huge weather events caused a statewide blackout. “It brought into focus how risky our situation is as a state,” Crafter says.

So the state put out a call for renewable technology that might help alleviate the situation, and Tesla put in a bid for its linked system, called a virtual power plant or VPP, and suggested using Australia’s housing trust to deploy it. That way, the government owns the batteries and solar panels as well as the homes where they’re installed. Those customers, who are mostly low-income, are most likely to benefit from cheaper power bills directly, but any excess energy they draw can shore up their neighbors’ homes as well.

Lower bills were a theme among the people I spoke to who’d had Powerwalls installed in the first portion of the plan. Sherallee Andrews, 58, told me that her bills ranged from $300 to $400 AUD quarterly before her 17 panels and Powerwall were installed in April 2018. Now, she says, the bills average around $12. Another customer, Victoria Townsend, 45, had 20 panels and a Powerwall installed in April 2018. “We noticed the benefits quickly over the summer,” she says. Her bills used to be $340 to $450 AUD quarterly, and now her statements appear as credits. The energy company owes her about $130 AUD, she says.

Photo by Kelly Barnes for The Verge

Victoria Townsend has a Tesla battery and solar panels at their home in Dover Gardens, Adelaide, South Australia.

This is part of the selling point for VPPs. But there’s another one to keep in mind, says Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Unlike the current electric grid, VPPs aren’t centralized. That means they could potentially make the grid more secure.

“The Powerwall is like power security,” Ceder says. (He owns one.) “As long as your power comes from one centralized place, there are major security issues in stabilizing the grid. I see the benefit of highly distributed power as a security issue.” A distributed grid has many vulnerabilities but no one large vulnerability, Ceder points out. That makes events like the US Northeast blackout in 2003, when an estimated 50 million people were left without power because of some rogue tree branches, less likely.

When I ask Andrews if the battery made a difference for blackouts, she laughs. “With the battery, we hardly notice blackouts.” Townsend tells me she hasn’t really noticed blackouts, either. “The light flashes once.” But you don’t realize it’s a blackout unless you check the app, Townsend says, because the lights stay on. I am reminded, again, that the strongest selling point for this technology is exactly how little it will change for the person who installs it.

Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Tesla still mostly sells and leases cars; revenue from automotive sales and rentals in the first quarter this year totaled $3.72 billion. Solar energy generation and storage — solar panels plus Powerwalls and Powerpacks — was $324 million, a fraction of what the company makes from its cars. It’s also a drop from the first quarter last year when Tesla had energy sales of $410 million. (Tesla declined to say how much of that revenue was from energy storage specifically.)

In fact, Tesla’s market share in solar energy has been shrinking. When Tesla first bought SolarCity, it was the biggest player in residential solar energy. Last year, Tesla slid to second place, behind Sunrun. In June 2018, the company stopped selling its solar panels at Home Depot. That tanked sales: energy generation and storage revenue sank in the fourth quarter last year to $371.5 million, a 7 percent decline. (A former Tesla employee told Reuters that Tesla “didn’t appreciate the significance” of the Home Depot deal.) Then, in February, the company announced that all solar and storage would be sold online.

In April, Tesla announced that it was cutting prices on its solar panels in response to its drop in market share. Though the price on Powerwalls hasn’t dropped, Tesla says that it’s simplified the process of putting a Powerwall in and lowered installation pricing so more Powerwalls are being put in homes daily.

The battery squeeze has gotten so intense

Tesla isn’t the biggest player in consumer energy storage, either; that’s likely Sonnen, which was bought in February by Shell. (Yes, the oil company.) Sonnen was founded in 2010, and, last year, it installed 40,000 battery packs worldwide, according to a Financial Times report. Sonnen received permission to build its own version of a VPP in Germany. Vivint Solar, LG, Eos, Sunverge, and Nissan all dabble in the space, too. More companies have jumped in as the cost of lithium-ion batteries has come down.

Part of what differentiates battery companies is the supply chain. Right now, Tesla is predominantly using Panasonic’s supply chain, says Craig Irwin, an analyst for Roth Capital Partners. While Irwin doesn’t see any problems with battery production in the next five to 10 years — “not on lithium, not on cobalt, not on separators, or electrolytes, I don’t see it” — Panasonic will always get the best price on things coming from its own supply chain. For Tesla to have an advantage on materials, the company would need to create its own supply chain, something Irwin doesn’t see happening for at least the next 10 years.

On the residential storage side, Tesla isn’t just using Panasonic cells; it’s using Samsung and other suppliers. That’s because not every supplier makes every kind of cell. Tesla’s battery issues may make expansion tough and expensive, even though Tesla recently bought Maxwell Technologies, a battery company known for its dry electrode technology. If the new technology works out, that means a massive reduction in how much it costs to make each battery cell because no solvent is required, meaning it doesn’t need to be recovered and recycled. Maxwell also has all-ceramic separators, which might make batteries last longer. (Tesla declined to comment on the Maxwell acquisition’s purpose.) The battery squeeze has gotten so intense that Musk, in a June 2019 shareholder meeting, discussed the possibility of Tesla getting into mining.

Photo: AFP / Getty Images

Solar panels set up by Tesla Industries are seen at a hospital in Vieques, Puerto Rico, on November 27th, 2017.

There is also the cautionary example of Vieques, Puerto Rico. In September 2017, Hurricane Maria — the worst natural disaster ever to hit the island — knocked out the lights and power for all of Puerto Rico where 3.3 million Americans live. Tesla employees landed on the island a week later, offering a proposal to create “microgrids” to produce and supply power separately from the island’s main grid. It wasn’t the first time Tesla had done this: on Ta‘ū an island in American Samoa, all 600 residents were now using a solar battery power system. Tesla had also built a solar and battery farm on Kauai, a Hawaiian island. More recently, Tesla also helps manage energy in Samoa where the company helps balance the load of energy on the island using an 8MW Powerpack. (The software also controls a diesel generator, just in case.)

While Tesla did successfully get electricity up and running at one project, larger changes didn’t really happen. “At one water treatment facility, the battery sat dormant and, during HuffPost’s visit to the site in late February, the field of solar panels was overgrown with weeds and brush,” Alexander Kauffman wrote for HuffPost.

There were also regulatory hurdles in Puerto Rico that Tesla didn’t face in Australia. Australia generally has more lax regulation around power than the US does. That’s one reason why Tesla has projects there. Regulatory changes have happened in Puerto Rico that should make it easier for renewables, including rules that make it easier for microgrids to get started.

Because cars are so important to Tesla, they are likely to take priority

Australia may represent the high water mark of Tesla’s power ambitions so far, with a favorable regulatory framework, a government investment in renewable energy, and plenty of money to spend on upkeep. It is the second-hottest renewable energy market for commercial energy products in the world, says Irwin. The hottest market in the world right now, Irwin says, is Germany.

But fundamentally, according to Irwin, the biggest thing pushing battery technology right now isn’t energy storage systems for homes or utilities. It’s electric cars. “The success of residential energy storage systems and utility energy storage systems will be derivative of the EV pull,” he says. That makes the energy storage products a nice business adjacency for Tesla — the company certainly has plenty of engineering expertise — but it also suggests that it’s unlikely to be the main driver for Tesla in the next several years, or ever.

Because cars are so important to Tesla, they are likely to take priority. Last year, there was a shortage of cells as Tesla began ramping up its Model 3 production. That slowed the production of energy products. The company pointed out in its fourth quarter letter to shareholders last year that new energy production lines have been built out at Gigafactory 1 where Tesla manufactures its energy products, including the Powerwall and Powerpack.

Tesla is about to launch another new car, the Model Y. In April, Musk tweeted that Panasonic’s pace of battery production was constraining the production of the Model 3. “Batteries will run out if Tesla starts to sell the Model Y and expands its business next year,” Panasonic CEO Kazuhiro Tsuga said in May, according to Bloomberg News. “What will we do then?”

Image: Tesla

Night at the Hornsdale Power Reserve. The 100MW / 129MWh lithium-ion battery is the largest in the world.

As I write this in California, we are entering fire season, which, theoretically, starts in June and ends in December but is beginning to feel permanent. My local electric company, PG&E, has announced that there may be days-long outages for some of its customers this summer. They have also been responsible for more than 1,500 California fires since 2014. That means the energy company is likely to deactivate more power lines this summer, out of caution, UC Berkeley’s Ceder says. So hot, dry, windy weather is power outage weather all summer long. And the outages have already started: already, Yuba and Butte counties had their power switched off.

“I’m worried,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said. “We’re all worried about it for the elderly. We’re worried about it because we could see people’s power shut off not for a day or two but potentially a week.” The city of Calistoga alone may lose power 15 times this season, the Bloomberg report said.

Most people aren’t prepared for this, and that includes me. About three weeks ago, my mother called to ask if I had bought a solar generator and a battery, just in case. I still haven’t done it. Most Californians haven’t, though the situation has boosted interest in home energy systems. According to BloombergNEF, almost 10,000 home battery systems were in place last year, up from just 400 in 2016. But the cost was steep, averaging $16,400 once incentives were factored in.

“It’s really hard to make the economics on that work.”

That cost helps explain why some people believe the Powerwall and consumer solar panels aren’t the real game for Tesla energy. “I never would have imagined that: someone showing off a battery as a status symbol,” says Sam Jaffe, an analyst with Cairn Energy Research Advisors. “It’s neat, it’s modern, it looks good, you look cool, I guess. It still puzzles me that a battery can be sexy.” That might make it more like a “halo” car, a representation for the brand that isn’t really affordable or practical for the vast majority of consumers.

The product Jaffe flags as being most significant to Tesla’s energy business is the Powerpack. “The Powerpack is a very competitive and well-engineered product that’s always going to be one of the primary choices to be used in a utility-scaled system,” Jaffe says. He’d also guess that it’s probably a larger proportion of the business than the Powerwall.

The basic issue is economic: it costs more to make a lot of little things than a few big things. And Tesla’s industrial-sized Powerpack battery makes more sense for businesses and utilities than a Powerwall or VPP might. There are places where VPPs consisting of Powerwalls are useful — near the edges of the grid, for instance, or on an unstable grid where there’s enough wealth that people can afford it. But even with that taken into account, “it’s really hard to make the economics on that work,” Jaffe says. “You’d need to have such a dramatic drop in battery pricing for that to matter.”

That means large-scale utility systems are going to dwarf whatever happens in our own homes, pretty much always. And so Tesla has installed 42 Powerpacks at an Osaka station for the Kintetsu Railway as a backup in case of emergency. But it’s pretty small as backups go, with just enough juice to get a stranded train into the station. Tesla batteries also power mini-grids in Eritrea.

Image: Tesla

Hornsdale Power Reserve by day. Hornsdale exists to lower energy prices while increasing the stability of the grid.

But an even larger-scale Powerpack installation is in Australia: the Hornsdale Power Reserve, a 147-mile drive north of Adelaide. The 100MW / 129MWh lithium-ion battery, the largest in the world, stores energy generated by a nearby wind farm.

Like the VPP, Hornsdale exists to lower energy prices while increasing the stability of the grid. The battery, which cost about $90.6 million AUD, generated revenue of $13.1 million AUD in the first six months of 2018, according to The Guardian. About $2 million AUD came from the South Australian government’s contract with Neoen, the French company that owns the battery. The rest came from trading on the energy market or from sales on stored electricity.

The Hornsdale battery dabbles in the “frequency or ancillary services market,” which is a fancy way of saying that the battery does stuff to make sure there’s enough energy to meet demand. In the first four months of its operation, the Hornsdale battery dropped prices on the market by 90 percent, according to a study presented by McKinsey in 2018.

Again, here, the goal is to allow South Australian residents to essentially live their ordinary lives, without any special awareness of the renewable energy that’s making the market cheaper and more stable. A successful execution of the Hornsdale project is one that residents hardly think of. They just notice their energy bills have dropped.

One big hope for this kind of battery is that it can be used to replace power plants that are at the end of their lifespan. Last year, Tesla agreed to supply PG&E with a new Powerpack project that would be even larger than the one at Hornsdale. The project was approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, but there’s been a hitch: PG&E’s impending bankruptcy.

If Musk is to be believed, Tesla energy is where the action is this year

The utility company was found to be responsible for the Camp fire, a wildfire that burned a record 153,336 acres. PG&E may have to pay as much as $30 billion as a result of liability for fires in 2017 and 2018, according to Bloomberg. (That excludes fines or other punitive payments.) The specter of bankruptcy may scare the planned battery storage unit out of existence, but it hasn’t yet. PG&E spokesman Paul Doherty told me that the company “continues to move forward with this project.” PG&E is aiming to have the battery online by December 31st, 2020, Doherty said.

PG&E isn’t the only company struggling. In February, Tesla announced that it was closing most of its stores and laying off some sales staff to save money. I had actually just arrived at the mansion two weeks later when Tesla reversed itself with an announcement that many of its stores would, in fact, stay open. I wrote about the announcement using the stored energy from the Powerwall battery. A more recent event suggests that Tesla, which is never especially financial stable at the best of times, was in real trouble: on May 16th, an email from Musk leaked. Though Tesla had just raised $2.7 billion this year to help the company stay afloat, Musk’s email suggested that it would only last 10 months unless severe cost-cutting measures were introduced.

Still, if Musk is to be believed, Tesla energy is where the action is this year. The Model Y unveiling event occurred in Los Angeles while I was in Adelaide interviewing Powerwall customers. I ended up watching it later in my hotel room. From the stage, I watched Musk declare, “This is the year of the solar roof and Powerwall.” Model 3 production had pulled battery resources to the car. But now that production had smoothed out, Musk said, “we’re excited about the solar roof, solar retrofit, and Powerwall.”

“Excited” struck me as the wrong word. The thing I appreciated the most about the battery-powered electricity I had seen firsthand was how boring it was. It was life as I knew it but powered almost exclusively by renewable energy without fossil fuels. The most promising thing about it was how little I’d had to change at all.

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