from the first paragraph of the article, it sounds like they share your feelings:
Battery technology is one of those areas that is getting a lot of promising research results but very little in the form of commercial products we can use to power digital devices, electric vehicles, or off-grid homes. That may soon change thanks to sodium-ion batteries that are safer, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.
"cashing in this virtue signaling"
Not wanting to be associated with the Great Replacement theory is "virtue signaling"
Tell me you're a right wing shill without telling me you're a right wing shill
I don't think I'd listened to or read Sam Harris before, but he sounds like an apologist for war criminals.
Sh'artgnan
This seems wrong to me. Existing paradigms like try catch or returning result codes enable handling these situations gracefully and in an informed manner. Making an inert api as is suggested here means that now you have an api that doesn’t behave as expected but without an explanation why.
“The app was probably only tested against a PC so an exception would be unhandled” means that they did not implement it well against a PC. There are a bunch of possible reasons you’d get an exception while adding a printer on a PC, and I can’t imagine that the correct behavior would be to crash whatever it is you’re doing.
"virtue signaling" is a right wing term by which statements of principle are dismissed.
i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that "Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C". Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.
Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.