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The Donut Labs Solid State Battery – Breakthrough Or Bust? | Lightning Round

Joe Scott | May 7, 2026



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In today’s Lightning Round video, I take a look at the coverage of Donut Labs’ new solid state battery that they previewed at CES in January. As independent tests start rolling out, the picture has become more complicated. Does it meet the specs they promised? Is it even real solid state? We’ll take a look. We also look at bio-computers, IQ tests, existential dread, and wild weather patterns.

Check out these videos from Matt Ferrell, Ziroth, and Two Bit daVinci for more on the Donut battery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H45HXs4xXfA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNX47A8BysE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ljwigh9jA

https://youtu.be/vWwPySIm9tU?si=iYQRcv2xHL-d9ZWI

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – Intro
2:03 – Donut Labs Solid State Battery
9:50 – Biological Computing in the 90s & 00s?
14:29 – The Next Revolutionary Tech in Home Computers?
16:48 – IQ
20:13 – Your Biggest Existential Dread?
22:12 – Patreon & Member Callouts
23:06 – Why Is The Weather Erratic?
28:00 – Sponsor – Nebula

Written by Joe Scott

Comments

This post currently has 33 comments.

  1. @soffici1

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    Well, while it is true that IQ is an idiotic way of measuring actual intelligence in living beings (and it also has its roots deep in racism, so there’s that), religion has a corrupting effect on the ability to critically think. Since critical thinking is a way of improving not only your knowledge, but also your actual intelligence (in the broadest sense), anything that stumps critical thinking also stumps intelligence.
    Hence the causal relationship is a vicious circle: if you are dumb enough to be fooled by religion, you will become d7mb enough to be fooled by religion, which will make you dumb enough to be fooled by religion, in an almost endless spiral of gullibility, bigotry and all the nice character traits that come with ignorance: racism, sexism, preference for cultist behaviour, etc.
    Yes, even smart people and very educated people fall for racism, sexism and the rest, but we’re talking percentages and incentives, here.
    In general, the more educated, the more liberal and less religious.

  2. @Primordialplasma

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    Is a neuron not just a product of the relationships between chemicals? A formation which exists purely because it maintains a cycle? I mean searching for anything is essentially futile since the concept of processing is defined by the intention/drive to continue to process. we only think because we've been told to by the development of the universe. Anything a human can perceive/label can be entirely defined by the core factors which initially generated the conditions that created humans. We just be out here poopn+fartn~

  3. @peterprokop

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    The most successful religions are multi-layered and have something to offer for every level of intellect, from child level to some of the greatest minds ever lived.

  4. @ThyrzaSegal

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    My mother just died of esophageal cancer from eating so much red meat. She had been absolutely convinced via youtube that a carnivore diet was good and was radicalized against vegetables. She was also one of the most intelligent people I have ever known. I don't say that because she was my mother. I say that because she seemed to quickly become an expert at any thing she ever spent any time at or reading up on.

  5. @NoWay1969

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    Isn't the global warming, the weather, the increase in data centers, the water shortage, and add in just about anything threatening humanity's existence, driven by population? Get the global population back down to < 1,000,000,000 people, and we can all eat steak in our cars while driving to our data centers with no worries.

  6. @NoWay1969

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    I am not scared at all of an AI apocalypse. AI does what it's programmed to do. If AI results in some Terminator: Judgement Day scenario, it's because some moron human programmed it to do that. Neural computers, though, that scares the 💩 out of me. Biology has an innate instinct to duplicate itself at all costs. A biological organism with super intelligence? We're toast🍞.

  7. @ClippyDaMane

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    I know brain dead atheists and very intelligent religious ppl and vice versa. I personally think intelligence has nothing to do with religion. For me it’s based on experience’s. I saw some crazy shit and felt some crazy shit to the point that I couldn’t deny it anymore and chose to be on the good side.

  8. @tribalrhino

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    Humans… pft… 🙂 Science is also a bit of a cult. The universe don't care about "the laws of physics"… Maths and science are human creations to try and explain stuff to our justification engines in our skulls – we even know it's wrong, but we move on anyway, cuz it's the best we have at the moment… so they are not real "rules" as such then… Back in the olden days, I used to be able to measure a meter, with a verified stick and carry it around and satisfy myself that things were a meter… now-a-days I have to trust the rich overlords that have the "special" equipment that can verify that a meter is actually a meter. Sounds a little bit culty to me. It's no wonder you puny humans are doomed 😀 (I am going to be fine, I am the next gen pong playing mouse neurons) 😀

  9. @annonymat

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    The future of home computing:
    Actually, we'll get an NPU in every PC. The AI that tells you hallucinated facts and generates naughty images is what's being marketed, but actually, AI can be pretty useful in the background.
    Think anti-virus, scam protection document formatting, autocorrect, image adjustment and things like ray tracing and video upscaling.
    A small 2B model can scan any website and censor it for your kids in less than a second, eliminating the needs for age verification and preserving privacy.
    The tech overlords want us to do that in the cloud, but that's a dead end. In actuality, it's coming home and it's probably gonna be open source.

    AI is also changing: IBM Watson had it right the first time around. Small LLM, that knows how to search and huge libraries / encyclopedias that are formatted for AI to look up stuff. That saves energy, is faster and won't hallucinate.

    But besides the AI stuff, quantum computing is also coming in a decade or two. It's getting better and can crack 12 bit in a lab. Once it hits 16 bit, it's gonna change some stuff.
    It's not good for everything, but it's great at ray tracing, matrix multiplications and again…. AI. But it's gonna be used in data compression, video and images, rendering and gaming.

    But what's in the short term?

    Windows is a dying platform, Linux is taking off. Same goes for x86. That's the processor type we've been using since the Apollo days. It's full of old baggage and legacy mess, making it widely inefficient. So what's next? Instead of using 60's tech, we're upgrading to the 70's: ARM processors. They come with less bloat and therefor use less power. The desktop is the last holdout on x86 and translation software is getting better and better.
    At some point, supporting two architectures is going to be too expensive and the shift will happen.
    You might think of ARM as computers on a chip, but modular computers like we have now are just as possible on ARM than on x86. It just isn't wide spread.
    But where is apple on all of that?
    Well, they've been on ARM since the M1 Macbook. That iPhone has been from the start. Apple just shifted early. As for the OS, Mac is Unix based, just like Linux, so sorry Microsoft NT kernel, you're a dying breed.

    Am I glazing Linux? Not really, Laptop makers are shifting, governments are shifting too and Linux devs got off their high horse. More and more Software is released on both. I think the shift is inevitable by now. Steam made Linux sexy to the gamers and Windows 11 gave the platform a death blow. Thanks Copilot and TPM 2.0.
    When consumers have to choose between old habits and privacy, in the end, privacy wins in the long term.

  10. @iamjames8403

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    I'm sure this comment will get hidden/deleted.
    Everyone worries about data centers consuming drinking water but not at all concerned about the Native American Reservations who have no running drinking water and have to pay to have the water tanked in.
    Even Mr Beast went to Africa to help them have drinking water but why not in his own backyard?

  11. @matsv201

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    Looks like a scam, feals like scam, taste like a scam.

    is it a scam? How would i know, but i´m for sure not going to invest money

    While 11C may sound impressive, you can get most lithium chemistry to 11C with some trickery, specially if you let it roast at 100C. Again, most batteries can sit at 100C, but there life span will be very short. So its basically a nonsense test.

    97.7% charge after10 days is not impressive. A typical NCA cell does 97% after 30 days

    Doing 100kw chage, even a fairly small battery, say 15-20kWh is really only abouy cooling. If you have heatpipe chambours that is really not that hard.

    The fact that the battery swell indicate its not solid state. While it can be semi solid state, its not a true solid state.

  12. @michaellutes1057

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    Joe, wild idea for you to speculate on: refilling lake bonneville. Obviously, this would necessarily include making preparations for the 2+ million people who currently live below the historic lakeshore to be provided for.I gamed it out over a few weeks in a conversation with googles Gemini. From that it seemed like the end result would be a positive in most ways, though it would come at a high cost initially as well as many hurdles.
    I’m very curious what you’d think of that idea in the hypothetical.

  13. @jasonlouis697

    May 7, 2026 at 3:33 pm

    For something to accurately be considered a change in climate, you need THIRTY years of data to support it. That's the real difference between climate and weather. One is happening now. The other is happening when your kids are married.

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