If AVs become as good as they proclaim, then overall power consumption and emissions will dramatically decline when people no longer have to buy cars to get around.
841 karma · joined March 18, 2016
Yes, you have to pay $15k just to apply to the beta program, and you still may not get accepted into the program.
I can support millions of DAUs with a 3-node K8s cluster running .NET7 instead of a 50+ node cluster with Python or node. Just simpler, without npm package dependency hell, and produces a nice clean single file executable.
And corporate espionage is more prevalent than you may think. Can you absolutely guarantee 100% that the competitor, like Zoom in China, isn't sniffing their video traffic or recordings to some of their most sensitive internal business discussions?
2. Get as much professional experience as possible. There's an entire world outside of the startup/HN crowd where you can thrive in a great career at an enterprise company doing .NET/Java. These are your name brand mega insurance companies or health care organizations that are just trying to get line-of-business apps created for internal use. It's not the brand name cachet as a popular SaaS. These mega corps often don't go out of their way to advertise for new positions, so just checkout linkedin or look at their job boards on their corporate website. These companies often have the large internal development team to pair you with a senior developer and train you up.
3. Bide your time until the market "re-opens". The market will come back, but in the meantime now is the time to build up your CV. If you still are having problems getting a foot in the door, then take on open source projects. Create a side-project. There's nothing worse as a hiring manager seeing a new grad with zero experience asking for $150,000.
Also, I get "Plus One". Talk to your eye doctor. They can do "ADD +1.00" to your prescription to make things larger but still in focus. You won't have to hunch forward either.
Then I make all of my IDE font settings larger. I see less on the screen, but I have less eye strain.
Whereas Google will release something, get user traction and then try to make it 'best in the world'. If it doesn't get to world class status, then it cancels it and moves on, pissing off the early adopters in the process.
The problem is that this becomes counter-productive just like serial dramas in the TV world. If people think you're going to cancel something, they're not going to get emotionally invested in your product. Then it almost certainly gets canceled because it doesn't get enough user traction. Rinse. Repeat.
C# is VERY different from even just what things were 2 years ago. You can now build a full-on app with the same number of lines that a Node/Express/Flask app. Except the .NET runtime is about 5-10x faster than those runtimes.
In other words, just do it. Don't look back. You only have so many years of your life left. Make it worth it.
Should be: "Besides that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Your state probably has a public service commission that won't allow you to compete with the local power company. Competition in the utilities business is illegal.
Australia has no such requirement, and so they can use the cheapest inverters from China/Amazon.
I think we're there now. You can get "server-rack" LiFePO4 batteries for about $1500 for a 5kWh battery. You can probably get solar, inverters, and 30kWh of batteries for about $25,000 and this should last maybe a few days for most homes. Mini-splits instead of central HVACs reduce power consumption a good bit, and have better energy efficiencies.
Two, the tech is just forming to help solve some things, such as "floatovoltaics". Covering Lake Mead will help, or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. But water is very corrosive. Engineers have also stayed away from putting power lines in water for good reason. The tech for floatovoltaics is just now emerging, and even the national electric code has just put something in it for 2023.
Three, raw materials shortages. Solar requires a lot of silicon, aluminum, glass, and steel. Batteries require a lot of rare earth metals from harmful mining practices. You need billions of tons of copper just to handle the wiring and distribution side of things. Almost all lithium battery and solar manufacturing is overseas in China. There are some in the U.S., but not enough to make a serious dent in solving the overall problem. EV batteries have secured over 140% of the available lithium mines in the world. Alternative batteries like sodium-ion are exclusively produced at scale in China, but startups like Natron Energy are trying to change that (again, not enough to make a dent). But the main point is that there isn't enough lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, silicon in the world to go around without having some serious inflation and supply chain issues along the way. The tech doesn't yet exist for grid-scale energy storage that doesn't rely on lithium and its closest cousin sodium-ion doesn't have the manufacturing scale to produce the billions of cells annually needed to tackle this problem.
Four, the U.S. lacks political will. Republican states are actively damaging companies who are reducing their carbon emissions. Fox News labels climate change as "woke politics". Thus, you have 40-50% of Americans believing solar panels and EVs as "bad" things. It then trickles down to local politics like where the article shows that Southern states should be accounting for 33% of solar production, but due to poor politics/laws they only account for 7%.
Isolated DC-coupled solar is mostly done by DIY folks with inverters like Sol-Ark that can do AC or DC-coupling and can work when the grid is shutdown. Your solar constantly charges your batteries and powers your house as a microgrid. Any excess power COULD be sold back to the grid, but to avoid the added hassle of interconnection agreements, most just store it into a larger battery bank for rainy days. The goal here is to fully zero out your monthly power bill AND be self-sustaining.
Source: google search on "PJM Interconnection Backlog"