amoshebb

The original sin was using watts not joules. Humans hear watts as “gallons” and “watt hours” as “gallons per hour” and all the rest of this confusion in every article about EVs/fast chargers/distribution/solar/everything all trace back to “X-Hours” and “X” incorrectly sounding like a rate and a count, not a count and a rate.

Not that you need more choices, but franklin.jl hit my sweet spot for “handles math and code inline well, otherwise is clean and gets out of my way”

Tinymist plugin in vscode is all you need to install, no giant amorphous TexLive thing needed for local editing.

His website makes him look like the owner of a law firm, although I think it's just him? I'm not expecting the same number, but... california issues bigger fines for watering lawns or buying illegal fireworks. For a lawyer, a fine order of magnitude smaller than "hiring a paralegal" is less "historic" and more "cost of doing business, don't get caught"

I'm numb to it after many "EU fines Householdnamecorp a zillion doubloons" type headlines, but using "historic fine" to describe $10k to a lawyer feels odd.

See I guess I find broadside “impractical” dissatisfying.

Could a few cargo ships be converted into floating fly farm aircraft carriers on either coast, maybe another in the amazon, and then just use a hundred reaper drone type things to do a creeping barrage? This must be within the budget of even a modest nation state.

Some folks are posting about the regular flights over Panama, and I’ve seen talk about ending screwworm with a “gene drive”, but I also feel that it doesn’t feel necessary.

But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.

In nova scotia there are grants to build “community solar gardens”. A 3-6MW solar farm is built somewhere cheap and convenient and then anybody in the community can pay for so many panels and then they get that amount knocked off the light bill as if they had rooftop solar. Idea is it lets people buy solar unrelated to if they rent/own or have a good roof pitch or whatever.

“Typology optimization” is probably what you’re thinking of. All current versions of it result in this similar blobby-spider-web vaguely alien and somewhat organic structures.

Looking at things like bicycles designed this way leaves me suspicious that it doesn’t actually have the power to derive interesting insights about material properties. I suspect future versions may end up starting to look more mechanical as it discovers that, for example, something under tension should be a straight line.

20m by 3m is 60m^2, with 300W/m^2 solar panels, it's less than 20kW.

A truck departs NY at the crack of dawn on the longest day of the year and cannonball-runs west at 100mph without hitting a single red light. The sun covers 15 degrees per hr. Denver is 30 degrees west of NY. The truck doesn't quite make it to Denver though, the sun sets on it somewhere in the middle of Nebraska. By chasing the sun, instead of 1700 miles, it gained a whole 1hr40mins of extra sunlight. That 20kW array turns that into 36kWh of extra power. By doing this chasing the sun instead of west-to-east, our truck turned a 1700 mile trip into something like 1718 miles.

On any 'typical' daily long-haul of 600 miles, we're looking at something more like an extra 3000-4000 feet. On something not as perfectly east-to-west like 900 miles NY to Atlanta, we're in the extra 100-200 feet, as long as it's not overcast.

is an "as in free beer" project.

the article is about Puerto Rico, not California, and specifically mentions net metering.

I love solar, but this "those who can afford microgrids can shield themselves from blackouts" paired with net metering where "the wealthy get paid a premium for excess generation and can buy expensive high-demand power back at a discount" probably aren't steps on the path to improved grid resiliency for any definition other than this weird "no island-wide outages" definition.

it's just a stand-in for "expensive but relatable purchase". He's saying "I'm about to write so many bugs that the sum reward will be in the tens of thousands"

Charging so many cars. With a fleet of ICE cars any old gravel lot by the airport works. With a fleet of EVs you're going to need depots with upgraded service drops, chargers strung everywhere that need to be maintained, and to pay somebody to come unplug them every morning.

Closer to guaranteed range. With a fleet of EVs it's possible that a frosty morning or long weekend where everybody wants a trip out of town might drain them all in sync in a way ICEs would be less impacted by.

And then at the intersection of these two: flexibility recovering from some incident. Assume some "night crew didn't refuel" situation, sending out a fleet of ICE cars half empty and planning to refuel them all between trips is fairly simple, but sending out a bunch of half empty EVs and trying to somehow add an unplanned recharge midday is at best logistically more difficult, and at worst, causes other cascading problems.

could we build them different if the goal is just to waste excess energy?

Why couldn’t it just be a giant heating element and some sort of steam condenser at the top and some way to flush it periodically?

It might burn some laughable 3kWh per kg of water, but who cares? every water utility on the coast could add a few megawatts of tea kettles and get opportunistic little splashes of water in volumes small enough they can probably already handle them and the brine discharge would be so small, disperse, and infrequent it’d be easier to deal with, and it’d basically cost nothing

the only macbook I’ve tried to put linux on was a t2 machine, and it still doesn’t sleep/suspend right, so I’m a bit skeptical that apple is really leading the way here, but maybe I’ve just not touched any recent windows devices either

This doesn’t address “Quickly overwhelmed”.

Yes, a wall of $150,000 bushmasters with some servos can take hurl enough lead in the air to protect a city from a single gulf-war era $100,000 lawnmower engine on two meter wings bumbling in a straight line at jogging pace.

We’re currently in the “a shipping container on a semi can could launch dozens of $2000 racing quads with molotov cocktails zip-tied to the bottom with enough agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing its own mass”

And the writing is on the wall for some near-future “any nation state could drop sci-fi cluster bombs that shed ten-thousand 250gram racing quads that can overwhelm even the most advanced point defence just by numbers and it’ll be cheaper than a conventional 2000lb bomb”

stickstootext

the feeling that they needed to include a few paragraphs of “look this isn’t the single digit amounts your friends are getting… but… it’s dilutive and we know best for you” language is telling

AI is usually just a 20th/21st century “icarus wax wings” or sometimes “monkeys paw”. Re-masters of a “watch out for unintended consequences” fable that almost certainly predates written text.

Yes, I’ve also thought postal banking could help drive down the visa/mastercard tax on nearly all small businesses must pay now. The government has run an expensive payment network (the mint) since before 1776, no real reason they should stop now that it’s cheaper to do.

I think this is a case where “technically” the words mean the same thing but “generally” they mean different things.

This “if cars were synced all would be well” fantasy assumes that the limited gains from scrunching won’t be a rounding error compared to the nearly unlimited additional trips that robots with infinite patience could start making.

Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”

Maybe, but boots for sure are better and cheaper than 100 years ago. I think the only thing that makes this slightly confusing is that what were old mass-produced workwear have become limited-run fashion items, so looking at things like M1918 boots or cowboy boots and comparing to modern Red Wings or Luccheses it's tempting to say "Oh how much more expensive leather-soled brass-hardware hand-tanned full-grain leather boots are now", ignoring that Modern soldiers wear lightweight goretex running shoe-boots and farmers wear cozy neoprene pull-ons with anti-slip soles and carbon fibre toes, both of which cost half of inflation-adjusted prices of the objectively inferior boots of 1925.

but then it kinda stops, couldn’t we layer on chords as well, you can peck “t h e” or just mash “eth” and both would result in “the”, or maybe some sort of english pinyin where only the first few chars are needed?

Anhydrous isn't common here, so the only way I've seen it applied is with shanks that cut everything up to inject high rates maybe not even annually.

So how would farmers familiar with anhydrous use "A box that makes 330lbs of ammonia a day"? Treat an acre a day? Apply a 1/300th rate and do 300 applications a year? Maintain a high-pressure 100,000lb tank of ammonia slowly being drip-filled until they need it all in fall? Buy 50 sea-cans and leave them shut off for 51 weeks a year?

so, we’re observing the same things, but drawing opposite conclusions.

A box on a farm means much MORE handling of it, no? Currently no farmer I’ve met has ever handled pure ammonia, only UAN or nitrate/other dry solids. And like you said, they’d rather not. (although I also don’t know any who would drink glyphosates with how quickly they eat sprayers)

How does a box help with timing? Each farm must either store enough on site for an entire application (which farmers could already do if that was worth the cost) as it’s slowly generated, or they’re constrained by daily output of the box. Late shipments are bad, but a renewable only box running out on a cloudy week? No angry phone call to the coop fixes this.

Spreading the cost to centrally produce and store lots over many farms/industries seems optimal when one needs infrequent but huge quantities of anything.

The emphasis on containerization and strictly using green energy makes me skeptical about the underlying technology…

If this “lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis reactor” is really so much more efficient, surely incumbent nitrogen plants would be camping on the sidewalk to be first in line?

Maybe it’s different elsewhere, but here farmers don’t use daily applications of small amounts of pure ammonia, they get an armada of co-op spreaders to deliver and apply dozens-hundreds of tons of dry blend in one big shot and then do nothing for months. There’s a reason production is so concentrated, and it’s not because farmers haven’t realized air is the main ingredient.

why not? if their product is “SOTA LLM” then they can’t just lay off r&d and coast. Years from now nobody is going to be paying for “that authentic gpt4 sound”. LLMs aren’t guitars.