12,443 karma · joined March 16, 2014
Now working primarily in climate tech and adjacent spaces.
Interests:
- Energy/Climate Tech (especially decarbonizing and bringing resiliency to the built environment, electricity, transportation).
- Applications of emerging tech to solve problems in climate and energy, education, and quality of life for the majority of people.
- Linguistics (especially historical, also computational and social).
The best way to get in touch is to triangulate me on the Internet (shouldn't be hard from my comment history) and reach out over LinkedIn.
The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.
Given the degree of corruption and criminality, a more appropriate metaphor might be "smash and grab".
That's to say nothing of doing it within the energy budget of a squirrel.
50% of consumer spending is by the top 10%, and that trend is getting more extreme as wealth concentrates further. Is there a breaking point? Sure. But capital is willing to see how far it can push this before it breaks.
A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.
The US today isn't the US on the dawn of WWII, and this war is unlike WWII as a whole.
Domestic political support for the war is so low due to the huge costs (of the war itself and on the American pocketbook). Furthermore, due to the open and blatant corruption in the current administration, and the passing of economic policies that increase the struggle of everyday people while enriching the billionaire class, there has been a huge loss of trust in the US federal government in general.
Contrast this with the establishment of the Social Security act and WPA before WWII, which greatly increased the public's trust/confidence in the federal government to secure their welfare in the wake of the Great Depression, and made them willing to sacrifice for their country.
Finally, unlike WWII, this war didn't start with any attack by Iran on US territory, or attacks on closely allied countries. To the extent that allies have been attacked, it has been in response to US aggression, further undermining the public's will to commit American lives to further conflict.
Can you point at a residential scale rock heat storage system that is available? I saw one startup in the UK trying this several years ago, but can't find them now, and haven't seen anything since.
> Heap pump water heaters work, but you need a large one to hold a days worth of hot water
Mine (for a household of 4) is 45 gallons - small by US standards - but we keep it at a high temperature (along with a mixing valve) to get higher "virtual" hot water capacity during peak usage hours. It serves us fine for daily usage, but we also have efficient flow taps and showers throughout the house so that helps too.
> If you want to store more water than a days worth of use then you need more storage
I don't think it makes sense to store hot water for days if the goal is to minimize energy costs. The standby losses would be pretty significant, even with a very well insulated tank.
If the goal is resilience to a grid outage, it makes more sense to have a solar PV array + batteries that you can use to run the heat pump water heater, or have a backup gas-powered heater.
Sand/rock heat storage is for industrial and utility scale application, not your house.
> You can also use water for storage, but again you have the issue needing a tank (and water is a drowning hazard, plus the worry about leaks...)
Tank heat pump water heaters are available and can already do load shifting on a daily basis (using off peak cheaper and cleaner electricity). I have one and it works great, and I guarantee it isn't a drowning hazard.
There are versions of these systems that can store enough heat to heat a house, not just provide hot water at the tap.
What part is unfathomable, the Range Rover part or the green part?
I ask because Range Rovers are strongly associated being quite well-off everywhere, but maybe there's something with SF and the green paint choice.
If I were that CEO I'd avoid that person because of their very poor judgement, lack of boundaries, and questionable self respect.
That you think it's even on the edge of normal describes the current balance of power in the tech job market in a nutshell, though.
Speed of feature implementation isn't the objective. High feature throughput with labor cost reduction is.
"trajectory of humanity to a parabolic move upward" is poorly defined here. Whether we are headed to a machine god ruled scenario or "just" incredibly powerful productivity tools, there will be a lot of economic pain for some (most) and a lot of economic gain for a few.
I've yet to a see an LLM/agent-based business plan in where scaling with an order fewer workers than before LLMs is not a central part of the value proposition.
Is stylistic ingenuity, breaking from convention, or leaving things out on a website for a Ramen restaurant chain a feature or a bug? I'd choose to go based on the quality of the food not how unusual the website UI is. The website is not the product.
I personally find navigating and ordering food on restaurant websites that don't use standard conventions a frustrating experience.
Between "stable" and "extinct" are many stages of software engineering labor market change, continually more difficult (for labor) as we move toward the latter state.
Software engineering is likely to become a skill/tool attached to another harder to automate ability going forward rather than a vocation/craft on its own.
To the extent that software engineers are employable, they will likely need some other x-factor adjacent to software skills, whether in the science, business, creative/artistic, or social domain. I've already seen this trend emerging in the startup world.
Something can have a great deal of utility to everyone while simultaneously causing damage to a subset of people. Electricity is universally useful, but anyone downwind of a coal plant is hurt by air pollution even if they benefit from electricity. It's not contradictory for those people to ask for stricter controls on pollutant emissions.
Likewise with LLMs, they can provide a lot of utility to enterprises and individuals, while simultaneously causing damage to those individuals.
Hordes of now-fragile white collar workers are currently trying to use AI to figure out how not to be rendered obsolete by AI.
People who live near proposed datacenter sites are using LLMs, while also facing spiking utility costs due to the AI datacenters, and maybe significant quality of life regressions.
Everyone is trying to figure out how to maximize their own benefit from LLMs while simultaneously trying to put the costs of this technological revolution on others, and everyone has different positioning in that race, depending on their skills, adaptability, and privilege. This situation will test all individuals, institutions, and societies.
Hate to break it to you but it is happening, increasingly at the business stakeholder interface later.
> A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.
Most of the value in the software engineering process isn't in the compiler, it's in deducing the requirements and weighing tradeoffs for various solution paths. LLMs have now automated the next step: translating human language requirements and specifications to code.
The compiler is just the last deterministic step, which while essential, is entirely commoditized in the value chain. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?
Don't forget health insurance for when they have to use that sick time to get treatment - so they can get back to work ASAP. Plus, during a bust if they get laid off, we don't have universal health insurance, so they have to factor that in as well.
Yes, even if only for the AI summaries it generates, it saves lots of time.
Only thing is that with a company this is nearly always on enterprise managed software like Google Meet or Zoom, not personal software. Maybe this is good for independent consultants meeting in person.
> These are the Holy Scriptures, and - like the Homeric ones - have multiple authors but lack the obscurity of ancient history to allow that latter fact to be subsumed into the story as a single, blind bard.
Nonetheless that hasn't stopped us from almost deifying the founding fathers. If not for the fact that many of them were slaveowners, they'd be deified already. Clearly, US society hasn't advanced beyond deification of its leaders, whether past or present.
Also, although they involve Gods, the Iliad and Odyssey are not religious texts in the sense of the Bible. They were epic legendary poems, not scriptures.
The History of the Banana
https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom
Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea.
If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite end of spectrum of TikTok, etc. Also, don't watch his "History of Sugar" documentary if you are feeling depressed. Instead watch the "History of Curry".
Only after we establish and guarantee the rights of humans and the rest of the natural world. The rights of machines, however "intelligent", come only after that.
Absent a federal wealth redistribution, yes NYC must do its best for it's residents. I'm not disagreeing with that. A federal wealth tax, however, would tax Alabama billionaires as much as it would tax NYC billionaires.
Adding a wealth tax doesn't mean eliminating existing income taxes.
> Cities like NYC pretty much can afford UBI (look at per capita spending on homelessness, public schools etc).
Perhaps , but what about poor states like West Virginia or Alabama. It's not universal if they don't receive benefits also.
I suspect they might also be a little bit mad (whether they admit it or not) that they are being subjected to all this to make a few people unbelievably wealthy.
These people aren't simple peasants - they are as aware of how the system works as well as the rest of us. Lenox is just a short distance from Flint, where they know all about how a city and its population can be left behind by an industry.
The problem is that all of a sudden they are being made to pay the price in quality of life, instead of some other group of people they could care less about or even dislike.
If this truly matters to them, and it's not just a negotiating tactic for a piece of the pie, they should consider making common cause with other groups affected by this in other areas and look past their traditional tribal alliances. Otherwise, no little municipality stands a chance against the power of capital that effectively controls government.
I'm skeptical that this was a factor, because in total only 5% of oats are used for human consumption. 95% is used for animal feed: https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-fact...
I doubt it was that much different back then. This relates to the "Oat Mafia" that the article responds to:
https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provi...
While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.
As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).