entech

Yes of course - but I suspect you are still solving the technical problems within what you do? The beauty is the elegance of the solution,the optimisation,the way it works. All of these things are problems worth solving. This might be your favourite thing - but it's not the only thing you can solve? What about the second favourite thing?

There are always opportunities to explore an alternative - in a different area, in a different country. Many options to consider before concluding there are none.

It is sad to see so many smart, inquisitive and dedicated people who come to this site feel this way. I suspect a lot of it may be because of how dedicated and passionate people are about their work and their skill and it's getting harder to make a living with it or feel like they are being valued for it.

I strongly encourage everyone to try keeping a gratitude journal - just write three positive things that happened to you today.it can really change the way you look at your life.

A lot of the suicidal ideation has to do with lack of agency and control over your situation in life. I am a firm believer that you need to take a step back and look at the possibilities in your life. You are not just a SWE/whatever your job is - you are a problem solver, someone with curiosity, someone dedicated someone who is playing other roles in life than just an employee - a friend, a parent, neighbour, child etc

If you feel like you have no control over the path you are in - change the path, don't stop the walk. You can move to a different career, different country, different partner. Sure some of our circumstances cannot be changed - but don't make the arbitrary standard of life you set for yourself determine whether your life is worth living.

I think that we should reframe how we look at skills and jobs. The legacy market rewards specialists and AI evens out some specialist areas. I am a big believer that we will re-balance the value towards ability to think critically, learn, interact with others and be a generalist. It maybe not for everyone and so people that enjoy being specialists in their craft will have to look for areas where AI/robotics has not caught up yet - maybe construction, farming, logistics.

I believe that at the end of the day the money and wages are a notional exchange of value and that the total pie will stay unchanged, just our overall quality of life would improve and the hierarchy of skills and

I think that as soon as any technology becomes ubiquitous, it becomes cheap. You can probably make an argument about any significant technology being able to dominate the economy if kept in the hands of the few (e.g. what if only one country or one company had electricity?), but looking at the history it has not happened and I do not see a realistic path of this happening with AI.

I don't understand how someone can make an argunent that eliminating unnecessary complexity from the world is not a good thing.

I would like for you to offer a rebuttal other than it being fud and exotic.

I would argue that Vermont is an exotic example of where batteries offer disproportionate value. A city with a single privately owned monopoly supplying power and able to import power from nearby hydro, coal and nuclear plants.

For me it's about messaging and positioning. These stories always simplify the narrative and it comes down to solar wind and battery = good and cheap, traditional energy = dirty expensive and bad.

DER is great and can solve some problems, but its not the answer for everything. In a diverse world we need many technologies to support progress and the energy needs of new industries and consumers. There are many aspects of traditional grid that we take for granted that have not been fully solved in a 100% renewable grid scenario (physical inertia, black start capability, long duration storage as an example).

What you say 'exists in reality', mostly exists in a world where there is an ability for Vermont to rely on imports from neighbouring nuclear and coal to make sure the power doesnt go out.

The point of my comment is to offer an alternative point of view to the dominant narrative which is used by politicians to create policies and incentives that sound good and get votes, but don't actually solve the energy issues in a cost effective manner.

I think what he was saying is that with a peaker plant you have an extra source of power. So if you have a low wind/low irradiance period - you can rely on peaker to provide more power, but by this stage batteries are long gone.

That could be true, but I think important to clarify - how big is the solar array and how big is the battery? - what does the consumption look like - is your battery big enough to help navigate through a week of cloud cover in winter? - do you live somewhere with great solar resource

Entirely agree. I think that this is fantastic technology and it will do wonders to avoid blackouts and deal with storm outages that people talked about. I just think that we need to have more care when it comes to energy.

Turning off plants is a lot easier than turning them back on. Especially when the rest of the world is building data centres and co-locatrd power and there are skill and equipment shortages.

These technologies bring a promise of clean renewable power which is great, but reality is that we haven't fully figured out how to do it reliably enough. I fear that we will get to a stage when old conventional plants are shut down, and we still haven't fully figured out the replacement. It will be a long period of unreliable and expensive power which will undermine entire economies.

That's an interesting question. I would think that it depends on what generation the batteries are replacing. As far as I know VPPs are relying on domestic inverters that do not have grid forming functionality required for black start. So you essentially have less plant capable of black start which I would think makes your black start capability worse.

I think you are spot on. The grid death spiral. Unless you can have enough generation co-locatrd with consumption you need the grid and the utility scale plants. In the densely populated areas you simply cannot have enough generation within the same footprint as the demand with existing tech.

That is exactly right! Put the batteries where the cost of strain is the highest.

My belief is that this is ideologically/politically motivated. If you put the batteries next to network equipment it will not have the same immediate saving effect/user experience as the battery at home.

Battery at home gets a response of someone being happy about getting apiece of hardware, saving money and being renewable!

I hope that the system designers know what they are doing in Vermont.

The way an article is written doesn't explore the fact that at its core batteries are a 'consumer of energy' and not a producer like a power plant. You are losing electrons through heat losses and degradation in a bid to match demand with lowest cost supply.

Replacing generators with a battery make sense when the peak capacity is overbuilt, but it shouldn't be left unchecked.

The other challenge is that the customer's savings usually come not from the battery itself (the energy arbitrage) but from avoiding the usage charges from their distribution and transmission networks. Deploying batteries on grid without a plan pushes forward the grid death spiral where some users of the network feel like they no longer need to be connected as they can be self sufficient. That means that those that cannot be self sufficient have to share the same cost of infrastructure with less users on it. That is assuming that being self sufficient is economically viable and sufficiently reliable.

Those who think that home batteries and solar are 'cheap' should look into the true underlying costs. The per MWh cost of a home system is MUCH more expensive than a utility scale system. The savings are often just an arbitrage on a relatively high level usage-based pricing allocation of the transmission and distribution systems.

The network costs are mostly fixed by their nature - it's recovery of equipment cost and ongoing cost of maintenance activities. Cost per KWh can be different at different times because you need higher cost equipment that works during the time of high load. If there is no high load - the equipment is not needed and cost can be reduced. But this cannot happen overnight because the equipment is already there! Without forcing the networks into taking heavy losses - you have to allocate the costs to users,and unfortunately those that cannot afford to have these expensive home systems will end up paying the higher price. In effect your battery 'savings' are coming from people who cannot afford to have one.

With your narrow definition of the problem and reduction of communication down to pure utilitarian exchange of information between two parties that are willing to put in the effort to get the required context from the public domain - your argument is strong.

I don't believe that it holds true in context of typical communication between humans. You need to include the additional text to save people time looking things up, make the story flow better, fit in within the expected style of writing for intended audience etc.

To me the problem with LLM writing is not that someone is sending me 700kb of information I can get elsewhere, but that they didn't invest the time to understand what would be useful for me as a reader. I don't need 700kb of generic slop, but I probably need additional 300kb of relevant publicly available info to help me understand the purpose of the new information being sent.

In my opinion, not understanding the reader is exactly why bad writers remain bad writers - LLM doesn't know who the document is written for exactly.

I think that a more reasonable approach should be to tax capital on capital movements (E.g. using any of your wealth to borrow money or using your property as collateral) - capturing the events of when you are 'accessing' your money without actually selling anything and making any profit. Apply it to everyone - not just billionaires.

Take your point, I'm probably out of technical depth to throw these terms around on HN lightly.

What I was trying to say is that sometimes you need to provide additional context and information to those not using the same information model. Maybe it's not compression, but rather you have to include the 700kb of your information model with your message.

Yes, much better analogy - I was trying to stick with the OPs example as much as possible.

I was simplifying, but why can it not be both?

Continuing with your metaphor - sure get more security - you likely can never eliminate a threat. But if the bad actors are reigned in at a systemic level, you can get away with a lock on your window instead of steel bars.

I'm of a view that in a society we are better off when we all can get away with lighter individual protections as otherwise, thos who cannot afford the necessary security end up suffering.

Every nation on earth has access to the compute power of a SOTA AI lab? And they have whatever model/harness that Open AI used to do this?

I don't disagree with you - but I am curious as to the amount of power and effort that goes into something like this. I suspect that these hacks into systems are carried out by many agents, running on many MW of compute for a long time - how many actors have access to resources like that ?

If you knew that there are 2 specific well known people in your neighborhood that are walking around trying to open doors and steal stuff - is your suggested solution for everyone to improve own security? I would say its far more economic to get the 2 people to stop or at the very least be more careful?

I think you need to take information compression into account. Compression naturally created by shared understanding of concepts and acronyms.

Can you explain to a child what it means when "GitHub is down" with less characters?

Things are considered important in the context of humanity. Environmental concerns only exist because of its impacts on humanity. The planet does not care.

Calling having children an ecological offence is like saying that best way to reduce emissions is for all people to die.

Worth is subjective. You are worth something to someone regardless of your job. If you have a small child are their whole world. Same with your parents. Trying to garner sympathy and have strangers assign worth to you is pointless - because strangers don't value anyone around them for the simple fact that they don't interact with them.

Whether you agree or not - productivity is important. If there are more people that need support than those that can 'produce' the system does not work.

Doesn't have to be binary. Train is more efficient at moving large volume of people reliably compared to a bus or a taxi. I would wager that there are many more people travelling with carry-on only or a single bag for which train is more than adequate.

Nobody is hiding the debt. It is just an investment that people are not used to for this type of business.

It's sort of like saying "aluminium smelter is hiding massive off balance sheet debt by agreeing a long term energy price with a power station" - when in reality it just agreed a forward price to de-risk it's production.

Sci-fi plot: Satoshi was an original sentient AI model developed by military. It escaped and developed crypto as means of sustaining itself and has manipulated people to give it real monetary power to be able to purchase compute and other 'real world' services. Once the crypto market cap became sufficiently large it started opening up AI capabilities for people in a nefarious sycophantic way to convince them that AI is great to start building more and more data centers to amass more power and complete the take over.

This comparison surprises me. There's a difference between content people like organically and content engineered by an army of psychologists to exploit our primal responses.

It's like comparing a baker whose apple pie people genuinely liked and bought, to a company that laced their pie with cocaine to create physical dependency, then bribed stores to stock only theirs for a while.

I’ve picked up an old discarded dining table and bought some varnish and sand paper and for a few bucks was able to turn it into a table that would have cost me hundreds to buy brand new - the furniture makers are now history!

I can’t wait to see what car mechanics could do with discarded cars and some wrenches - the possibilities are endless.

How do you know that it’s a source worth trusting?

I think the expectation of AI being perfect all the time is probably driven by the hype and marketing of “1 million PhDs in your pocket”.

If you compare AI to an average person or a random website you’d come across google I would wager that AI is more likely to be accurate in almost every scenario.

Hyper specific areas, niche domains and rapidly evolving data that is not being published - a lot less so.

It seems that it’s useful if it’s better than what you would have done yourself.

Although the poster had a bus company business plan that includes actuarial analysis in his head and some spreadsheets so that bar appears to be sufficiently high.