leonidasrup

"

"Increased rates of component life consumption due to thermal fatigue, mechanical fatigue and wear caused by differential thermal expansion comprise the bulking of cycling (costs)," according to the International Energy Agency's Coal Industry Advisory Board.

"Every time a power plant is turned on and off, the boiler, steam lines, turbine and auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses," the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wrote in a report on cycling costs published in April 2012.

"

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/to-survive-c...

You should visit the Tibet region and ask the locals. But:

1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.

2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.

(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.

" The cost of the electrical equipment that brings the offshore renewable energy from the wind turbines to the shore is in the same range as the cost of the wind turbines themselves. The future offshore grid will need tens of billions of Euros of investments in HVDC transmission infrastructure. For instance, Dutch-German transmission system operator TenneT has contracted 30 G€ for such connections in the North Sea. "

https://blog.sintef.com/energy/future-hvdc-grids-yes-please-...

It solvable but very expensive.

The costs of large number long distance HVDC lines with accompaning invertor stations would be as expensive as a electric generation based on nuclear power.

The difference between Microsoft and Anthropic is that Microsoft had IPO when it was much smaller and grown much as a publicly traded company.

" It is a well-documented fact that Bill Gates was initially reluctant to take Microsoft public. His primary concern was that the pressures of quarterly earnings reports and the scrutiny of public shareholders would distract the company from its core mission of writing great software. However, a specific regulatory requirement known as the 500-Shareholder Trigger eventually forced the company's hand.

Under Section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, any private company with more than 500 shareholders and a certain level of assets was required to register with the SEC and begin filing public financial reports. By 1986, Microsoft had issued stock options to so many employees that it was rapidly approaching this limit. Gates realized that if the company had to disclose its financials anyway, it might as well reap the benefits of being public, such as increased liquidity for employees and a stronger currency for acquisitions. "

https://learn.oreateai.com/learn/when-did-microsoft-go-publi...

> Nobody asks questions, everyone claims to understand everything, the reality is they have no clue.

India is so big that, you can not claim this for everyone in India. Counterexamples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subrahmanyan_Chandrasekhar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._Raman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homi_J._Bhabha

Most of electricity in Sweden is produced by:

1. Hydropower 40%

2. Nuclear 27%

3. Wind 22%

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...

You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

I hope The Troubles will never again repeat.

Nuclear appears to be a distraction, today in 2026, it was not so in 2002 when Germany started to phase-out nuclear energy.

Global warming was not much interesting for public until about 2006 - 2007 and when public started to be interested in global warming, the public was promised that renewables would the solve the problem. They did not solve the problem, worldwide annual CO2 increased from 30,9 Gt (2007) to 37.8 Gt (2025).

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2025/co2-em...

Local decreases in some countries don't make a difference because, global warming is function of the total amount CO2.

The nuclear phase-out came into effect in 2002, under first Red-Green Schroeder government. (the "Act on the structured phase-out of the utilization of nuclear energy for the commercial generation of electricity")

Merkel government wanted to postpone the nuclear phase-out, but after Fukoshima, reverted to the original Red-Green nuclear phase-out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

IRA was unsuccessful in case of Thatcher, but was successful in case of Lord Mountbatten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Mountbatten

I see The Troubles, as a civil war in UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_troubles

For serious engineering work not only physical designs, software also.

When we manually tested nuclear power plant controlling software, each test case was printed out on paper and tested and then signed by the tester. A lot of paper was produced and archived for each software release. (Archived for as long as the software was running in any nuclear power plant).

Everyone understood, that in a case of significant accident at the nuclear power plant, accident analysis would be done and if the root cause was an software error, this could have possible legal consequences for the developers and testers. (Of course nuclear power plants have many independent and redundant hardware controlling mechanisms, but incorrectly working controlling software could damage the power plant in a very costly way).

You can see the curreny Linux AI policy here:

https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

Broadly it says: you can use AI as much as you like. You have to disclose use of AI. You, as a person, not the AI, are responsible for the quality of Linux kernel submissions.

For comparison, the unit cost of Boeing B-29 Superfortress (manufactured 1943–1946) was $639,188. In total 3,970 B-29s were build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-29

Network engineers and TCP/IP stack implementers have pretty good understanding of how the Internet works.

But I have see quite terrible finance software, patches over patches hold together by a duct tape. Also finance software has to implement large complexity of tax law, which is very large and always changing. It also doesn't help if the company developing finance software sees software development as a cost center and wants always to push the costs down (especially short term costs).

No compiler does optimal register allocation, because optimal register allocation is an NP-complete problem.

Chaitin et al.: "Register allocation via coloring".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_allocation

The precise term is Surveillance capitalism.

" Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

There was already in 2015 presentation at CCC, How to cause Blackout.

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7323-wie_man_einen_blackout_veru...

Cheap electricity would change your usage in indirect way:

Cost of electricity is a significant part in aluminum production. Cheap electricity, cheap aluminum, more cars made from aluminum instead of currently cheap steel.

Cheap reliable electricity would enable cheap hydrogen production, which could replace many uses of fossil fuels. Cheap hydrogen, cheap ammonia production, cheaper nitrogen fertilizers.

Aluminum smelters have so high electric consumption that you usually build then near the cheapest reliable sources of electricity.

Cost of electricity is a very significant part of production costs of aluminum, around 30% on average.

https://www.aluminium.fr/en/energie

> What is obsession with the light

It is historic, electric lighting was the first major application for electricity in households.

" Electric lighting is highly desirable. The light is much brighter than oil or gas lamps, and there is no soot. Although early electricity was very expensive compared to the 21st century, it was far cheaper and more convenient than oil or gas lighting. Electric lighting was so much safer than oil or gas that some companies were able to pay for the electricity with the insurance savings. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrification#Benefits_of_el...

Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests.

" The term "rare-earth" is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but because they are found only in compounds, not as pure metals, and are difficult to isolate and purify. REEs are relatively plentiful in the entire Earth's crust (cerium being the 25th-most-abundant element at 68 parts per million, more abundant than copper), but in practice they are spread thinly as trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore which is costly and energy intensive. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

What radioactive element is commonly found with rare earths and has to be separated? Thorium, the same stuff that could power future nuclear reactors and is commonly found on beaches in Kerala, India.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-why-india-wants-...

You can timeshift your power consumption, but in many cases you can not timeshift industry power consumption, especially heavy industry power consumption. For example it takes few hours to start a big plastics injection plant, it takes few days to heat an aluminum smelter. High quality glass production needs few weeks of uninterrupted power supply. Iron blast furnaces run without interruption for years.

But for example, cement production can be turned on and off quite easily, and is turned on and off on demand by the grid electric operators to help with grid stabilization (cement producers are paid for this grid stabilization service).

> - The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.

The total electricity consumption for computers is much higher then in the past. You just don't see it, because the consumption moved to data centers.

In many cases when a government branch or municipality switches away from Microsoft, Microsoft throws money at the government branch or municipality.

For example, When Munich in 2013 migrated to Linux:

"In 2016, Microsoft relocated its German headquarters to Munich. "

"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place

— ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt

This rare events with significnt impact on many people, like nuclear accidents, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, are always good source of drama for movies.

In case of Chernobyl, the worst case estimates are 4000 excess deaths. In comparison, about the same number of excess deaths is from coal burning in Germany each year.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373512769_Environme...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

Because coal burning is happening for decades and is not one time rare event it doesn't get the attention it deserves.

And also many organization demonizing nuclear energy do it, because they see a source of plutonium for nuclear weapons in each civilian nuclear reactor and each country running civilian nuclear reactors as a country on the brink of having nuclear weapons.

When energy was needed even Climate Minister Robert Habeck could find an angreement with fossil industry (RWE).

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-robert-habeck-coal-e...

The problem is that you need energy storage for much longer times then 4 hours.

" Most of these events occur from October to February; typically 50 to 150 hours per year, a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute