ZeroGravitas

The standard narrative on air pollution in China is that they had to act to clean it up as it was causing unrest amongst the population.

I don't see why the same couldn't happen if they let datacentres drive up energy costs or have other widespread impacts.

The phrase "vote blue no matter who" is explicitly calling for people to vote for the lesser of two evils despite them probably having some unfortunate beliefs based on which industry and/or country is funding them.

It's not an endorsement of not knowing what people stand for.

That link has a big section on their use of AI that ends with:

> Overall, AI played a critical role in many aspects of this project for things I couldn’t do myself but the vast majority of the work was done manually the “old fashioned way” from creating the design and writing the code to restoring each plate and formatting all the text to designing the book and posters. I have no doubt that a lot more could have been done with AI but I still enjoy putting in the elbow grease to create something just the way I want.

We want to eliminate fossil fuels and lower costs as quickly as possible.

Vague claims that some alternative like nuclear or Snowy 2.0 will somehow make that last 1% of fossil easier to eliminate are both dubious and irrelevant if their construction uses money that could have easily eliminated 1% of fossil fuel every year for decades.

And once we get close to that last few percent of fossil gas in the electric system it would be better for costs and climate to focus on electrifying industry and homes with cheap electricity anyway.

If the climate change denying and anti renewables Manhattan Institute is running propaganda for something that is strong evidence that the ordinary person is being conned.

Coal is economically inefficient compared with distributed solar.

Nuclear is broadly on par in cost.

The health impact costs of running existing coal plants in Texas are higher than the cost of installing new rooftop solar. That's ignoring carbon costs, which could be the same again.

And that's at Texas install costs. While low for America they are double Australian costs mostly due to poor permitting regulations and lack of competition.

This artificially makes the gap between utility and rooftop solar wider.

So you're being weirdly specific in your desire for economic efficiency.

Texas generates a lot more power than California.

The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.

They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.

The utilities don't really want to sell you the cheap solar. They'd rather write op-eds about how too much solar is flooding the grid and beg for more money to invest in the grid elements they can make money from.

The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.

They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.

It's not stupid if they are paid off by the people selling the coal and gas.

It's just a treasonous level of corruption.

Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.

Snowy 2.0 has major limitations on what it can supply, the headline number is very misleading.

And the comparison shouldn't be to batteries alone, but solar/wind and batteries. The former can be used directly and fill the batteries repeatedly on a timeline that is predictable.

It provides no extra value for the electricity to be stored long term if for the same money you can generate and store it short term.

Article on the various restrictions on Snowy 2.0:

https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-cost-blowouts-might-be...

I also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust.

I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

Developed economics should have been planning to double their electricity use for decades now. Electrification of transport and heat should double electricity while simultaneously halving energy user overall.

Is an utter failure that everyone is acting surprised by this increase.

Everywhere being authoritarian throughout all time seems a fairly good summary to me?

The Romans nailed Jesus to a cross, the American south bred human slaves, Europe regularly had crusades and pogroms, post-war America supported a crazy number of military dictatorships, the Iron curtain, Communist China and so on.

I think we're worried about the Trump administration lying about what they talked to the Russians about. A translator with loyalty to the USA might request what they heard.

This isn't a huge deal except in aggregate.

For individual renters (or homeowners) it's a small outlay that repays itself over a few years and then saves a small amount of money.

It's relatively boring and that's good.

What a slimy headline.

You can imagine some narcissistic abuser saying the same thing.

Maybe "not always wrong" isn't the bar you should be shooting for.

Generally enforced by regulation, particularly tied to any government grant program to encourage EV adoption.

It is hard to make an executive not enshittify something when his salary bonus depends on him enshittifying it.

There are software systems that deal with the consequences of driver incapacity that are not "full self driving".

Climate change denial is getting pretty unsubtle when this guy is joining an explicitly pro-CO2 organisation.

But if the pro-CO2 guy hates wind solar and batteries I guess that's a good thing since the world is rolling them out at astonishing speed. Bad news for fans of CO2.

My assumption for these new nuclear startups is that they are scams.

Once they start making deals with the government on the basis of which Christian Nationalist church they belong to that pretty much tips over from suspecting a scam to suspecting I live in a Stephen King novel.

You might be referring to this but on top of hardware decode some Bluetooth setups can send the actual AAC file to the headphones and decode it there.

Traditionally Bluetooth audio meant decoding and reencoding it into a crappier codec before transmission. So it's an efficiency and quality win.

I think some Google Pixel Bud Pro earphones do this for Opus but that is rarer (there's a few other codecs that have been done like this over the years by different manufacturers).

The low end of costs for new build solar and wind in the US is nearly identical to the average running costs of fully deprecated nuclear plants in the US according to Lazard.

Solar low end $38, Wind low end $37, Nuclear running cost average $34, Nuclear new build low end $141

Normally I'd say that renewables cost is likely to continue to fall over time, but with Trump in charge and putting his thumb on the scale that future is a little cloudy. These are all long term investments and risk causes higher prices.

Either way if a nation is looking to get out of nuclear today then it's not a clear cut case to say that they'd lose money by doing so.

I want to live in a world where this part leads the article:

> For many Spanish consumers, the glut is a blessing, because the price they pay for power is linked to what producers get on the wholesale market. This year their rates have been among the lowest in Europe — about half of what Germans pay.

And the grumblings of speculators are relegated to the second half of the article where I clipped that from.

Offshore wind is cheaper than coal in China now. Which also makes it much cheaper than nuclear in China.

Onshore wind is only very slightly more expensive than solar in China too, most projects overlapping in cost ranges, both roughly half the cost of coal.

This is reflected in their deployment numbers, which also feeds back into cost reductions.

For businesses where this is true, they also need to be able to switch provider quickly in case the best provider changes.

It's almost identical to the possibility of one model getting shut down for a business that doesn't care about SOTA.

(2025)

Is it relevant that the paper linked has been retracted?

> The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article. An investigation by the journal found evidence of authorship manipulation. The Editors-in-Chief therefore no longer have confidence in the provenance and reliability of the article contents. The authors disagree with the decision to retract.

We should improve society somewhat

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Spot the odd one out:

> Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.