rgmerk

Dart/Wong for America ‘28 - Give America Back Its Groove.

Can you link to it? I'm curious.

In theory, at least, they have finished their design, had it reviewed by the NRC, and had it approved, so there should be no significant design changes.

But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.

I did have the same thought, had a quick look (I'm not a polymarket user) and couldn't find a market relating to this project.

Put it this way, if it's in commercial operation by 2031 I'll eat my hat.

Their hoped-for completion date is "2031". Anyone want to hazard a guess about what their actual completion date for this plant will be?

Hmmm. If we do simple extrapolation based on a battery density improvement rate of 5% a year, it takes about 30 years to get there. So it's not as crazy as it sounds - and it's also worth noting that there are incremental improvements in aerodynamics and materials so that gets you there faster...

However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.

Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).

Pretty sure the answer is no, most of the time.

As I understand it (and even if I’m broadly right I’m greatly simplifying) there’s an auction system and if demand is X kilowatts, they line up all the bids to supply in cost order and draw a line at X kilowatts. All successful bidders receive the price bid by the highest successful bidder.

There are rare times in this kind of market where the price does go very high (though not to $1000 per kwh), and those brief periods push average prices up substantially.

In markets where batteries are going gangbusters, they are squashing many of these peaks and thus reducing average prices paid by consumers (though not as much as you’d hope because the majority of retail electricity costs are distribution rather than generation).

Worth keeping in mind that nobody freezes to death in FNQ if the power goes out.

Grow up in a place where roads have gravel on the shoulders and are made using coarse-chip seal and you’ll get them regularly.

Hmmm. If, rather than flying close to sea level, you flew at high altitude (above commercial airliners), and kept it relatively small, I suspect that you could do this and no one would notice unless you told them.

Though at high altitudes the winds are such that it would be less of an airship and more of a steerable balloon.

I would assume that these days you can simulate that increasingly accurately before you need a full-scale prototype.

They could also use active noise cancellation, which is already used in some turboprops like the Q400.

Numerous critics pointed out that the only application where cryptocurrencies had any real advantages over conventional finance was crime.

The critics were right, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem in which Silicon Valley was a not insubstantial part were wrong.

As such, and combined with the ills of social media, Silicon Valley has blow’ any public trust it may have had in the past.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re not a researcher in the area ignore any media reports of a study that include the words “in mice”.

Also, there’s a tendency on HN for commenters (mostly software engineers) to think that they are smarter than the scientists who work on this stuff day in, day out. Let me tell you, you, random HN reader are not smarter than random biomedical scientists.

There are legitimate applications - fixing a tiny mistake in the dialogue in a movie in the edit suite, for instance.

Do these legitimate applications justify making these tools available to every scammer, domestic abuser, child porn consumer, and sundry other categories of criminal? Almost certainly not.

My hypothesis: Generative AI is, in part, reaping the reaction that cryptocurrency sowed.

Not happening any time soon, sorry. Car manufacturers want that sweet sweet subscription revenue.

Key difference being that there is only a certain amount of food that a person can physically eat before they get sick.

I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the amount of software written if it was, say, 20% of its present cost to write it, would be at least 5x what we currently produce.

You don’t need more gas to reindustrialise.

The biggest single thing the US could do to bring down power prices quickly is let people put solar panels on their home roofs more easily.

US emissions have been declining - not fast enough, and from a very high baseline - for the last 20 years before this year’s result. Europe’s emissions have been declining since the 1990s.

China’s emissions may have peaked in 2025, or are very close to peaking.

Big emitters have not done enough, but to claim they have done nothing is a nonsense.

There’s also the possibility that you’re not omniscient and the project succeeds.

See my OP.

In short, the appalling treatment of renters in Australia is due to the chronic undersupply of housing; if landlords had to compete for tenants it would not be possible to mistreat them in the way many currently do.

There is also scope for better regulation of tenancies and indeed the Victorian government has passed some reforms in this area.

YIMBYs would argue (and in my view rightly) that if you allow townhouses and apartments to be built, the market will build them where there is a demand.

Australia is so big that there's still plenty of land available where you could build new cities (and not just in the desert).

It's just that everyone[1], given a choice, would like to live near the beach in Sydney's eastern suburbs[2], and there is most definitely no more land available in those suburbs. So the only alternative is to build up, and the boomers sitting in their multi-million dollar houses that were originally bought for $3.95 don't like that prospect one bit.

[1] Not everyone, but you get the point.

[2] and Melbourne's inner east, and the desirable parts of Brisbane and Perth.

You would feel that, but you would be wrong.

Small businesses are often just as ruthless as large ones, just less competent. In any case, most rental properties are managed through agencies, who are soulless profit-optimisers.

It will make very little difference in the end.

Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities.

If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing.

All the vaguely plausible industrial use cases for CO2 are a rounding error compared to the amount coming out of vent stacks and engine exhausts.

The one exception is making synthetic fuels, but in the vast majority of applications it’ll be cheaper to use electricity from clean sources (renewables/fission/fusion/unicorn farts) directly rather than pay all of the efficiency losses of electricity -> thermal -> chemical -> thermal -> (end use).

Ballpark, running a car on synfuels takes 10x the energy of running it on batteries charged directly from renewable sources.

It’s worth noting here that premature deaths were routine back when these decisions were made, in a way that we would find almost unimaginable.

While smallpox was no longer a major threat, influenza, polio, whooping cough and a bunch of other infectious diseases killed kids in huge numbers. People died from infections from routine cuts. Millions of young men (mostly) had been thrown in the meat grinder of WWI.

Life was cheaper then.

Harsh but accurate.

Depends what you're trying to hide.

If the redaction is a person's name, and there's nothing else to give the person's identity away, single word redaction probably works reasonably well, AI or no AI.