yodelshady

Good article, I've seen this covered from the materials science and system engineering perspective before but not the mechanical perspective.

Ask any first year materials science graduate how Challenger failed and they'll confidently tell you about glass transition temperatures in fluoropolymers, but if any chartered engineer gave you that answer, fire them. People in the room at the time knew about that, but somehow a clear warning became a point of uncertainty became a minor interest became a footnote.

What I find more interesting is, ask any first year economist about 2008 and they'll tell you about Gaussian risk cupolas. Somehow in that field sticking with the level one explanation as if the PhDs in the room there didn't know is accepted.

120 GWh of storage is approximately zero storage. Which, for Australia, population 30 million and literally near-tropical light patterns, might well be enough.

For the UK alone, not the most northerly of populations, you need 50 TWh. Get some investors to give you the numbers on that.

"..the grid operator to request that Electricite de France SA take several nuclear plants offline."

Could you read the article please?

The lumbering beasts, which actually do hate changing output at all, turned off before the renewables.

Secondly, another below comment already explains that no, there's not a shortage.

Thirdly, please for f*ks sake, engage your brain and think what the impact of 700 euros a month (high in 2022) to negative prices now has on industry. What the everloving ** do I charge my customers?

Maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679507

Projects I've seen recently refused permission by the local population in the UK on environmental grounds:

- A data centre using the site of an old landfill. - A data centre next to an oil refinery. - A film studio using the site of a disused quarry. - A solar farm. That one was opposed by Greens. - A housing development, by a roundabout.

And organised campaigns on environmental grounds against:

- A cycle bridge, built next to a railway bridge. A grade-separated railway bridge, in case you were wondering about safety concerns. - A sewage works, near greenbelt land. Not on greenbelt land. Servicing a conurbation that currently dumps raw sewage into the local river. Also opposed by Greens, naturally.

Dare I even say that, after writing a forty-five thousand page environmental report for Hinckley, legal objections - based on matters clearly covered by said report - continued?

Or everything to do with HS2? Also, again, naturally most vocally opposed - by vocally, I mean by trespass - near me by Greens.

Or literally any wind turbines visible by anyone. Including offshore.

Our local democracy, like a fair few other institutions I can think of, was built by idiots with no concept that said system could be abused, from inside (I've not mentioned bribery, have I?) and outside. And so it's a tool of abusers. If the only way China could avoid that abuse was to override the locals entirely, that's a shame. But I can't in good conscience say they've picked wrong.

There are ships that move over one billion kWh of LNG around at a time.

At $100 to store a kWh of electrical energy, along with approximately ten times the cost to account for structures that can support and move the extra weight (that's AFTER allowing for less energy demanded in total)... shall I leave this as exercise to the reader?

Source [3] seems highly suspicious. There's ~24 GW of wind capacity in the UK, the vast majority offshore, and according to Elexon Portal (https://www.elexonportal.co.uk, a good public frontend at http://gridwatch.org.uk/), which gives realtime grid data, the maximum production was 10. So an average cap factor of 39% is, well sorry it's wrong.

And time and time again renewables always seems to take optimistic, if not ludicrous estimates.

Mackay's papers is indeed 15 years old, and what do we have now? Extremely expensive power, backed by fossil gas, because if wasn't, people would die. Avoiding 2 deg C and ecosystem collapse is not even vaguely possible anymore. In that time, 40 years ago, France got to 17 g / kWh. That's not a success and, for the literal trillions of ESG money spent, someone should be held accountable for that.

Which means, as pointed out by e.g. zemvpferreira, proportionate-to-damage then either makes HGVs completely unviable or the wear component of tax for any passenger car negligible.

And HGVs really are the limiting factor on road design. We could ban SUVs maybe, we could ban cars and scooters and bicycles if various factions get their way, but if we ban HGVs - cities starve, in weeks if not days.

If you argue that you'd be a liar. They just don't.

They all get about 200 miles real world, my (£10,000 cheaper !) hatchback, petrol with a 55 L tank and much more interior space than any of those, can push 400.

Why say things that aren't true? People aren't going to be fooled.

The "slightly tall hatchback" form factor is also the best form factor for electrification. A Fiesta doesn't have a lot of underfloor real estate.

Although the industry isn't so dishonest as to pretend that "consumers are more resistant to £30,000 hatchbacks than they are £30,000 'SUVs'" isn't a factor.

Yes, it's a real bugbear describing these as if they're the same as an F-150. Although I've seen more of those as well.

Cool. Now, look at the "rust code" when you're tasked with changing mean to median... in the average non-programming specialist shop, where what you have access to is the production server. Which may or may not be the dev server, or a laptop.

No they're not complying to your CI/CD best standards - tell me with a straight face they're learnable in less than a month with a budget of $0 above your existing capital. Yes they're adding real value to the economy. That's "computing for everyone", and one of those tools works for that scenario.

I have literally never had a project for which Poetry, given an exact list of dependencies and flawless running on the "bad system", installed correctly on first try.

Most recently it defaults to asking for a keyring, even when just downloading? I believe that's marked WONTFIX. Even with that hacked around, and I thought the point was to reduce the number of hacks required, tensorflow seems to almost universally fail in absolutely any configuration I've tried.

Don't even begin to try integrating your own packages, c++ template errors are tame by comparison. I've also never seen a poetry error fit in less than 500 lines of nested exceptions.

I want to like this tool but... boy, Docker doesn't give me this crap.

It's much more impressive to me seeing it be done on a basically Formula Student++ budget. I'm sure the same team could make a very fast ICE car, and that would be impressive too.

I've seen Ford make a similarly fast electric mustang-chassis dragster, and yeah, that's a bit... unsurprising, really? You know how much force you need, ergo how much torque, translating that into a motor is not hard, translating that into a current is not hard, translating that into cabling is not hard. It's much more a set of composable sub-problems, and unlike engines, most of those sub-problems can't explode.

> I would suggest that if you are allowed a fan that sucks air from under the car then you can easily achieve pretty much any acceleration.

Or if you point the fan backwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuJz5zkIiUQ

It's not necessarily the heat pump, but the internal remodelling to fit larger rads/underfloor heating, and better insulation.

Fundamentally, after that you're using an energy source 3x as expensive as gas, so... any time the COP is less than 3 you're losing money. Oh, guess when you need the most heating? That's right, when it's cold. I don't give a flying what the COP at 10 C is, because waste heat from everyday activities keeps the house warm at that. I care about the COP at -2. On a becalmed day when the output of circa. 24 GW of wind capacity is < 1 GW. This absolutely happens.

Nuclear District Heating (i.e. repurposing the waste steam) is literally a thing.

Not in the West though, we're too enlightened and smart and sophisticated for that. Don't look at the starving cold people.

I believe dingi is perfectly aware of the realistic outcomes, and is instead describing the normative ones, i.e. what you need if you want an enterprise that actually self-improves, where the best employees aren't actively looking for the door whilst concealing things from management.

It is, however, wholly a management problem to find those actually-rewarding rewards.

Crazy idea: what if employees retained IP of any spontaneous, self-directed R&D? You could then license their tech and make the role redundant, something any ruthless capitalist would consider a win. The employee can go job-hunting with a small passive income and glittering CV, which means they're much more likely to actually tell you so you can get that outsourcing win.

In reality, it seems far too many businesses have moats as a result of excellent decisions made by founders in the past, and as a result can't be outcompeted by companies that do manage talent better.

Literally nobody runs storage, not at the required volumes for a North European country. To claim otherwise is just a fucking lie.

Just... what is your plan with this? The reality is, North European countries are now wholly reliant on there not being a cold winter again. If you check three simple things: the number of MW of heating demands, the lithium prices for a MWh, and the god damn ninety-fifth percentile worst weeks for wind+solar at >45 degrees North, to get the number of hours. You can do this, and ask people with money in the game whilst you're at it. The answer is not ambiguous, and it is no where fucking near regardless of what a Twitter bro with 50 MWh in a desert will prat on about. So why. The Fuck. Haven't you?

The crossover point in any grid that has significant gas presence - which is absolutely ANY "renewable" grid- is not a COP of 2. It is 3. That is, per this graph, 5 C. A temperature at which if you do things right, process heat (ovens, showers, humans) should be supplying enough of the required delta T that you really don't need to spend a lot with any energy source. And that's the marginal crossover point, not the "I need to remodel my home" crossover point.

Just... what happened to the meanest part of self-criticism that science bodies used to have? Do they think other people won't ask questions? Because I'm sorry, they do so a great deal more now than ever. Many of those "questions" are stupid. But some are not, and shouting them all down means people should distrust you.

Non-graduates are also suffering, yes. Did I imply they deserved to suffer? If I did that's not the intention.

However, a degree usually requires hard work (being born wealthy does not), and has been widely recognised as the best legal route out of poverty for decades. We are not a communist society and do expect hard work to lead to greater standards of life, on average, even if there are exceptional non-graduates and lazy graduates. If even the best legal route is failing en masse, then we are screwed.

Or Ireland, Cyprus, Malta?

And you think correcting that failure will be harder when the consumer has zero personal investment (financial or emotional) in that thing?

I was going to say "they put methamphetamines in the candy", but apparently that's a myth (https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2022/11/melting-the-myth-of-panze...)

There's an excess of frauds. Large amounts of money will obviously attract them.

JFC, if you have "an idea for an app, bro", but you can't build the product, and you can't raise the honest VC necessary to build or acquire the team that builds the product, YOU DON'T HAVE A PRODUCT.

I don't know how these people get to go around without being challenged on the obvious fact that, for there to be seniors, there has to be someone training juniors. The level of hypocrisy and greed are beyond words, and the fact that every two-bit podcaster and reporter doesn't call these people out loudly and repeatedly is worse.

> if even they are struggling, then... how is the average person in that country even still [independently] alive??"

Either they accrued capital already, or borrowing from relatives who did, or they're not living independently. They're sharing accommodation that would be cramped for two among six.

Lifestyles once only necessary for students are now de rigueur for established graduates, with the possible exception of better food.

No, he's not. Why have it?

This isn't a general purpose programming language, a pile of ore from which you might conceivably construct a footgun. It's a toolkit specifically designed for financial applications with a "leak your financial details" tool built in.

Sure, it's AGPL, they're not literally liable, but it's not great.

Tauri might be cool in theory, but Hello World consumers TWO POINT EIGHT GIGABYTES of hard disk on my machine.

Arguing "Rust has no dev speed penalty" in that context is just... no. You are damaging your own cause there, because all advocacy becomes laughable.

For the vast majority of services, dump the passwords requirement then.

Physically stealing a token from me is a much riskier, less scalable attack than slinging hashes from someone's hobby site into GPUs.

This is probably the biggest problem I was hoping for a YC-style solution for.

Motoring is absolutely subsidised - by motorists, who pay 90% of the cost before a single wheel is turned.

And Jesus, with a apologies to one Jeremy Clarkson, I have twice, debatably thrice, in my life needed to make a journey where the stakes were "this might be the last time you see them" (good news, it wasn't). No other transport option was vaguely credible. What the hell am I going to think of someone telling me "no, you can't do that"?

They're all sold in Europe, where they're legally cars, meet car safety standards and fuel consumption is usually only slightly worse, about the amount you'd expect from raising a hatchback body 1-2 inches.

The layout also has obvious advantages for EVs, although Tesla does manage a sedan form factor. They are meaningfully different from "Jesus Christ I may have just killed a child whilst parking, because I am driving something doing a decent impersonation of the industrial equipment normally associated with an open-cast quarry".

The everlasting cycle of security fuckwittery (with some apologies to Randall Munroe's "sandboxing cycle").

1) There is a protocol for communication that encodes some useful heuristic for regular operations - IP addresses, for example, or ports. 2) Idiots decide that ONLY EVER COMPLETELY SAFE traffic should be allowed. As a result, all communications are gone. 3) That's not workable, so some channels have to be opened. 4) Someone develops a way to encode all the previous uses, including the necessary administrative ones, AND necessarily the malicious ones, over this protocol. 1) as 1) but with an extra layer that now does nothing.

A very* similar process exists for scripting languages. "Why are our employees so unproductive, manually doing easily automated things that security won't let them automate? -> Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could automate all the things with [X]? -> Oh noes, malware!".