I know plenty of people personally who can rant about energy prices being high while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy and even namedrop whichever foul devil bogeyman it is this week that is said to be the cause of this disjointed trauma that they find so overwhelming.
In the next breath, they pick something else from the deck to be upset about: These days, that's usually brown people, emails, laptops, the American cities that people in frog costumes burn to the ground every night, brown people, guns, laptops, and Hillary.
Sometimes, they then take a break to hear themselves talk about baseball, praise the president for getting so much done that he doesn't even have time to sleep, or to complain about the plot from the episode of The Dukes of Hazard -- from 1983 -- that they watched for the 14th time last night on Pluto.
After the break, it's time for them to complain about how they can't afford visit a doctor or buy eyeglasses, but they sure as hell don't want them any of those librawls to take any of their hard-earned money so everyone can go to the doctor.
Then things shift back to being weirder again: Schools turning boys into girls, kids using litter boxes in the classroom, men wearing dresses, God's Perfect Plan, guns, brown people, groceries, brown people, and blue hair dye.
This tiresome process repeats until I manage to escape, or I tell them very pointedly to shut the fuck up (hints don't work).
None of the people I know who act this way seem to be particularly bright, but I know them anyway.
"while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy "
Did you ever consider that all the money spent on expensive renewables is money not spent on cheaper forms of power? Did you ever consider that they are correct and that spending on renewables drives up power costs? Because that's what the data says is happening. Now, I am aware that the amount of FUD on this topic is very different to get through. But if you learn about the differences between capacity and utilization costs and the other accounting games that are played with energy costs, you will learn how to see through the FUD. But I'm sure it is more psychologically comforting to just look down on them which is what you are actually doing.
I consider that I'm intertwined in the evolution of a very different friend's very local efforts, with their own hybrid battery-backed grid-tied offline-capable solar power system.
That rig is pretty sweet.
It pays for itself, and in present form and with their present use (wherein: they're not trying to live particularly-efficiently) it is almost entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period.
But, sure: We can talk about games, instead, if what you want to chat about is just games.
"entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period."
You do know that batteries have a capacity right? And powerplants have something called a capacity factor. That means for a given amount of capacity, you generate on average a certain amount of power. For nuclear that factor is .9. For renewables its .1. So 1 watt of nuclear provides the same power as 9 watts of renewables. That's why when you say that renewables have 1/3 the capacity cost, it really means its 3x more expensive than nuclear. That means higher bills for people, which is what we mean when we say utilization cost. That's the real cost that people pay and actually counts. And all this is before we talk about siting issues with renewables. Fun fact, most PV is sites (located) somewhere with an albino factor of less than .25. But since you connected a battery terminal to a PV panel, you must know what that means. Seriously, you are just spreading misinformation that transfers cost from the rich to the poor, such a hero you are.
Most grown men are influenced by this. The patriachy is strongggg.
Just like you can manipulate women en-masse by appealing to patriarchal attitudes around femininity and beauty, maybe by talking about weight or hair, you can influence men by appealing to patriachal attitudes around masculinity.
I mean, you can convince the average American man to drop an extra 20K on a truck he doesn't need and a multiply his gas cost by 2x just by convincing him it's manly. You can discourage men from drinking cosmopolitans and instead have them drink the equivalent of cat piss by telling him it's unmanly.
I don't understand. Why is a duration of months preferable? What is the benefit above storing energy beyond say peak-to-peak? I suppose you can flatten out seasonal variation, but that's not nearly as big of a problem.
This site finds optimal combinations of solar, wind, batteries, and a long term storage (in this case, hydrogen), using historical weather data, to provide "synthetic baseload". It's a simplified model, but it provides important insights.
Go there, and (for various locations) try it with and without the hydrogen. You'll find that in a place at highish lattitude, like (say) Germany, omitting hydrogen doubles the cost. That's because to either smooth over seasonal variation in solar, or over long period drop out of wind, you need to either greatly overprovision those, or greatly overprovision batteries. Just a little hydrogen reduces the needed overprovisioning of those other things, even with hydrogen's lousy round trip efficiency.
Batteries are still extremely important here, for short duration smoothing. Most stored energy is still going through batteries, so their capex and efficiency is important.
You can also tweak the model to allow a little natural gas, limiting it to some fixed percentage (say, 5%) of total electrical output. This also gets around the problem. But we utimately want to totally get off of natural gas.
I suspect thermal storage will beat out hydrogen, if Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach pans out.
Exactly: When you're building software, it has lots of defects (and, thus, error logging). When it's mature, it should have few defects, and thus few error logs, and each one that remains is a bug that should be fixed.
I don't understand why you seem to think you're disagreeing with the article? If you're producing a lot of error logs because you have bugs that you need to fix then you aren't violating the rule that an error log should mean that something needs to be fixed.
> Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.
This is a pretty dumb statistic in a vacuum. It was clearly 100% a few years ago before CLI-based development was even possible. The trend is very significant.
Imaginary situation: People are using claude instead of cursor, and you can run claude in a terminal, so this is going back to the days of not using an IDE for the people that do it.
Straw man shake down: Terminal based development like vim and emacs are old and shit, and we moved away from that for a reason, and so (although totally unrelated) this means 'using claude' means going back to using a terminal for everything, which is similarly old and shit.
...but, obviously wrong.
- There's a claude desktop app that isn't done via the terminal.
- Agents use the terminal/powershell to do lots of things, even in cursor because that's the only way to automate some things, eg. running tests.
- Terminal environments like vim and emacs are ides. :face-palm:
- It literally makes no difference what interface you copy and paste your text prompt into and then walk off to get a coffee in agent mode.
Anyone who's seriously arguing that IDE integrated LLM chat windows somehow beat command line LLM chat windows is either a) religiously opposed to the terminal window, or b) hasn't actually tried using the tools.
...because, you'll find it makes no difference at all.
Why is cursor getting involved with graphite? ...because the one place where is makes a difference is reviewing code, where most CLI based tools (eg. `git diff`) are just generally inferior to visual integrated code review tools.
You know what that is?
An acknowledgement that cursor, in terms of code generation has nothing that qualifies as the 'special sauce' to use it over any other tool. CLI or not.
So they're investing in another company that actually has a good, meaningful product.
Now I want to see the goal posts for what makes an IDE...
That being said, surely the point here is about "agent driven development" vs "ai autocomplete". As they say, whether you type your command into a web window or a terminal window presumably doesn't change the flow that much.
I like being able to tap my phone a couple times and tell it to clean out e.g. the area around my cat's toilet, or my kitchen floor after I spill something, etc...
And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.
So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?
At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.
Something similar happened to me, but with Lufthansa. Canceled my flight 1 day in advance and told me to take a hike, didn't even bother to find/recommend another flight. Germany has really deteriorated, it's no longer matching its past reputation of getting things done.
With a flight, an airline that cancels a flight with less than two weeks notice owes you cash compensation of 250, 400, or 600 Euros depending on the length of the flight. The airline can only avoid this obligation if the cancellation was due to extraordinary circumstances outside their control.
A similar regulation for trains would likely tighten up reliability, though it could also raise ticket prices.
I think the time limit to request compensation under EU261/2004 in Germany is 3 years. If this happened within the past 3 years, you can demand that they pay you.
This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.
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