HN user
jpbhd13217 AT gmail
Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it.
Tall guy with good hair, smooth talker, in the same socio-economic circles, buddies with the board/investors, social drinker for networking, knows a lot about costly hobbies and 'interesting' experiences (pilot license, restores classic cars, has exotic car collection, golf) .....
The same land can produce for 25 years with zero labor and OpEx. The best passive investment ever. Plants capture solar energy at 6% efficiency but required a LOT of OpEx, solar panels capture it far more efficiently (15 - 20%) with zero OpEx.
Actual title: DAE Inaugurates World’s First Hydrogen Production Facility Based on Copper–Chlorine Thermochemical Cycle Using Nuclear Heat from Fast Breeder Test Reactor
People work hard for academic and career success. This will take decades. The plan is to make a lot of money with that success, have costly things/hobbies and derive happiness. It is driven by money as social status, which allows you to buy costly things and signal to others about your success.
Instead, find joy in cheap hobbies and ignore the status markers. Just do things for yourself, not for others.
There was a massive dark fiber buildout in 2000. The hyperscalers already have long haul fiber optic infrastructure everywhere in US.
Whats the relevance of fibre optic latency to electric lines?
Its a shame that tribal lands aren't being used for solar and wind.
Can anyone share archive or gift link?
"humans have only one language processor" -- this is what I remember from Patrick Henry Winstons lecture
Ban Chinese cars, solar panels, wind, CPU/GPU/RAM, Network gear, AI ... anything else left?
What happened to all the talk about how free trade is good for US citizens? We lose jobs and get cheap stuff in return.
It its required by Govt (USB-C), all new cars would have this feature. It won't be optional.
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: naming things and cache invalidation. Cloudflare writes about how it deals with the first one.
For V2G, its a simple feature that enables a car to participate and make money in the energy ecosystem. Govts have to standardize it for cars, just like mandating usb-c.
Consumers pay for everything -- increased RAM, SSD, CPU, GPU prices, either directly (for DIY) or indirectly (apple/android phones). We pay dramatically increased prices for every device. We pay more because servers (non AI) cost a lot more now, which means cloud (or your own DC) bills increases for all companies and they are all going to raise prices.
Electricity will cost more because AI DCs need to be cheap, all upgrades cost will be borne by consumers.
Water will be less available and/or cost more because all forms of energy (except solar, wind, hydro) need a TON of water[1]. Which was ~48 trillion gallons in 2021.
As a consequence, nearly everything will cost a lot more. And this is the price we pay for AI. AI has hijacked the supply chains built for existing uses, taken over all the low cost ones. Forcing the rest of humanity to bear the costs of building everything new at a high cost, both high CapEx/OpEx.
These externalities must be accounted for when thinking about how 'cheap' AI is.
--- [1]From: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56820
U.S. electric power sector water withdrawals for power plant cooling: 47.7 trillion gallons of water.
The electric power sector uses a large amount of water, mostly for cooling. Thermoelectric power plants (including natural gas, nuclear, and coal plants) boil water to create steam, which spins a turbine to generate electricity. The steam leaving the turbine must be cooled back into water to be used to generate more electricity. Plants withdraw water from nearby rivers, lakes, or oceans and pass that water through the steam leaving the turbine. That process cools and condenses the steam back into water. In 2021, 73% of the utility-scale electricity generated in the United States came from thermoelectric power plants.
Utility providers won't build fiber connectivity to homes and make massive profits ($50+/month), but they'll build unnecessary infrastructure for AI DCs and make people pay for it. As long as we do things to serve the super rich, everything is okay.
Australia should deploy vertical solar massively. Adds a few more hours of production.
On a related note, There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/attention-crisis-...
Seneca observed that the minds of those who read too many scrolls too quickly became restless and unsteady. This kind of mind was less able, he noted, to “stay in one place and spend time with itself.”
Professors report that students now have difficulty watching feature-length films, let alone finishing books. On average, we check email 77 times a day, and often it’s not because of a notification — we interrupt ourselves. We’re not even able to focus on our devices: Two decades ago, a given task could hold our attention for two and a half minutes; today, research shows, we make it only 47 seconds on one screen before succumbing to the itch to switch.
Ideally, they should pay the EV owners because electricity price goes negative. The EV owners are spending their own money to create a scalable on-demand storage infrastructure. This saves CapEx/OpEx of BESS and also eliminates peaker natural gas plants. EV owners should be paid once for allowing storage, and paid again for using the power to supply back to the grid (V2G).
tldr: Deploy a TON of solar. Use the excess production to charge batteries (EVs, BESS), chemical storage (Ammonia), green hydrogen for industrial uses, heat pump for HVAC, CO2 as refrigerant.
Deploy solar everywhere. On roofs (inefficient), plug in solar, vertical solar, solar on reservoirs, highways. Everywhere. Use excess production!
Phase 1
1) Buy only EVs[1]
2) Use EVs as energy storage. Pay the EV owners because power price goes negative (or worst case charge at no cost).
3) This will immediately capture clean energy that is being curtailed (~20% or more)
4) Without 3 in place, we can't accelerate clean energy, because curtailment will increase, making it unproductive.
5) Pay the EV owners to supply power back to the grid. They now replace peaker plants, which is the most expensive part of electricity bills.
6) EV storage becomes the new grid, creating a gigantic energy reservoir. Extremely resilient energy storage. (think just like the kube/containers, cattle/pets, etc)
With the scale of EV car adoption, we'll get better and better at batteries, making them significantly cheaper. This will allow us to build battery swapping infrastructure for big vehicles. Most likely, this will be sodium or solid state.
Phase 2: All big vehicles (trucks/buses) can use battery swapping stations spread out everywhere. The battery swapping stations serve multiple functions, they are an essential part of the short term battery storage (multi-day), a layer above the EV storage. And they also provide the battery swap infrastructure. They get paid for being charged (negative price) and then again for the trucks using them. We shouln't build charging infrastructure for big vehicles, it is capital intensive, requires a lot of expensive machinery, real-time transmission capacity, real estate, wasted time, etc.
Long term/seasonal: Build Ammonia --> electricity emergency plants. We need ammonia at a massive scale anyways for fertilizer. The best outcome would be green ammonia (green hydrogen), using excess power from clean energy.
Industrial uses (heat): Green hydrogen on demand, freshly produced from solar. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule, explosive and corrosive, won't work with any storage.
All heating and cooling: Use heat pumps. Use CO2 as refrigerant and ban everything else. We are going to see 100x deployment of ACs everywhere, all of the third world will buy AC as their incomes increase.
[1] Govts could ban all ICE vehicles, but they wont. Fossil fuel lobby wont let them. For the fossil fuel shills who are invitably going to comment that EV doesn't work for them, please continue using your EV for your daily commute from Alberta to San Diego. There will be enough used ICE cars for the next 20 years.
What is developing is so far beyond any global climate event that has impacted modern industrial civilization that predicting much of what’s coming is educated guesswork. Turn the volume on the typical El Niño impacts up to eleven, then watch the collective infrastructure of modern industrial civilization crumble. Watch as flooding storms wash away roads and cities. Watch as trailing storms create new inland lakes, swamping farmland. Watch as fires raze forests and grasslands. Watch as heatwaves turn temperate regions into unsurvivable hellscapes. Watch as crops fail and dams burst. Watch as the shelves of your local grocery store gradually, then suddenly, go empty.
From: https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
100% remote unless absolutely required. Professions like doctors, cooks, massage therapists. This will clear 95% of traffic. Start with mandatory remote for all software jobs.
Which God? There have been (and still are) millions/billions of them.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying solve problems more like North Korea?
Can Technology Save the World (Before It Destroys It)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHQR1OBum5Q&t=1210s: "I think it can be great. I mean I think we have the potential to eliminate poverty, solve climate change, cure a huge amount of human disease, like educate everyone in the world phenomenally well"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHQR1OBum5Q&t=1760s: " ... I didn't mean more consumerism I meant just sort of a higher quality of life I think we'll have better education I think we'll have much better health care I think people will have much more time for interpersonal relationships I understand with their families I think we will have probes that go off and colonize the universe I think we will use AI to build technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere .."
Google’s head of sustainability, Kate Brandt, has claimed multiple times that AI could reduce global emissions between 5 to 10%
In the video, Kate says a report found that there is an opportunity for AI to provide technological solutions that could reduce.
There was an interview of Sam Altman where he said AI can solve climate change. I can't find that video, I asked Gemini about a dozen times to find that video and I get this reply "I encountered an error doing what you asked. Could you try again?". Its the first time I saw this response from any AI. Its almost as if this kind of questioning is not encouraged by AI.
Some links that I found:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pqgJw9MSXtQ
https://ia.samaltman.com/: Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/28/1104588/sorry-ai...
This is amazing. As the govt grid becomes costlier, wealthier households buy batteries and disconnect, this creates a virtuous cycle of increasing costs, making solar+battery the cheapest source of energy.
People can switch to electric cars, heat pumps, induction stoves. They can plan consumption during peak productivity, keeping emergency power in EV and wipe off their entire electricity bill.
Did we go from a supply crisis to oversupply already? xAI(SpaceX) and Meta are already renting out compute, which means the hard fought and won GPUs/DCs/electricity can't be productively used by them and its better to find some other revenue stream.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft who may have withered AI crash (because they sell shovels) already have competition, how long before we see a lot more companies renting/selling their AI DCs?
Meta also tried building a mobile alternative to google/apple.
Mining rigs aren’t like stocks — if a stock drops, you can hold and wait, it costs you nothing. A mining rig burns real money every single day it’s running. The moment revenue dips below cost, your money-making asset becomes a hole that bleeds cash. So I shut them down.
This logic applies to AI datacenters too. They cost real money to run, what could potentially be profitable can be a loss very very quickly.
Whats doable with todays technology is to give people walking robots[1] and instantly enable last mine connectivity to all metro/train/bus transit.
Bikes (and e-scooters, one wheels) are a decent solution, but you can't take them in most metros or buses. 2nd/3rd world infrastructure is pothole ridden, not even ready for bikes. Walking can take you everywhere.