If you overbuild wind (or solar) perhaps you could use the excess, when it exists, to drive processes that can be started and stopped quickly. My first thought was synthesizing kerosene, but I'm not sure how readily that could be pushed up and pulled down. Perhaps it would be better used to pump water uphill or some such. Then when the wind stops or the sun isn't shining you could use hydroelectric.

Hydrogen is tricky, but liquid hydrogen doesn't need heavy containment.

FWIW, I think Hydrogen would be the better choice AFTER the conversion was made, but synthetic kerosene has a *much* smoother transition path. And you can use lots of already existing infrastructure. But to make synthetic kerosene scalable you need a standardized feedstock that you make it from.

What guarantee do you have that a "customer" is not also the product?

If you think Apple is the only company to act in the manner, you are quite unobservant. (OTOH, I have no idea how often companies in the EU act in a similar manner.)

This is an artifact of the current legal system and both the laws and precedents that it has established. It's not happenstance. I trace this back to "santa clara vs union pacific railroad co.". It probably goes back further.

Since this is an artifact off the legal system, on should expect companies primarily operating under different legal systems to have different typical moral failures.

AND India. (And probably elsewhere.)

The economic reasons I've heard is that with an aging population, a much smaller percentage of younger folk need to support a much larger proportion of the elderly.

I really think that this argument doesn't work in a world with improving AI and robots, but it's true currently, and has been true for the last century or so. (Probably really true only since antibiotics supplemented public sanitation, though.)

Sorry, biofuels CAN be carbon neutral. But it's more expensive to do it that way, so nobody does. Generally they're just greenwashing PR, so they don't try to make it actually work. Alternatively, they're a research project that gets written up as if it were a reasonable operational choice. (Or both, of course.)

This is more a problem with our decision making strategy than it is a technical problem, even though of course there are technical components. We are really poor at dealing with long term problems. Less poor at recognizing them. But we highly discount future costs.

Use hot air with a hydrogen fuel to keep it hot. (Batteries MIGHT work for that.)

OTOH, it would be slow. There's no way around that. It could be a good replacement for a luxury liner, I suppose. And it might be useful for freight that wasn't too heavy and didn't have an extremely urgent delivery requirement. That's a pretty niche market.

You can't make things work by just building wind-turbines. (Or solar cells.) You need to add large investments in energy storage and voltage regulation, and the ability to pour power into the grid episodically from random locations. This *is* the right way to go, but don't oversimplify things.

The current grid is not designed to accept random amounts of input from random locations. It's designed to be driven by base-line loads, like hydro, nuclear, coal, or gas. That's what was available when it was being designed. When variable sources get to be around 40% it becomes less stable. (That's what the various huge batteries have been added to handle...but the problem gets worse when the base-line load becomes a smaller fraction.)

The grid is **In the process** of being redesigned. But the redesign is not near completion. This is only partially because of existing commercial interests.

Hydrogen is a more realistic choice. I.e. it's known to be possible, and CAN be generated from water and electricity.
There are lots of problems with it, but there are known plausible answers to those problems. (Except the ones about expense. This requires different engines on the airplanes.)

The easiest plausible answer is synthetic kerosene. This is doable, and requires feedstock of things like methane. It CAN be done in an approximately non-polluting manner. Expect this to be MORE expensive than the hydrogen approach at scale.

The processes involving things like food waste will always be non-scalable, because the feedstock it to varied. (Well, you could compost them anaerobically and pull off the methane...but doing that at scale is both difficult and inefficient as a source of methane.)

Batteries are too heavy to be a suitable replacement for air fuel This is true even of Lithium batteries. There *do* exist short range electric airplanes...but I expect them to always be :"technical tour de force demonstrations".

I'm not sure. Copyright isn't supposed to apply to functionally required elements. And I don't think "hello" can be copyrighted.

I think it's effectively a ban at this point. After a few court cases are decided that may change. At the moment it's just playing safe...which is normal NetBSD activity.

If they're using a B+Tree or a B*Tree, deletion is a lot more expensive than making as deleted, and not removing it until something else wants to be stored at the same index. But they *should* zero out the data.

Yeah, but the purpose of this site is not to be believed, but rather to be argued with. The articles are all that good, and are occasionally blatantly foolish, but often the arguments in response are worthwhile.

True, even is quotes, is the wrong way to describe what LLMs do. They have no direct connection to the universe, only to their training data (which is often the internet). What they do is try to answer "Given what I've seen so far, what is the next thing to expect?".
This is highly useful, more so than I predicted, but it's not intelligence, and doesn't have any relation to truth, not even to "truth".

Note that this criticism is specific to LLMs. There are AI models that do make empirically good predictions. But they operate off of reasonably curated training data. (Actually, the LLMs make empirically good predictions in their proper domain, but that domain is not "truth", but rather "What word or phrase is likely to appear next?".