Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

I don't want to stop buying plastics. I want to have the option to buy actually recycled plastics that actually get recycled. We can do this but we don't. We don't because the people with all the money who therefore control the means of production decide that we don't. "We" is a stretchy word. So is "you" and so's "can". Sure, you can choose to opt out of society, but it would make more sense to make society not shit all over everything.

An anecdote is not correlation. It's not even weak evidence of a correlation.

Skinner, 1948, "'Superstition' in the Pigeon."

https://psycnet.apa.org/fullte...

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."

I guess that makes sense, but the wheeled vehicle isn't suited for that at all. In that case they'd have been better off just making a drone-in-a-box with convenient mounting points on the box.

NHTSA and NASA didn't study all of the code in the PCM. Their analysis is therefore invalid. Barr Group found a significant number of paths to unintended acceleration, zero of which depended on cosmic rays and also that Toyota not only didn't follow industry best practices, they didn't follow their own internal procedures. And you think China, which hasn't ever made the best software for anything, is immune to the same kinds of errors. You literally stated that there was no other way that it could happen, which is an obvious falsehood. It's unclear why you're engaging in this level of gaslighting.

first post modded redundant

suck this dick like trump sucked bubba, cuck

I'm not sure why the Internet thinks Bubba is Bill Clinton.

https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/B...

Actually, the Epstein comma seems to be the worst.

I'll go with NHTSA and NASA over the "Barr Group" ambulance chasers, thank you. Barr found that it's possible if you get like a cosmic ray to flip just the right bit you could stick the throttle on (but still not make it overpower the brakes). NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases. In not a single actual case that they investigated did they find that it wasn't well explained by either stuck pedals or pedal misapplication (mainly the latter).

Oh hi, I remember chatting with you earlier :) Sorry to hear about your back. If you're ever planning on visiting Iceland, drop me a line, I can make recommendations. :)

There's some fascinating new work on "inverse-vaccines". In the same way that antigens can be flagged as "foreign", they can also be flagged as "non-foreign" by attaching N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) to them. The liver recognizes that tag and uses it to suppress immune activation against that antigen.