I own it, it's just the 25 years of hosting i bought for $12 a year at the turn off the century finally ran out

Generally people keep their solar installs for at least one year, rather than replacing your panels, wiring, controllers and batteries each year, attempt to get two or more years out of them. This should help keep your cost basis down as inflation causes prices to increase

The advantage of sodium battery means anybody can produce it, there's no geopolitical alliances needed to manufacture them. Lithium is super rare by comparison. Any and every country can domestically produce sodium batteries forever. The low temp operating envelope of sodium is interesting, but only 11% of the worlds population lives somewhere that is useful. The big benefit is any country can stick a straw in the ocean and build a battery factory regardless of sanctions. Go look at Iran right now if you want to understand why I keep harping on this point.

I dunno, people on boats and in vans buy this stuff and run it for a decade or more without problems. Name brands like anker and ecoflow have very solid track records and 5-8 year warranty on most of this stuff. It's not fly by night Chinese crap. All this stuff has a very solid track record at this point. I bought my first MPPT way back in 2017 it's still alive and kicking no problem

Well that was with i think 32 panels, breaker box upgrade, and i forget 10 or 20kwh worth of battery. Effectively fully off grid except dec and January for our climate

My roof is about 10 years from EOL so I'm not super eager to install it today as a full system is about $40,000 in my local market. By comparison I can install this in my backyard in about 45 min simply with hand tools. I will do both eventually but i can do this today and cut about 50% of my air conditioning and beat bill today.

California and Texas are some of the biggest adopters of industrial batteries, and the prices keep plummeting. I remember being near an executive power summit in Idaho back in 2016 and all the execs said industrial power was pie in the sky and would never work. It has virtually resolved all of Australia's power "duck curve" problems. Solar + battery is just phenomenally economical today. China is bringing on NaCl batteries this year and shipping cars with them by EoY. Solar panels are made from beach sand and batteries made from ocean water. Couldn't get any cheaper than that.

We have a sunny, south facing portion of our yard. Looking forward to hanging 4 solar panels on the fence and getting 800-1000w (1200w "nameplate" max but reality is closer to 1000w) to offset our daytime use. We both WFH and then the kids are home by 3pm so being able to offset computers, fridge, and part of our AC/Heat bill is huge.
 
A couple of mfg, Anker and Ecoflow both sell a system that you do the standard 4 x 400w panel = 1200w plug in, and then a second 2000w (+5 more panels) into a battery system that discharges a max of 1200w overnight as the sun sets. I think they want like $1600 for the system. That's an instant buy for me when california electricity is $0.50/kwh

A million years ago I thought there was probably some synergy between my gmail account and getting better, personalized search results. That never was realized, but oh well. I can't even recall the last time I used google for anything. I use Kagi for search now but even then it's use is pretty minimal. Now that the need for search engines is being replaced.... why would I ever use a google product? What value does the brand "google" even bring to the table in 2026? Other than Kagi I haven't been actively trying to "degoogle" but the lack of interesting or useful products is really striking for such a large company. The last thing I want is yet another google app yeeting marketing telemetry back to the google mothership.

>On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
 
You're living in 2023 if you think any company worth their salt is still scraping the live internet for quality content. Everyone has their own curated library already Nobody has been scraping en masse for at least two years, unless there's a blog article about bleeding edge science research or something. Even then they will probably just scrape the scientific paper itself, rather than coverage of it.

I've been on google fi for... I dunno, probably at least a decade now? Maybe more. They just mail me a phone, I turn it on, and it figures everything out. I get a new phone ever 2 years or so. I couldn't tell you what the inside of a phone store looks like because I've never needed to go into one.

>the AI bubble is going to burst and
 
Kimi K3 docs and tooling, and weights, dropped this morning. Kimi is selling K3 tokens at $3/million tokens and if you're running it using GB300 gpu racks @ $6 million each... the math mostly checks out. Anthropic is selling what some people call roughly equivalent Fable tokens at $50/million each. I don't think AI is going anywhere, but valuation of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI in the $500b-$1T range isn't sustainable when "open" models sell tokens at a profit at $3/million tokens.
 
Open Weight models have been catching up to SOTA for a while but the lead OpenAI and Anthropic have, has been eroding quite rapidly and their ability to charge a premium for their product may not continue indefinitely at this point.
 
Again I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the bubble is largely based on valuation and Kimi K3 is.... well positioned to pop that bubble.

we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Move further south, I guess. The rest of the country is much warmer, more livable, and doesn't freeze solid for three months out of the year. The fact that you have to change your clocks twice a year to cope with it isn't my problem.