I don't disagree that good journalism would have included that figure for comparison. On the other hand, in less time than it took you to write that, you could have found out from the internet: 3.0-4.5 mi/kWh, depending on driving style, weather, heat/AC usage, etc.

It seems to me that solar awnings over carparks are a better use case.

The last coal-burning power plant in New England produced its last electricity a few weeks ago, and the owners are starting decommissioning. It had been operating only as a supplemental power source for years - providing guaranteed reserve capacity for especially hot or cold days. But even the guaranteed payments for that were no longer profitable. The owners intend to repurpose its 500-MW grid connection for battery storage, and the sprawling acreage with a solar park.

For the first time since the grid got started, New England's electricity is now coal-free. The sky has not fallen.

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

I'll leave the historical vengeance fantasy genre to Tarantino, thank you very much.

It's a cute "attack", but not practical in the real world. The "poison" stands out like a sore thumb on your loss graphs.

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

I found the end of the article to be ironic:

After a day working on the farm, the Terradot team...gathered around a table for a barbecue. One slowly roasted large skewers of meat over an open fire, carving thick slices that people picked up by hand.
Connor Sendel, the head of operations, stood up and announced that the company’s first project had its design validated by a carbon removal registry — moving them a step closer to delivering their first carbon credit. The room erupted in cheers.

Eating meat, raised using land that used to be rainforest before it was cut down and converted to poor grazing and cropland, and erupting into cheers for spreading rock dust over that same land. I feel a bit more self-reflection is in order.

Wait, are you telling me that the Emperor's newest outfit isn't the most beautiful in all the land? I was told only the ill-cultured and unintelligent nabobs would fail to be dazzled!

Agreed. Jeff Geerling made a 1.2 PB NAS using a rack of drives and a Raspberry Pi. (Wholly inadequate for this South Korea job, but it does show that 1-PB storage isn't that hard or expensive.)

Also: Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!

Wait, according to Fox News, Germany gets lots of sunshine!

Earlier this week, the coal-boosting Trump Administration recently held an auction for coal mining leases on federal lands in Montana. There was only one bid - for a whopping $186,000, which equates to about $0.001 - one tenth of a penny - per ton. That seems to be a pretty clear indication of coal's prospects. But, sure, go on and on about "Beautiful Clean Coal" all you want.

Curious note: the bid came from the Navajo Transition Energy Co.

I am also in the camp that thinks we're in for major and damaging disruption in the job market, due to AI and other automation technology. But the notion that 100 million jobs will be lost in the next 10 years, out of a total workforce of 170 million, doesn't pass the sniff test to me.

I don't think much of their methodology, either. Asking ChatGPT about the potential effects of AI/Automation doesn't mean much unless you then also examine whatever sources ChatGPT can cough up. Most committee staffers are lawyers of one sort or another; surely they've heard the cautionary tales of what happens when you use LLM outputs uncritically. One can get ChatGT to claim the sky is green, or that you (yes, you!) are the messiah, if you give it the right prompt.

None of the woo "hurt him in terms of accelerating cancer". The problem is that he did that instead of actual treatment, and let a highly treatable cancer turn into a nearly-untreatable one.