Wait, Pisgah is on the 40, but the power still routes from there and up to the 15 via powerline roads through the Cady Mountains. I should've clarified that.

Oh, I should also add, this is also tied to the Eldorado Lugo Mojave Series Capacitor project, since they'll need that power to run that route on fully-electric trains. There's a shitton of construction that's going to be competing against each other for movement and right of way and all other kinds of fun stuff, oh and that project has several issues that need to be addressed, like seismic mitigation (I've read the plans for the 220kV Pisgah substation, and while thorough are about 30-40% underspecced IMHO knowing the general geology of the area) and the insane winds that can hit out there which can readily cause line snap. If you think this is going to be done in even 20 years you're likely to lose that bet. I can't wait for them to come across that insane faulting section near Pisgah. I bet that's going to make for a fun challenge, because it is actively expanding, and you can tell where it is if you look at the 15 while crossing through the lava field. You'll see a nice weird row of lava, and right where it hits the interstate, you'll see the road cracking open. I want to watch them deal with that one.

Bro you're on a train built on flat land with no mountain or desert terrain to compete with.

Come over here to Cali and drive the planned route. You'll be betting that track record of success is going to go right down the tubes.

They claim 200+ MPH. There might be maybe one stretch where they'll achieve that speed. I was discussing this last night in my geologist group. Anyone that's done driving up and down the 15 knows that there are so many turns barely sharp enough and spaced far enough apart that you aren't ever going to maintain much over 80MPH consistently, especially if you're following the Interstate 100%. If you think you're going through the Cajon Pass at 200 MPH you're fucking suicidal.

I even mapped the route after the Cajon Pass for the geology group last night. As you can see, most spots you could theoretically get to about half that speed before you'd need to slow down for one curve or another. You're certainly slowing down big at Barstow for the 15/40 split, and big around Mountain Pass/Primm. Oh let's not forget some parts of the 15 are close enough together that you're gonna have to move them to make way for the train, especially since you're gonna have to cut away mountain in many spots as that's the only thing separating the two directions of traffic (at different heights, even.) At best, the average might get close enough to 100MPH. Cars can't even safely do much more than that on the 15. There are plenty of crosses littering the sides of the roadway (not as many as the road to Ft Irwin) from high speed accidents.

Oh, did anyone bother to do the environmental impact studies of needing to move some sections of the Interstate? There's one spot where you might need to encroach into protected rattlesnake habitat. I don't think that was thought about.

that LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) is only one side of the equation. Solar has had a low LCOE for several years now, but if you're a business running a solar farm, LCOE isn't what you care about -- profit is what you care about! Profit depends on the cost of solar panels, but it depends just as much on the value of the electricity you are selling to the grid. If the price tends to be near zero (or heaven forbid, negative), profit is dead and the power plant is not worth building.

Wind and solar are the cheapest ways to add capacity to your grid, but they only makes economic sense as long as the instantaneous price of the electricity remains reasonably high. Eight years ago the value proposition looked good because solar wasn't competing too much with other solar, and wind wasn't competing too much with other wind. There are alternative measures that incorporate both cost and value -- see here.

Batteries can restore profitability by timeshifting the electricity sale, but they typically cost well over $100/kWh. They're worth the cost if you can charge and discharge them roughly once a day or more (which can be certainly done if there aren't enough batteries, as in California), but they are not economical for long-term storage and never will be.

We need another solution to reach net zero. For the last 50 years, nuclear could've been that solution, but boy do some people hate it. Nowadays there's another possibility, Enhanced Geothermal Systems, and it looks pretty good. But I still think Molten Salt Reactors are a great design category and we should build them.

9 o clock to 9 o clock, 6 days a week.

AKA what china expects you to work - near constant slavery hours with no time to raise family or even handle most of your own daily needs.

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

Good job assuming - go back to school because you don't know shit. I've been doing computer builds for over 3 decades.

Tell me you don't work in semiconductors without telling me you don't work in semiconductors.

Protip: The Ryzen 5500 is a cut-down 5600G - tons of room for QA errors during that laser-locking process. First CPU had I/O problems. Second one had a faulty PCI Express bus. Third one was outright DOA (and these are ALL AMD RMAs.) So no, the problem isn't me, it's AMD. All the problems went away the second I tossed a 3600X into the socket. It's the CPU. It isn't me. But you say what you must to make yourself feel better.

It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

Because I'm pretty sure it's actually going to be AI NPCs who generate speech and behavior with GPTs and other neural networks.

Well, UE5's Nanite and Lumen will be big. They don't need raytracing hardware, but I guess it could help.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.