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.

eVTOL man-carrying craft (flying taxis and flying cars) are not yet economically viable -- and won't be until we have a whole new generation of batteries with higher energy densities and cycle-lives. At the current cost of operation, these are a solution looking for a problem.

Hell, China can't sell all the EVs it makes so the chances of them selling any of these is....

Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.

...This is my embarrassed face.

I had previously assumed you were speaking of allocating $1M across all projects used by Google. In fact, you were speaking of giving $1M to each such project.

One would wonder what sorts of strings would be attached to such largesse. Still, that would indeed be game-changing and amazing.

Google could create a new corporate policy to provide a minimum of $1M/year to any open source project it uses.

That would be real innovation.

While acknowledging your noble intentions, no, it wouldn't be innovation. It would be cheaping out.

In the San Francisco bay area, $1.0E+06/year gets you maybe five skilled engineers. Set against the quantity of Open Source projects used by such organizations -- FFmpeg, GStreamer, OpenSSL, ssh, rsync, gcc, gdb, coreutils, nanopb, Samba, Lua, Python, Perl, Git, Vim/Neovim, Yocto, ImageMagick, Blender, the Pipewire framework, the Linux kernel, the Debian packaging system, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc... -- five engineers is miserly.

Google appears to have understaken the expense of spinning up an ocean-boiling slop machine to automagically generate plausible bug reports, and then casually fire off an email to the maintainers.

Note that Google has not undertaken the expense of assigning an engineer to also write a fix.

That they are not doing that is a conscious, management-approved choice.

...Y'know how Google relishes in closing bug reports with "WONTFIX - Working as designed?" I think FFmpeg should close slop reports from Google with, "WONTFIX - Unfunded."

"Hey, everyone! Don't pay any attention to those Japanese translators who'd been volunteering their time and expertise for the last 20 years that we just insensitively and comprehensively shit on... Look! New mascot logo! Giz cash..."

(Narrator: New revenues did not materialize.)

The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells.

There are no sunk costs around the turbines. The existing turbines will be replaced. From TFS:

In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

They're reusing the land and part of the existing structure on it. Almost everything else is getting replaced.

Modern combined-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than that. Most new installations now get around 60% efficiency if not better, and the current record is 64.18%, set by a Siemens turbine at Keadby Unit 2 Power Station in the UK. The end result won't be 68%, but it also won't be 34%. Given the losses associated with electrolysis, the net is likely to be around 50%, which still makes it a bad idea.

As holder of the domain aardvark.co.nz I can already feel the benefit.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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The videos you watch don't have intrusive sponsorship segments then?

I suspect it has in most households -- even boomer ones.

The problem is that nobody wants YouTube to be just like broadcast and cableTV was. The thing that made YouTube so compelling and so popular was its authenticity and variety -- but the management at YouTube are carefully killing the very thing that made it great.

Ever-growing levels of ever-more intrusive advertising. Ads that are (at times) 90 percent scams. Ads and content that are low-value AI-slop which, once the novelty value wears off, will drive people off the platform rather than onto it. Endless spambot comments on videos. -- all these things are slowly souring the formula that made YT what it is today.

Creators are complaining, viewers are complaining and pretty soon, advertisers will be complaining because viewer numbers will decline.

Many creators (such as myself) are now switching to self-hosting via a federated network of servers that we host ourselves (PeerTube or similar). Doing this frees us from the tyranny that is YouTube's arbitrary and unchallengable AI content moderation and it's unwillingness to deal with bogus copyright claims and strikes.

We have reached "peak Youtube" and just like so many companies that have become a huge part of our ever-day lives, it will now begin an ever-steepening decline.

If YouTube doesn't deliver what viewers and creators want they will find an alternative and the self-hosted federation of servers overcomes the single largest hurdle to creating a YouTube competitor -- the problem of matching the company's vast storage, processing and bandwidth capacity.

Watch this space... things are about to get exciting again!

That's right... you don't *really* think YT is giving you a choice do you?

I do not make shorts, I do not want shorts but without using plugins I can not avoid shorts. Successful companies are generally built on tailoring their offerings to match the needs/wants of their customers so YT once again proves that WE are not the customers, we are the product!