Spent decades in North Dakota and Alaska.
Yes, 0C was still T-Shirt and Shorts weather until I got over 45 or so.
Went back to college, saw a dude still in shorts and tshirt at ~-20F, which is getting close to -20C.

I've now spent ~4 years in Florida, have worn pants like once.

I'm sure you're making a joke, but I'm not sure what the punch line is supposed to be.

That's storage ("disk" space), of course. It's only got 16GB of RAM.

Perhaps some people are too young to remember the dot-com hype. We had so many businesses back then who had the "idea" that putting your business on a website was sufficient for wild success. Many of the businesses were just half-baked ideas. Some were precursors to services we have to today, but done too soon, expanded too fast, got unlucky, or too the wrong approach: Webvan (30 minute delivery guarantee was bonkers though), Pets.com, Flooz, eToys, Go.com, Kozmo, Garden.com, Furniture.com, etc. While other dot-coms just hemorrhaged money with no clear way out; basically businesses with no credible standalone monetization model. Maybe Kozmo (deliver anything from a convenience store to you in 1 hour) seems stupid (it did at the time), but that's exactly what the rideshare and food delivery services offer on the side. And Pets.com basically works as a model as Chewy and others have shown, through more careful cost control.

[human clerk] Felix, Felix, Felix, Felix... but then suddenly we're talking about some mystery person named Carson who "handle[s] the physical work". So Felix doesn't do the physical work?

You'd think that Slashdot, with its current practice of including almost all of an article in the "summary", could include some sort of introduction to any new characters.

I'm glad to see that Slashdot isn't above printing the occasional feel-good story. :)

It would be good if it could locate lava tubes as well. Unlike lava tubes on Earth those on the Moon and Mars are sometimes kilometers wide and can run for hundreds of kilometers. if the interior of a section could be sealed it would create a huge habitat for minimal investment.

This is America, if we're ever in a situation where we have to choose between a business or data center having power 24/7 with 99.99% reliability (1 hour or less) and residential customers having some reduced level like 99.9% (8 hours of outage a year) then you can be certain that's how it's going to play out.

Where we draw the line is really the only debate. Like 95% is more like having 36 hours a month with an outage. Maybe even rolling blackouts every week, so some people don't have power on the same day every week. If that is what is necessary to keep datacenters running, you can bet that the tech billionaires and their buddies in the government would find a way to keep their lights on, at the expense of keeping the lights off with regular people. (who are voters - which ought to be a serious political issue, but I don't think it is an issue anymore)

They're typically Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP), good for 5000+ cycles before they degrade enough to be a problem. So charging every day they're good for about 10 to 15 years.

In practice, they'll have a site with multiple generations of batteries. So they're always extending their capacity and keeping old batteries in service. Eventually replacing degraded packs with new equipment when it is cheaper (in terms of storage capacity vs cost) to swap out the equipment than to simply add new.

US DoE averted rolling blackouts for 17 states back in July. (California not on that list)

Texas had a rolling blackout back in 2021, which I believe was the last rolling blackout in the continental US.

And there was an unplanned multi-state blackout in the Northeast way back in 2003 due to software+human error. I'm a bit surprised with all the cyber security issues we have today that these kinds of blackouts aren't happening every year.

Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), there is one going on almost every week in some part of the state. I get maybe two a year, if it is going to be a windy day and it is fairly dry they'll cut my power for 6-12 hours typically.
There's several PSPS going on in the Sacramento valley and northern Sierra because it's dry and windy right now. (September 9th to 14th). PG&E has about 1000 people working on it right now.

The way brownouts are evaluated is quite broken. There is little logged with regulatory agencies on sags unless a customer complaint has been filed. If that isn't working for you then escalate to CPUC's Consumer Information Management System (CIMS). This is the route you can go if you have reported brownouts or sags or other service issues and there appears to have been no action taken by SCE.

You're not wrong!

Rolling blackouts used to be far more common and the government would issue a Flex Alert to indicate that rolling blackouts would be used. California has CAISO which manage electric related stuff and they have a PDF of grid emergencies since 1998 which include flex alerts. Spoiler, there hasn't been any since 2022 which is shown in this bar graph of flex alerts by year.

So now that we have established that rolling blackout haven't happened since at least 2022, the question is why.
Here is a bit more info but the TL;DR version is that in 2022 CA passed law to create the Strategic Reliability Reserve which has multiple programs aimed at preventing power outages, including that distributed energy grid system that was featured on here a while back.

However, is it really batteries that preventing outages? Well, it's already been shown that battery systems react much faster than normal energy production methods which prevents your power from "blinking" when a source goes offline. Also, here's a graph from 2024 that shows when battery power is being used and how much (noticed it's very negative when charging from solar). The point here being that the energy stores are substantial and can be discharged ad hoc. It's not definitive evidence but I'm sure if you dig into some of the stats on https://www.caiso.com/ that you could find you seek.

Last week it was high-90's and low 100's along the central coast (Santa Cruz & Monterey). It cooled down at night, but I also don't have A/C because I almost never need it, maybe for 3-5 days every 3-4 years it would be appreciated.

San Francisco is its own particularly bizarre climate compared to the rest of California or even the Bay Area. Just going from the tip of the peninsula to the South Bay can add +20F degrees to the temperature. It can be 75F in SF and 95F-105F in San Jose. Sometimes SF gets to 90F weather most years, specially downtown, even while the Outer Sunset is buried in fog by the next morning.

But last week had some parts hitting high 90's in most of the City, and it was 100F in The Castro and Corona Heights I am told. Very few residential buildings have A/C in SF. Not central air and not even a window unit. With mini-splits getting cheaper and easy to retrofit to old buildings, we're going to see more SF residence adopt A/C to deal with the hotter weather that has become more frequent.