It's a community of hackers passionate about the way things work. Picking it apart helps everyone understand the inputs and outputs of a system to understand how feasible it is, and what the tradeoffs are. What would you prefer, a generic "that's nice"?

As far as I can tell, the author just kinda glossed over the brine situation. Some minerals can be sold, but his solution for the excess salt was just to turbulently mix it back into the ocean, if I'm reading correctly. The sibling comments here explain why that isn't trivial (cost and wildlife impacts). I found them illuminating!

> It's a community of hackers passionate about the way things work.

No it's not. It's a community of corporate, media and tech people opposed to hacking and the hacking ethos. It's mostly a business forum.

This is some negging bs.

Current front page items include a paper on vector databases, an example of AI garbage that showed Amazon in a bad light, a quite in-depth treatment of “Trilinear Point Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering” hosted on a PhD’s own github page, you know github, a huge gathering place for hackers to share their code with each other? An article criticizing Unity about banning an open source LGPL application, written by a developer of said open source product, introducing a competing platform to further decentralize the app store landscape, an article critical of Boeing, an article critical of Apple, a radical rocket design, bluetooth mesh networking, an open source python notebook project, an indie developer’s project to run stable diffusion in an iOS app instead of from some corporate server, an article on the ethics of immersive tech, an article on mysticism and empiricism, an article on epistemology…

Yeah, real dull business environment here. I’d totally rather go back to my training on peer performance reviews.

If you can’t find anything interesting on this site, it is a you problem.

"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."

We’re all so sorry that you can’t just do whatever you want while unleashing the externalities on society at large. You want to hack, go do it in your basement where you can’t affect the rest of us. You want to engineer, you have to answer to more people than just your mom asking what you want for dinner.

Well yes, that too. A mix of both, not sure of the percentages.

Frankly I wish there were a better place for the hackers to congregate without the capitalists. But whatever, at least the discussion here is civil and interesting. Best place I've found since Slashdot of old.

> But whatever, at least the discussion here is civil and interesting.

It's civil. Nothing interesting about the comments at all. Even the dullest person on earth would find the comments mundane and boring.

Well, if you don't find them interesting, you don't have to be here? Many of us still do find value here.

Do you have other similar forums you recommend?

He addresses brine, but not the waste products that come from brine, and only addresses it in one sentence:

> The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged.

This is not nearly as easy as this sentence implies.

Brine is just concentrated seawater. What waste products?

The waste product is brine. It's an extremely salty sludge that's toxic to marine life. In the same way that fresh water is "just" diluted seawater, but pumping millions of gallons of it into a coastal ecosystem would wipe it out.

The pipe should really go a dozen miles out to sea and then get pump-mixed with the destination water

Yes it is. We do it with urban wastewater in thousands of locations around the world. This is not a hard problem, nor is it expensive.

Waste brine is substantially more dense than regular seawater, so it tends to form a coherent layer that doesn't mix easily: it's why waste brine sinks to the sea-bed and spreads out in a layer.

Diffusers are a thing. Fairly well understood.

They provide some detailed and constructive thoughts. What exactly does your comment provide? Some sort of complaint which could be solved by yourself by not going into the comments or not reading theirs, hope this helps you in the future.