jakebol

I'm not a hard core nuclear fan but this Fervo project is coming in at about FOAK nuclear projects in terms of project costs per power output. It hasn't had to go to the public either for the cost of its power given the commercial off takers. I think people seem to think that enhanced geothermal is going to be cheaper than nuclear but many geothermal projects are signing contracts for $100+ MW/h power costs. EGS has the potential to be a considerable water consumer (non-potable) if field leak off rates are high and that sets up for potential public pushback given the arid farming/ranching environments these plants will be situated in the great basin. Like any technology there are advantages and tradeoffs, I see both technologies struggling without additional policy support.

A lot of geothermal energy investment happened after the California Public utilities commission issued procurement mandates for clean firm power after SB 100 passed.

I don't see why necessarily, they are in the same ballpark LCOE cost wise. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is that you can potentially build it relatively quickly but that is more a policy choice.

Enhanced geothermal are engineered geothermal systems in naturally hot dry rock where natural fluid convection and permeability are not found. The term comes from the fact that conventional geothermal power plants are often tapping into natural near surface convective systems with high water permeability. Bringing that heat to the near surface also heats the surrounding rock over hundreds of thousands of years so one way to "enhance" the output of traditional geothermal power plants was to theoretically engineer permeability into these surrounding rock formations. Fervo's facility is built next to an existing conventional geothermal power plant.

Not really, it is more the limiting physics of extracting heat through conductive transfer in the rock. The rate of heat extraction through fluid convection has to be less than the rate of conductive replenishment though the basement rock to not get thermal drawdown and these rates are often not economical.

Fervo engineers for thermal drawdown up front, it is well known that for EGS to maintain constant power output you need to periodically re-stimulate the field after a period of some number of years. What matters for the economics is the rate of eventual drawdown. The nameplate 100MW is also a bit misleading as it represents gross power output without taking into account the parasitic load of pumping which for an EGS plant is quite high. There was a ~60% parasitic load for their test facility and IIRC Fervo is eventually targeting 30-40% for the commercial power plant.

That is one part, the other part is that you would get more persistent high pressure blocking patterns over Europe due to reordered atmosphere circulation which will lead to more intense droughts. That is what happened this summer.

Current research is that it would get a lot drier than it is currently. Also the AMOC collapse process would play out over many decades (~50-100 years) it will not be a sudden event.

SSRIs have much more clinical evidence of efficacy for addressing anxiety disorders vs a placebo than depression. The effect size is ~0.7 vs 0.2 in meta studies.

A good book on this is Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. Describing the history of how many of these classes of drugs came about is pretty eye opening, I would say the book is pretty nuanced in its conclusions.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40180010-mind-fixers

The title is a play on the Pulitzer prize winning article from the 80's.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041125092022/http://www.byline...

We are certainly seeing higher monetary velocity in certain sectors. That usually follows from real economic expansion but could also be due in part to inflation.

Extensible trait support seems like another big one if the ecosystem is going to significantly grow. Not having clearly defined traits in the language made larger projects composing many libraries in Julia difficult.

You forgot to add that he was in a relationship and later engaged to the chief of staff at Anthropic while raising his fund, but I’m sure he had no access to material non-public information.

I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.

It acts as a negative feedback signal for producers because there is limited physical pipeline capacity. I think there are some financial incentives to reduce flaring for the LNG export market, but only a small amount of gas was flared in that region (less than 5%).

What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good. It feels similar to the Tea Party movement after 2008.

Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-wary-ai-driven-da...

It’s largely associated methane co-produced from oil production in the Permian. The economics of co-production means that the gas is often the cheapest in the nation and can have negative prices during large oil production swings. I believe it went nearly -$10 MMBtu this year at one point.

Advancement of normal technologies can bring about profound conflict, I feel that is one of the main takeaways from the history of the Industrial Revolution.

Many polls were done post election about preferences among non voters.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

There have been a lot of published retrospective cohort climate model studies, ex https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...

This is an incorrect way to frame the impacts of temperature increases. 1.5, 2, 3C makes extreme events like the one you stated significantly more likely in a probabilistic sense. The ability of adapt is in part driven by frequency of extreme events as much as it is adaptability to specific thresholds. We are already experiencing deadly heat bulb events at current warming levels, the impacted areas and frequency of these events will strictly increase.

Imagination applies also to how we organize society and “rights” we hold over nature and natural resources. Reforming outdated water law is the true fix no pipeline needed.

The southwest isn’t really over populated with people, it’s overpopulated with cows which require tremendous land and water resources.

138 MW is also nameplate capacity multiply that by effective utilization rate for ex solar (~20%) and it’s meaningless compared to the scale of the project.

Oil products are a fractional distillate of a barrel of oil. How are you going to pave the roads all these EV’s are going to drive on, or produce the plastic they consume (EV’s require ~40-50% more plastic)? If gasoline demands softens it doesn’t necessarily mean that other oil product demand will decrease at similar rates. Oil production declines over time so you need constant development even in a declining consumption scenario, and I think we are heading into a world where domestic supply will command a premium.

How is ancestry.com a startup at this point? It was founded in 1996.

Just to note that language "duplicates in sparse arrays" doesn't make sense, if you allow for duplicates it is no longer an array by definition.

Most every (analytic) RDMS database system can model sparse arrays. A sparse array is modeled by defining a clustered index on the table "array" dimensions and defining a uniqueness constraint on that clustered index. This works well with columnar storage because the data needs to have (and assumed to naturally have) a total sort order on the dimensions. Ex. Vertica, Clickhouse, Bigquery... all allow you to do this. TileDB allows for efficient range queries through an R-Tree like index on the specified dimensions.

Most real world data though is messy and defining a uniqueness constraint upfront (upon ingestion) is often limiting, so for practical use cases this gets relaxed to a multi-set rather than sparse array model for storage, and uniqueness imposed in some way after the fact (if required).

Unfortunately "its just geography" is kind of one of the talking points for not really addressing the problem. Although true, concerted reductions in pollution have happened when there was political will to make it happen (mostly through the federal gov. / EPA clean air regulations).

Ogden and Provo are some of the worst offenders for per household air pollution emissions. Like many western cities they have longish commutes (everywhere) in large cars (trucks / suv's) with a high number of cars / household and almost non-functional public transport system. For the Salt Lake Metro area, per capita carbon emissions doubled between 1980 and 2015 because of increasing sprawl. Air regulations here are spotty for personal vehicles and I'm guessing almost non-existent for commercial vehicles. Oh and the state governments solution to this is to push a publicly subsidized "inland port" that will bring increased truck and rail traffic to the valley. The leaders of these tech companies are starting to point out that terrible air pollution for parts of the year is hurting recruitment so it seems like as the money flows into this sector maybe there will be political will on the state and local side to address some of these issues.