technicalbard

I used elm before pine, on a terminal hooked to a Bull-Honeywell machine running Multics...

Except it won't work. The intermittency problem of renewables doesn't make them cheaper - there is no low-cost solution to that. The intermittency makes energy more expensive. Further, their population is already shrinking. Labor costs will start to rise quite rapidly in Chain, making things more expensive.

Renewable penetration hasn't made energy cheaper anywhere where it is a significant portion of the supply grid.

The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2.

The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.

Wrong. Storage has opex, because it has energy losses. Not all the energy that goes in can come out. 2nd Law and all that. On top of that, there will be maintenance and operating staff costs.

Wind would need to guarantee dispatchability on demand to fix a price. Offering low prices when it can is not the same as reliable on-demand sources.

This is true of all knowledge-work. Traditional engineering is fraught with the same problem - you don't know EXACTLY how you will solve the challenges, so how can one accurately estimate them? Even worse - if you don't have a clear set of requirements, or they are expected to change as you progress (a critical feature of AGILE), then estimating with any likelihood of achieving same becomes all but impossible.

The more uncertainty in the path, the less accuracy in the estimate. Kahnemann's latest book "Noise" provides some good background on why this happens.

Having multiple people do independent estimates and averaging them probably gives better results, and having a clear process to document assumptions and test sensitivity to those estimates can also help.

So they are building LISP inside Excel.... It is now a corollary of Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming...

If the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple of hundred years - EASILY. Remember that the Inuit of North America only entered from Asia in the last 4000 years or so, and speak a language that is closely related to languages in Siberia...

So these beads could have come to Alaska from east OR west. We will probably never know for sure.

Umm. Totally misses that the LISP family of languages predates both C and ML and introduced many of the features he cares about...

I'm an amateur developer and I write checking code in functions all the time because you can't be certain of the source of the data!!!

That it can do units too makes this a possible replacement for MathCAD!

I know companies that live in legal fear of discovery and destroy lots of things that have potential data-mining value. Imagine a firm that deletes all email more than 365 days old...

Awesome. I loved FORTRAN when I was at University

This is curious given there are well documented findings that which school you attended doesn't correlate to actual success. This is true in Engineering and Law. The problem, particularly in the US, is that the skills that are tested by the standardized tests (SAT, LSAT) are NOT the skills that make someone good at the job that comes out at the end.

It is still debatable whether carbon emissions are falling. Most of the country hasn't got enough data under a carbon tax, and oil and gas pricing has swung more significantly over the last 10 years than the carbon tax impact, and that didn't impact consumption very much.

The problem of a planned economy is the economic calculation problem and lack of a mechanism for decision making (i.e. prices). Mises and Hayek laid this out VERY clearly, as early as 1922. The planner cannot possibly know enough to make the right decisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Ah, something Common Lisp has had for over 30 years.

Generating power from very small temperature differences (2-3 degrees) with require gigantic surface areas to move energy. 25 mW/m2 is a TINY flux rate, and they are talking about how to get it to 0.5 W/m2? Need a bigger temperature difference...

The thermodynamics of this are a disaster, which will drive their cost of capture higher than this range. Capturing CO2 from coal fired power plants costs about $100/tonne and is easier due to substantially higher concentration than doing so from air. Their pilot plant requires significant electrical and heat input which they get from burning natural gas -and then capturing that flue gas. I think this is a PR exercise for the primary investors.

I still don't understand why Common Lisp isn't more popular

But deployment is slowing in jurisdictions that have decided they can't afford the subsidies and what it does to power prices.

Giant mirrors in space, redirecting energy to the surface of the earth...

Except the reactions happen at 300C, and the FT reaction is exothermic between H2 and CO, not CO2. taking CO2 apart is endothermic. And then you need to refine the hydrocarbons (because they will look like diesel or wax, not gasoline).

No. The prices they quote are JUST getting the CO2 out of the air. Other technologies for getting CO2 from Flue Gas using amines or ammonia have been commercially demonstrated at scale for similar prices.

The hydrogen production, FT reactors, post-treating refinery will cost a lot more.

If you want hydrogen from water, you need electricity. A lot of it. Nuclear reactors will be the most viable way to do that.

Why anyone would try to capture CO2 from AIR (at 410 ppm) when you could get it from flue gas (from a power plant), where it exists at tens of thousand of ppm (i.e. %) is beyond me. The technology has been commercially demonstrated to capture CO2 and compress it for about $100/tonne.

CaO generally does not exist in natural stone deposits (no alkaline or alkali earths exist as oxides because they are very reactive). You produce CaO from CaCO3 by calcining and driving off the CO2 (which is emitted to the atmosphere).

This is a crazy scheme. If you want CO2, there are much easier places to recover it than from AIR. Flue gas of furnaces/boilers, chemical plants that make it as a byproduct, etc.

Worse, their whole plan needs a source of hydrogen, which they claim will come from green energy electrolysis - but the math doesn't work well. You'd need nuclear reactors or big hydro dams to make enough to make fuels at scale.

And it won't be carbon neutral because of the second law...

I don't see a lot of engineering design, analysis and simulation software being done in the browser or mobile device. There are a few examples, but the really powerful stuff is desktop Windows (some still in WinForms) or Unix/Linux. The cloud offers some great potential for doing HPC stuff on large clusters, but the user interfaces necessary for DEFINING the problem aren't something I want to do on a touch screen or in a web Client.

I still hate the webclients for major brand tools like SAP and Successfactors where they still don't know about async calls...

Electrification will only reduce CO2 emissions if the power SOURCES are also carbon free. Since wind and solar are still a VERY small amount of the grid, and are very expensive without subsidies, the only real alternative is nuclear reactors. Lots of them.

Except that socialism will always fail due to the lack of information problem. Mises explained this logically and consistently in 1922 in his book "Socialism". He further predicted that all socialist systems will end with totalitarianism. The idea that "the people" should vote and have a say on how a business should be run (one where they have no vested interest) is ridiculous. Democratic socialism is bankrupting every country where people can vote themselves benefits.