ericd

20 ms·

391.
by ericd 8mo ago
Great list! For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but bas
392.
by ericd 8mo ago
That US average includes a lot of new, loaded, financed, comprehensively insured F150’s, not some reasonable minimum.
393.
by ericd 8mo ago
It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
394.
by ericd 8mo ago
I think the disconnect is that with starship they’re targeting >200 tons/200,000 kg and $2m-$10m/launch, so the very optimistic case is more like $10/kg. Also, the production of a panel in sun sync orbit is many times one
395.
by ericd 8mo ago
No idea how quickly they wear out in space with 24x7 irradiance and space temps, but on the earth, they’re at something like 80% capacity after 25 years. So seems like you could control how long they have via overpanelling?
396.
by ericd 8mo ago
Because GPUs are expensive, much more expensive than launch costs if they get starship to the low end of the range they’re aiming for, and you want your expensive equipment running as much as possible to amortize the cost down?
397.
by ericd 8mo ago
Good thing the lack of oxygen does a pretty good job of taking care of that for you ;-)
398.
by ericd 8mo ago
Now how about procuring half a gigawatt when nearby residents are annoyed about their heating bills doubling, and are highly motivated to block you? This is already happening in some areas.
399.
by ericd 8mo ago
Heh relax, it’s back of the envelope to try and see if it’s anywhere in the ballpark, and if they get launch to be cheap enough, it seems like it might be. You don’t assemble one massive thing in space, it’s a bunch of disposable individual
400.
by ericd 8mo ago
Just based on weight, looks like a Block 4 starship should be able to bring up ~150 30 panel pallets of 550W panels, about 2 MW. They're trying to get a starship launch down to $2M with full reuse. GPU DCs are frequently in the neighbo
401.
by ericd 8mo ago
Yeah, I don't know if it wins on cheaper, even with $2M fully reusable starship launches. Maybe rollout speed vs piecing together BD deals with a bunch of different infra providers? The expansion of the grid is going to be hamstrung un
402.
by ericd 8mo ago
Anticompetitive behavior has been normalized in our industry, doesn't make it not anticompetitive. It's a restriction that's meant to make it harder to compete with other parts of their offering. The non-anticompetitive appro
403.
by ericd 8mo ago
The anticompetitive part is setting a much lower price for typical usage of Claude Code vs. typical usage of another CLI dev tool.
404.
by ericd 8mo ago
Maybe. But for SpaceX, it’s more aligned with what they’re trying to do to just learn to manufacture them at scale and lob them into space. And one of the benefits there is the uniformity of it - they can treat them all the same, rather tha
405.
by ericd 8mo ago
Ok, why are so many being built in Northern Virginia, rather than in the middle of nowhere where there will be no backlash? And permitting is challenging in part because it’s so different from place to place. Their permitting process with t
406.
by ericd 8mo ago
Yeah, soft costs like permitting and inspections are supposedly the main reason US residential solar costs $3/watt while Australian residential solar costs $1/watt. It was definitely the worst and least efficient part of our solar
407.
by ericd 8mo ago
You asked if it's satire, I gave you a reason it might not be.
408.
by ericd 8mo ago
We’re quickly entering a new era of energy abundance, without needing to constantly dig up, process, and cart around enormous amounts of oil. And solar has recently gotten cheap enough that people in poorer countries around the world are de
409.
by ericd 9mo ago
I guess, what's the general breakdown of cost between engine and the rest of the car, and the amortized R&D? Most commuters use it mostly for commuting, but also day trips, and 100 miles is really cutting it close for day trip roun
410.
by ericd 9mo ago
Eh, it's just that the entire supply chain that keeps them alive means that their per-capita carbon footprint is almost certainly not dominated by their diet, let alone by beef alone (it's an outsized fraction, but it's just
411.
by ericd 9mo ago
That says 14-18% of global GHG emissions is due to cattle, the person I was responding to said "the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular". That doesn't seem like the biggest impact poss
412.
by ericd 9mo ago
It sounds like the point you're making is that manufacturers taking liability will make all of this unaffordable for normal people, similar to how medicine has become unaffordable? I don't think that's actually your point, bu
413.
by ericd 9mo ago
Pretty sure your diet is a relatively small part of your carbon footprint.
414.
by ericd 9mo ago
There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point… And if it’s sitting at home for 14 hours per day, a normal 120V outlet will get you 70 miles of charge. That’s fine for most commutes, but if you actually need more than that, you
415.
by ericd 9mo ago
Another incentive to go buy an EV.
416.
by ericd 9mo ago
I don’t think this is accurate, Chinese firms are increasingly moving up the quality chain. You might want to look at some of the reviews of Xiaomi’s recently launched car. Also, Tesla Shanghai is one of their best factories, much better qu
417.
by ericd 9mo ago
That’s awesome :-) Like, can we all take a step back and marvel that freaking wasm can do things that 10 years ago were firmly in the realm of sci-fi? I hope they’ll extend that sort of thing to help filter out the parts of the dom that rep
418.
by ericd 9mo ago
lol that was amazing and absurd, don’t know how I missed that, thanks! Sad to hear it’s stuck in legal limbo, though, that is a shame - it looks like they poured a ton of passion into it.
419.
by ericd 9mo ago
Ah, thanks! That helps explain why it seemed like a sort of poorly executed/ill conceived product. Any good brands you know of? I think I just got something random from FS.com or maybe even Amazon.
420.
by ericd 9mo ago
Thanks for sharing. I’m really looking forward to a Cambrian explosion of weird little movies like Kung Fury as the costs of VFX shrink. I’m sure that there will be a ton of garbage, but that also means more gems that would’ve never been ma

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