LCoE is a partial metric at best, it tells you nothing about how useful the energy is produced. For comparison a nuclear bomb produces an LCoE of about ~30cents/kwh but that doesnt make it a good energy source to power a grid with.

When you are adding intermittent sources to a most despatchable grid, sure LCoE tells you most of what you need to know, as displaced more expensive sources just throttle down slightly. But once you get into significant fractions of energy (~1/3 or more) just having expected joules created / cost to build is not a particularly useful metric for an intermittent power generator.

Gosh, I didnt realise I was supposed to be sleeping from 3pm until 9am in winter. Good to know

Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.

CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).

This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.

Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months. The big advantage I see here is that unlike those other technologies capacity is dirt cheap to build, its just a metal tank. So whenever a renewable plant would curtail its output it can instead redirect to creating gasoline to burn when the renewables arent producing much electricity.

I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.

While I agree that the banning of any demonstration in support of Palestine Action is an authoritarian overreach by the UK, I dont think its as bad as masked paramilitary goons dragging people off without explanation and executing them them in broad daylight while members of the government stand up and say that said paramilitary goons have full legal immunity,

Just on a technical level that is an amazing ad compared to the usual political soundbites in front of a few images.

That doesn’t make any sense as a reason to turn off Gemini in your inbox though. Either you are ok with having your emails scanned and used in ML systems, in which case why bother turning off the feature; or you aren’t and turning off the feature doesn’t help you.

As disgusting as I find Farage and his ideology, this isn’t a good thing. These are the same laws that the state uses to gag climate and left wing protests.

Google promises(new window) that Gmail’s 3 billion users will benefit from a “personal, proactive inbox assistant”. But given that these features are free, what’s the catch? Make no mistake, Google isn’t doing this out of generosity. The contents of your inbox are valuable to the company.

Email used to be a more private space where your communications could potentially be intercepted by bad actors, but largely your data was your own.

I dont think that is true wrt gmail is it? Google have been scanning your messages and using that for machine learning based ad targeting since it was released.

Sure, it probably wont take then as long, but its still misleading to portray “China reaches milestone a western company did a quarter of a century ago” as being equivalent to catching up.

China “has EUV” lithography in the same way ASML had it in 2001:

ASML built its first working prototype of EUV technology in 2001, and told Reuters it took nearly two decades and billions of euros in R&D spending before it produced its first commercially-available chips in 2019.

They are still an awful long way behind the west in this regard.

The thinking isnt that that you putting money on a horse to win increases it’s odds of winning, its that by signalling your belief that you think it will happen by a costly signal (you lose the money if you are wrong) you are updating the overall odds to be closer to the true probability by the power of crowds. if 200 people are betting something will happen and only 10 are betting it wont then that is evidence that the thing is more likely than not to happen.

There are flaws in this thinking, it doesnt take into account manipulation of events to win bets is a particularly big one, and it also gets worse the more removed the thing being bet on is from everyday life as people make less informed choices.

Those are how to install Linux inside windows.

Typical trash tier journalism from the canary, apparently no comment to an on the spot question about military matters (US using UK bases) to a minister who isnt in charge of that (she’s minister for development in Africa) is somehow “UK backs US powerplay for Greenland”

Edit: Especially funny now that the UK is on Trumps list for retaliatory tariffs for blocking his annexation of Greenland

And those people who think LLMs will replace software engineers any time in the near future are wrong. But it can still be the case that LLMs are democratizing coding ability to those who otherwise wouldnt have it while at the same software engineering as a discipline isnt going anywhere.

Its not just basic scripting either, often when people start coding in earnest their programs are just a huge pile of statements connected together with if statements and mutating global variables. and LLM can help show best practices like encapsulating logic into functions and isolating side effects.

But at the same time everyone having a CAD machine (or 3D printer) allows a lot of people to solve engineering type problems they have without an engineer, which is the article’s point.

I think you are vastly overestimating the level that statement is pitched at. The overwhelming majority of people dont even know how a for loop works. However they can ask an LLM to write a script to change this list of files with inconsistent numbering conventions and put them in a consistent order. That’s the level of spreading out the ability to program that we are dealing with.

The UK does not have regional electricity pricing. This is actually an issue as it means energy intensive businesses arent attracted to places close to large sources of renewable power (the North East and Scotland) and instead crowd into the overheated South East.

But it also means that the locals wont be helping with the leccy bill any more than someone in Aberdeen is.