> The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.
That's to power a single data center though, how would that scale?
If I'm doing the math right, Minnesota used 65.7 TWh of power last year so to store 3 days worth of power just for that one city we would need a battery 18x larger than the one mentioned here.
I can't imagine we could ever scale such storage capacity for all energy use, let alone all the wind and solar required to fill it.
Sodium is an interesting chemistry, though it has different voltage curves than lithium ion once hardware is built to match it they may scale well for industrial use.
That still doesn't avoid the more fundamental math of having to store such massive amounts of energy though, even if you skip batteries and pump water to retention ponds uphill.
Even for small scale residential, the recommendation is to store 3 days worth of average usage to handle stretches of cloudy days and to have a generator for the times when that still doesn't cut it. You also need enough solar that 4-6 hours of generation can fill those batteries back up after a stretch of cloudy days.
You also have to contend with frequency issues. This is what took down Spain's grid, they had turned on a ton of solar at the time - with many gas plants offline a seemingly small dip below 60Hz really wrecks much of the system when it wasn't designed to handle those swings and triggers multiple safety mechanisms.
This is the answer for me as well. My partner and I try to be intentional about giving each other at least an evening a week to go do something social, but it doesn't work out nearly that often because everyone else is juggling their own kids' schedules. So even if I didn't personally have kids, I would still be facing the same issue.
I have been building an iOS app that I had kicking around in my head for years but never had time to build. I have been a frontend UX engineer for the better part of a decade and went through a handful of tutorials on Swift. The project definitely sits in this uncanny valley for me. I have test suites for every aspect of the app and have the agent using TDD to avoid cheating - this has gotten me pretty far without having to look too close at the output other than general structure. As I'm reaching a more mature stage of the project though, I'm finding that I want to tweak a lot by hand in the code to get the details right without burning tokens.
The agents always do the best work IMO if you already know exactly what you want, but are too lazy to implement it. I like having the agent mock up a working solution before reimplementing it.
To split the difference, I now try to hand code as much as I can from the beginning, leave TODO comments for the agent to mop up and I'll ask it to complete the issue with reference to the current diff. It reduces the surface for agents to make stupid assumptions. If I can get it done fast on my own, win for me, if the agent finds issues or there's logic that needs checking, also a win. This way you stay sharp, but you have access to an oracle if you get stuck and it costs you fewer tokens.
Yeah, I like the "get out of jail free" card approach. The thing I always used to hate before this era was getting stuck in a hole on something that would take days or worse to grind through. It's nice to drop a little plank bridge across those now
This is appalling and I agree the technology is creepy. However, human verification is already a big problem that seems like it will only grow from here.
It does seem to me that this should be solvable at the device level by having a biometric scan produce a signed key on your device that can be used to issue a token of authenticity, similar to the way payment systems or certificate authorities work.
Then again, this only intensifies a different, growing problem where access to a smartphone or computer becomes a basic requirement for participation in society. No easy answers.
And not only that, it intensifies the problem where access to a smartphone or computer which can perform remote attestation becomes a basic requirement for participation in society. Slowly but surely, free and open source hardware and operating systems are going to become irrelevant as the daily drivers of people's lives because they are not produced or verified by the certificate authorities. Everyone is going to access digital society through the cloud terminals rented from Google and Apple.
Maybe you could have humans verify other accounts who want anonymity? Like I'd be willing to say jtr1 seems human and also don't mind verifying with a passport scan as I'm not personally that bothered by the anonymity thing. You could perhaps cap the number of vouches per scan to stop me vouching for 10^10 bots or some such.
Local post office posts a one time key every day on the door. You enter this key as proof you were a human who got this information from the meatspace.
"But the economy" is an out-of-date framing. The cost of renewables has been plummeting for well over a decade. New renewables are now cheaper than new fossil fuel plants in most of the world, and in many regions they're already competitive with or cheaper than simply running existing fossil fuel infrastructure. As modern wars in Ukraine and now Iran are increasingly demonstrating, they are not only cost effective but rapidly a matter of energy sovereignty and national security.
That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.
We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.
A new US administration and Congress need to be voted in. There is one party who backs fossil fuel interests and denies anthropogenic climate change. They're currently in charge. The American public didn't see that as an important enough issue in 2024.
They need a complete reworking of the government. The fact is that bum-fuck states with a handful of citizens can use their senate seats to hold the country hostage. Nothing will ever get better until that is resolved.
Gas turbines can run on a variety of fuels, natural, synthetic or a mixture of both. It’s actually one of the reasons that a turbine was chosen for the M1.
Except for the industries where it does matter. Trivializing the needs of complex and energy hungry supply chains, is bad faith. They are one of the many reasons fossil fuels are so widely used.
It's not really bad faith when we could make enormous progress in an enormous number of industries, and this in no way stops any of that progress in those economies.
It's specifically bad faith to say it as if it does somehow matter in the grand conversation, when the actual fallout is extremely small. Pretty much nobody is saying we must remove 100 PER CENT OF ALL FOSSIL FUEL USAGE EVERYWHERE FOREVER, just that we need to move off it.
If we stop using fossil fuels for the >90% of usage where fossil fuels are easy to replace, it'll make it much easier & cheaper for the <10% where it's difficult.
Maybe this is a naive question, but why wouldn't there be market for this even for frontier models? If Anthropic wanted to burn Opus 4.6 into a chip, wouldn't there theoretically be a price point where this would lower inference costs for them?
Because we don't know if this would scale well to high-quality frontier models. If you need to manufacture dedicated hardware for each new model, that adds a lot of expense and causes a lot of e-waste once the next model releases. In contrast, even this current iteration seems like it would be fantastic for low-grade LLM work.
For example, searching a database of tens of millions of text files. Very little "intelligence" is required, but cost and speed are very important. If you want to know something specific on Wikipedia but don't want to figure out which article to search for, you can just have an LLM read the entire English Wikipedia (7,140,211 articles) and compile a report. Doing that would be prohibitively expensive and glacially slow with standard LLM providers, but Taalas could probably do it in a few minutes or even seconds, and it would probably be pretty cheap.
The demo was so fast it highlighted a UX component of LLMs I hadn’t considered before: there’s such a thing as too fast, at least in the chatbot context. The demo answered with a page of text so fast I had to scroll up every time to see where it started. It completely broke the illusion of conversation where I can usually interrupt if we’re headed in the wrong direction. At least in some contexts, it may become useful to artificially slow down the delivery of output or somehow tune it to the reader’s speed based on how quickly they reply. TTS probably does this naturally, but for text based interactions, still a thing to think about.
I tend to agree, this has been my experience with LLM-powered coding, especially more recently with the advent of new harnesses around context management and planning. I’ve been building software for over ten years so I feel comfortable looking under the hood, but it’s been less of that lately and more talking with users and trying to understand and effectively shape the experience, which I guess means I’m being pushed toward product work.
1. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-solar-panels-and-...
2. https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c...
3. https://www.rootsanalysis.com/sodium-ion-battery-market
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