• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2024

help-circle





  • If they don’t replace Biden, we will get another Trump presidency

    One, they aren’t going to replace Biden. Two, that outcome they aren’t entirely concerned about. There’s some who look at that and go “Biden couldn’t possibly win now” and the thing is there’s an insanely small amount of people who are at this point undecided. We could have the election tomorrow and the vast majority of people know which button they are pushing and there is nothing that’s changing that outcome.

    It’s basically Trump vs Harris at this point, but with Biden still being a stand-in, Harris doesn’t have to get up there and show how little she can tango with Trump. That would actually move the needle. If Biden started pushing daisies tomorrow that would actually change the calculus.

    But this debate, as far as I know, zero people have changed their mind about who they are voting for. The RNC is going to nom a felon. The DNC is going to nom a zombie. Neither group is making sane decisions at this point in time because none of them give a shit. They aren’t replacing Biden just like the Republicans aren’t replacing Trump. We are all on this short bus full of Senior Citizens to hell for better or worse. Kicking and screaming all along the way, this is who have for November.

    If you think Biden can win after the world saw the debate performance, you’re delusional.

    The DNC brass, they don’t care, it’s a Tuesday to them if they lose. If Trump gets into power and rounds up all the gay people and shoots them in the head, hey I guess we’ll get on that in 2028 or something is what the DNC has to feel about that. It’s not that pressing a matter for them. And if Biden wins, the Republicans will just obstruct November 6th, the day after the election, just like they obstructed on January 6th. It is water under a bridge if Trump loses.

    You know I heard all this nonsense about “we just need to get Trump out of office” back in 2020. And I knew the day of the 2020 election, Trump isn’t going anywhere. If Trump loses 2024, Trump isn’t going anywhere. What people ought to be concerned about isn’t Trump sticking around, it’s when Trump dies off. Because we’re not getting rid of the crazy, we’re just going to get version 2.0 of the crazy.

    The people most affected by whatever outcome happens, those are the ones that are going to take the win or loss the hardest. But the political parties, and especially the RNC and DNC, all of this is just drops of rain on the glass. They are not replacing Biden, that is who we have unless he specifically croaks before we can get to the election.

    So if you do not like Trump, you push the Biden button or just stay home. That is the strat here from the DNC. But there’s so little undecided here, there is no energy to change course. If say the undecided was like 20%, maybe. But everyone knows whose button they are pushing, these debates aren’t going to change that.

    If Biden doesn’t win in November, Biden wasn’t going to win in October of last year. There are zero things either candidate can do that could change some number of people’s minds at this point to radically change the outcome of this election. Any everyone is quite aware of this, that’s the reason the DNC is going to send in a geriatric senile man and the RNC is going to send in a pompous felon.

    The election is already over, we just haven’t cast the ballots. The debates are just bread and circus.

    The whole thing is from the DNC and RNC perspective is like that Futurama poster, “you gotta do what’cha gotta do.” The DNC is NOT replacing Biden unless he literally dies before we get to the election. That is the only way who is on the Democratic ticket changes.


  • HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what’s between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.

    HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won’t be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won’t happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won’t build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.

    We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won’t want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we’ve got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.


  • I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

    China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.

    At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

    Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

    The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.

    For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.

    Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.

    We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

    I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

    I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.






  • In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn’t know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that’s been over hyped. A few choice hits like:

    • Crypto
    • Blockchain
    • Quantum
    • Cloud
    • WS-I
    • LAMP
    • XML
    • P2P
    • WORA
    • OOP

    Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There’s just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.

    I mean, at least it’s been this way since I’ve been in the industry.


  • I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.

    This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.

    There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.


  • Tech vendors have also been falling over each other to tell the world how they are including GenAI in their offerings as the leading AI companies attract feverish attention from investors.

    Because you can’t hype it up for investors if you call it what it actually is. Fancy auto complete. And don’t get me wrong, I love me some of the tools out there. But this stuff is being absolutely way over hyped.

    It’s good to go into this stuff with realistic views. Will it do all your work? Absolutely not. But what it will do is do a lot of heavy lifting for you so that you can get more things that require your specific attention done.

    The level of “sky is falling and we’re all going to be enslaved by AI” is literal bullshit to sell more stocks and create a bubble that will absolutely pop.






  • Say no to SaaS as much as you can

    I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don’t work in that profession.

    With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they’re going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won’t be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.