The most remarkable details about solar panels I've heard recently came from the environmentalist Bill McKibben[1] on a podcast[2]:
I was standing in a cornfield in Illinois this time last summer, with a farmer who grew corn for ethanol and was converting much of his fields to solar arrays. He said, I can grow in this acre, and he pointed to an acre in a good farmerly way, he said, in this acre, I can grow enough ethanol to run my Ford F-150 pickup, most beloved vehicle in the American iconography. It’ll run 25,000 miles off the ethanol I can grow on an acre in a year. If I cover that same acre with solar panels, then I can produce enough electrons to run my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, I can run that not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles.
Not to mention that the cornfield has to be essentially torn down and rebuilt every year, while the panels will just sit there quietly working for at least 20 years with very little maintenance.
An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right.
One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newest F-150s do an atrocious 18 mpg in real usage, so you need nearly 1500 gallons to go 25,000 miles. So this figure is presumably ignoring the non-ethanol content of the fuel, which is most of it.
Yea, but it says more about how bad corn biofuels are than how good solar is. Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW. If you want solar, move to Mexico (or even New Mexico) where it actually makes environmental sense.
It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.
Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.
> Also, Iowa is too far north for solar to do much good in the fight against AGW.
Absolutely not, Iowa is great for solar, it often provides more income than corn (and corn has massive subsidies), and is certainly better than most of Europe. Iowa really is not very far north
Generating solar power in Mexico won't keep Iowans from warming their homes with natural gas and powering their F-150s with petroleum, so solar panels in Iowa are needed for the fight against AGW.
The problem is that more energy is required and more CO2 produced in making the panels than they replace during their use. So in Iowa, using solar actually increases CO2 production, not decreases it. Somehow you are missing that.
Solar's EROEI is only 4. So anywhere with a solar albino of less than .25 means solar there does more harm than good. NASA Goddard provides a map of where that is. From memory, I believe Iowa's is about .22. The breakeven line roughly goes through San Francisco.
No, all of that is false. Some of it was true at one point, but it has been false for decades. There is no such thing as "solar albino". I would think it was easy to find the correct information. Where are you getting this false information?
It also ignores the reason why corn biofuels exist, because we subsidize corn production for national security reasons and there's a ton of extra produced so they try and find profitable uses for it.
I have tried building 'apps' for Alexa on a few occasions over the years. The developer experience has always been such trash that I've simply given up in some combination of frustration, despair, and disgust.
I'm not surprised that the end user experience has continued to get worse and worse.
IMHO: the acceleration curve into point-of-no-return was when Microsoft decided to go hard on AI, and saw GitHub's Copilot as one of the key inflection points they were going to use to do so - even going so far to adopt the Copilot brand across the entire company.
Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.
I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.
While GitHub had previously started work on migrating parts of its service to Azure, our understanding is that these migrations have been halting and sometimes failed
And there's no reason to suspect this next batch of migrations will be any different. Telling your engineers, 'good luck, you get to spend the next 18 months treading water,' is a terrible way to get them to give their best or even stick around.
I think sometimes the migrations were halted more because MSFT wanted to hold off. Microsoft makes more money selling Azure outside the company, and they needed more power for GPU build-out once LLMs and AI started becoming one of Microsoft's Things™.
That said, the difficulty of the work was absolutely also a factor in deciding not to carry through with earlier migrations, so your point still stands as a whole IMO. Just, now solutions will be found for blockers and engineers will be kept on it, rather than efforts stalling out and being put on hold.
This is probably what the kids would call 'cringe,' but I asked Claude to Summarize Plato's "Apology" into a brief rap that sounds like it could have come from "Hamilton"
The Trial of Socrates (An Athenian Rap)
[Verse 1]
My name is Socrates, corrupting the youth?
That's what they claim but I'm just seeking truth
Oracle said I'm the wisest alive—
I said "that's impossible," had to investigate why
Turns out everybody's fronting, they don't know what they say
Politicians, poets, craftsmen—all pretending every day
I expose their ignorance, make 'em look like fools
Now they're charging me with breaking all of Athens' rules
[Chorus]
I'm not throwing away my shot
At the examined life, whether they like it or not
Wisdom is knowing what you don't know
And I'd rather die than let philosophy go
[Verse 2]
Meletus, you're stepping to me? Son, you're confused
You say I'm atheist but blame me for introducing gods that are new?
Your story doesn't track, your logic's full of cracks
I've got a divine sign that keeps me on the righteous path
They want me silent, want me exiled, want me gone
But I'm Athens' gadfly, stinging till the break of dawn
Death? That's just a journey to another place
Either dreamless sleep or meeting heroes face to face
[Outro]
So sentence me to death, I'll drink the hemlock down
'Cause an unexamined life ain't worth living in this town
The only exaggeration is in that the way I asked GPT-5 to leave claude to do its thing was to say "why don't we just let claude cook"? I later checked with ChatGPT about the whole exchange and it confirmed that it was well aware of the meaning of this slang, and it's first reaction was that whole thing just sounded like a funny programmer joke, all in jest. But then I reminded it that I'd explicitly pushed back on a hard reset twice.
To be clear, I don't believe that there was any _intention_ of malice or that the behavior was literally envious in a human sense. Moreso I think they haven't properly aligned GPT-5 to deal with cases like this.
I strongly disagree with the personified way you interact with LLMs from a standpoint of “I’ve rarely gotten the best output from the LLM when I interact casually with them”.
However, it’s the early days of learning this new interface, and there’s a lot to learn - certainly some amount of personification has been proven to help the LLM by giving it a “role”, so I’d only criticize the degree rather than the entire concept.
It reminds me of the early days of search engines when everyone had a different knack for which search engine to use for what and precisely what to type to get good search results.
Hopefully eventually we’ll all mostly figure it out.
That's fair. I enjoy the playfulness of it and for me it feels almost like a video game or something, and also like I'm using my own natural language directly.
Also appreciate your perspective. It's important to come at these things with some discipline. And moreso, bringing in a personal style of interaction invites a lot of untamed human energies into the dynamic.
The thing is, most of the time I'm quite dry with it and they still ignore my requests really often, regardless of how explicit or dry I am. For me, that's the real takeaway here, stripping away my style of interaction.
I have played a couple hours of BG3 on PlayStation (time-limited demo), and a couple hours on my Mac (purchased on Steam), and I found the controller UI to be really weird and counterintuitive compared to the mouse-driven UI on the desktop computer.
Does it get easier? Does anyone have any suggestions for coming to terms with the controller weirdness? I would much rather play BG3 on my Steam Deck than on my computer.
yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after several hours.
I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
As a Steam Deck player (who mostly streams from my desktop at this point but still pretty much exclusively games with controller inputs nowadays), I got frustrated with a lot of the "automatic" management of the radial menus. Quite often, when the game adds a new ability to the radial menus, it completely rearranges them, and for some reason it really likes to automatically add things even if you manually remove them, so it becomes very unwieldly especially for spellcasters at higher levels. My frustration reached the point where I realized I either needed this problem solved or I just wouldn't be able to play anymore, which was disappointing for me given how much I've enjoyed it, so I decided to bit the bullet and start developing a mod to try to impose some semblance of order on the radial menus myself. Unfortunately it relies heavily on the Script Extender, which isn't available on consoles (and also doesn't work on the Steam Deck native version, since it's provided as a DLL that gets loaded by the game and presumably would require a non-trivial amount of effort to port to a native Linux shared library), but so far I've implemented a number of specific settings (which can each individually be enabled or disabled) around automatically preventing changes to the radial menus in certain certain circumstances and clearing them in certain other ones (e.g. for new games or when changing ca character's class). Most recently, I added a way to define a custom keybinding to manually lock the radial menus for the currently controlled character until manually toggled off by hitting the keybinding again (which currently doesn't persist past a reload, but I'm fairly close to being done integrating it with a Script Extender feature to preserve arbitrary data alongside save files so that it's possible to save them so that they get restored to the same state they were when a given save was made. Given the reception when I starting publishing this, there seem to be a small but passionate set of players with the same frustrations as me, which helped motivate me to spend the time to keep working on it.
To me, the modding ecosystem is probably one of the two most important things about this game (the other being that Larian seems to be pretty awesome as far as studios go nowadays, with their CEO taking a firm stance against "crunch" to get games out and in favor of the model of offline games that don't require paid DLC or microtransactions, as well as their continued support of the modding ecosystem itself). Long before I ever considered writing any mods myself, I started referring to BG3 as similar to Skyrim in that the mods will likely keep things fresh long after new official content stops coming out. I still think this is true, but I also keep being surprised just how much work they're continuing to put into the game even with new content presumably finally having come to an end.
tbh, I've thought of doing this, but it seems kind of outlandish given that I primarily play my Steam Deck in bed. I'd rather just take my laptop with me.
That you, in turn, do not immediately disclose your inevitable biases, makes me dubious of your motives. We all have biases. It’s important to be clear eyed and forthright
I can't get archive.is to work with this, but if you're subscribed to Apple News+ (e.g. through the Apple One bundle), you can read it here: https://apple.news/AWYHVpxN6QQWlM1h__Hp9nA
