I recently installed a mini split heat pump in a detached accessory building. The installer upsold me on a more expensive unit because I’d get federal refunds due to its higher SEER rating. Ok, sure: higher efficiency, same price.
In fact, efficiency was the main reason I wanted a mini split in the first place. It just bugged me to _not_ pump the heat entirely outside the structure. And I paid a bit more for that versus just using a window unit or “portable” AC. All we’re talking here is the location of the condenser coil: inside versus outside. It just makes sense to put it outside, with just a small penetration in the building.
Well, during electrical inspection apparently I paid too much. After paying more than a certain threshold for converting an unconditioned space to a conditioned space, I now need to insulate the accessory structure to a certain degree in order to pass code.
The kicker is, the only way I can insulate the space to meet code is to insulate with polyiso (aka styrofoam) because the structure is so small. So, I guess in an effort to be “green” according to local government, I need to rip out the mineral wool insulation, dump it and replace it with styrofoam. Or put the mini split in the dump and buy a cheaper less efficient unit like a window unit.
I’d save approximately $0.30 a year on energy costs to insulate to code versus what I have now with the mini split.
This whole industry is stupid and that’s because it’s regulated by idiots.
Yes, exactly. The demo of Gemini's Diffusion model [0] was really eye-opening to me in this regard. Since then, I've been convinced the future of lots of software engineering is basically UX and SQA: describe the desired states, have an LLM fill in the gaps based on its understanding of human intent, and unit test it to verify. Like most engineering fields, we'll have an empirical understanding of systems as opposed to the analytical understanding of code we have today. I'd argue most complex software is already only approximately understood even before LLMs. I doubt the quality of software will go up (in fact the opposite), but I think this work will scale much better and be much, much more boring.
On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.
On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.
Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.
Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
Yeah, more or less. The US uses the DoD as its private-sector R&D funding firehose. They aren't writing Raytheon a $800B check and saying "make us some missiles." They might write a $4B check for some missiles, but that leaves $876B left over based on 2023's defense spending numbers.
Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else.
As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.
Classic example of academic research funded by the military.
> In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
thanks a TON for this recommendation it was really eye-opening listening to his presentation and the detailed history, as well as the cat-and-mouse game escapades. Very well put-together presentation and yeah, really makes me reflect on the specialness of Silicon Valley and those relationships.
I had an uncle, an electrical engineer, who went there for higher studies, to stanford, got his PhD (typical common route for many talented Indians, at least up to MS, doctorate is less common), was mentioned in who's who in electrical engineering, worked there, married an American woman, and became a US citizen, and a hardware entrepreneur, in Sunnyvale, California, but I didn't hear about this from him, i just read it on the net.
> In fact, we didn’t found Tailscale to be a networking company. Networking didn’t come into it much at all at first.
I always just assumed they were building some kind of logging software (“tail”scale), used Wireguard to connect hosts, and just kind of stopped there. Don’t get me wrong, Tailscale is a nice way to connect machines. It’s nice because Wireguard is nice.
This long blog post (by the now-CEO of Tailscale), if you skip to the end, describes that parent’s hypothesis is basically exactly correct.
> Update 2019-04-26: Based on a lot of positive feedback from people who read this blog post, I ended up starting a company that might be able to help you with your logs problems. We're building pipelines that are very similar to what's described here.
Update 2020-08-26:
Aha! Okay, for some reason this article is trending again, and I'd better provide an update on my update. We did implement parts of this design for use in our core product, which is now quite distinct from logs processing.
After investigating the "logs" market last year, we decided not to commercialize a logs processing service. The reason is that the characteristics we want our design to have: cheap, lightweight, simple, fast, and reliable - are all things you would expect from the low-cost provider in a market. The "logs processing" space is crowded with a lot of premium products that are fancy, feature-filled, etc, and reliable too, and thus able to charge a lot of money.
Instead, we built a minimalistic version of the above design for our internal use, collecting distributed telemetry about Tailscale connection success rates to help debug the network. Big companies can also use it to feed into their IDS and SIEM systems.
We considered open sourcing the logs services we built (since open source is where attributes like cheap, lightweight, etc tend to flourish) but we can't afford the support overhead right now for a product that is at best tangential to our main focus. Sorry! Hopefully someday.
Wireguard by itself is good, but it isn't nice. Tailscale is nice because it builds on top of Wireguard (which is good) and adds UX stuff (which makes it nice).
I just listened to a podcast, Huberman, that discussed how to improve your ability to task switch. Apparently, there’s some connection to how your mind perceives time. He mentioned an exercise to improve your ability to task switch that manipulates how your mind perceives time, switching back-and-forth between slowing it down and speeding it up.
I think the inability to task switch is a big part of ADHD and this thing you’re describing really sounds similar to what Huberman was discussing.
Now, I’m not a doctor and I have no idea what I’m talking about here. Every time I start talking about this stuff I imagine my doctor friend sitting in the corner of the room shaking his head (maybe some of you saying it’s placebo should do the same).
In fact, efficiency was the main reason I wanted a mini split in the first place. It just bugged me to _not_ pump the heat entirely outside the structure. And I paid a bit more for that versus just using a window unit or “portable” AC. All we’re talking here is the location of the condenser coil: inside versus outside. It just makes sense to put it outside, with just a small penetration in the building.
Well, during electrical inspection apparently I paid too much. After paying more than a certain threshold for converting an unconditioned space to a conditioned space, I now need to insulate the accessory structure to a certain degree in order to pass code.
The kicker is, the only way I can insulate the space to meet code is to insulate with polyiso (aka styrofoam) because the structure is so small. So, I guess in an effort to be “green” according to local government, I need to rip out the mineral wool insulation, dump it and replace it with styrofoam. Or put the mini split in the dump and buy a cheaper less efficient unit like a window unit.
I’d save approximately $0.30 a year on energy costs to insulate to code versus what I have now with the mini split.
This whole industry is stupid and that’s because it’s regulated by idiots.
Name and shame: this is Chapel Hill, NC.
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