Look at the URL. It’s because the original WSJ title was “OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Resigns,” which was a dupe of yesterday’s discussions. WSJ changed the title yesterday evening.
Even better imo than all the chemical energy we could store when we have excess solar, think about all the water we could create. Creating fresh water from sea water is extremely energy intensive, but there's nothing easier to store than giant bodies of water. Once the energy term is the reverse osmosis opex equation is erased, large scale water plants wherever it's sunny are going to start looking awfully attractive.
As a corollary to that, a lot of deserts terminate in coastline. Generating desalinated water from solar in these areas has the side benefit of "creating useful land".
What's left to figure out is the ratio of panels to water to land, and in turn whether the long term value of the land is worth the investment. (Dubai would argue it is.)
This will destroy the near shore ecosystem, because desalination dumps brine that kills everything, while at the same time destroying the desert ecosystem because it gets converted into something local flora and fauna can no longer live in.
I don't think we need worry too much about desert habitats being removed. Deserts are large (and getting larger) and the amount of land which could realistically benefit from desalination is a tiny fraction of that.
While brine can impact local salinity, so does treated-effluent outflows (mixed together they are neutral.) Regardless elevated brine levels drop off sharply from the point of outflow.
We are really good at mis-estimating scale. So we know brine decreases sharply from the point of outflow, but do we know what 50 years of brine outflow at tens of thousands of locations around the world would do?
If it's profitable, it'll be implemented all over, and underestimating that cumulative effect is something we would plead willful ignorance on as we have done with other industries in the past.
Second point I will try to make, habitats are often unique and small, we would just want to make sure an ecosystem is truly ubiquitous before destroying a small pocket of ecosystem.
Especially now, there are animals that live in just one or few specific spots. We should be careful.
I'd expect that long term the brine would do bad things near the places it is released but would not have any noticeable long term consequences much farther away as long as we don't discharge it somewhere where it destroys something local that turns out to be a dependency of something far away.
That's because almost all the water that is taken out of the ocean will make its way back to the ocean. We just borrow it for a while.
If all the water used by humans were taken from the ocean, we'd take about 1/300000th of the ocean's water per year. Most of that will be back in the ocean within 200 years. That puts the cap on the amount of water that would be missing from the ocean of 1/1500th of its volume, which means that the steady state increase in salt concentration would be less than 0.1%, which is much less than the natural variation in ocean salt levels.
The brine levels can be greatly reduced by pumping more water to dilute the brine. RO desal projects tend to optimize for an energy efficient local optima that targets minimum energy subject to maintenance constraints. But if energy is nearly free you can instead pump a lot of extra water to solve the issue by moving more volume over more area further from shore.
1) cheaper energy means you can mix more water in to get whatever salt level you want.
2) you can mix in the output of your sewage plants
3) most water is borrowed and returned, not a huge net loss. Every toilet full returns to the ocean, every washing machine run, etc.
Solar powered desalination doesn't make the list for things to worry about over the next 100 years.
>This will destroy the near shore ecosystem, because desalination dumps brine that kills everything,
WRONG
WRONG!!!
No, we used the brines to create even more batries which store our solar charge
Now we have POWER at day and at NIGHT. 24/7. 247 we are producing the brines, but then that goes onto make more batries. Ain't no ecosystem destroyed here (though I'm sure people will try to perform a regression of muh bad event unto muh new technology because that is a timelessly vogue thing to do)
I think there might be local effects from elevated brine levels, but overall nothing substantial.
Compared to the amount of water that is naturally desalinated every day (ie via evaporation), even large scale desalination is a drop in the bucket.
Desalination is already operating on a massive scale in the middle east, and we're not seeing any medium scale effects there. Elevated salinity dissipates very quickly from the point of outflow.
>Elevated salinity dissipates very quickly from the point of outflow.
I've not seen any evidence supporting this is the case, but the opposite; large swathes of high-saline concentrated blobs sweeping accross the sealife, killing it. We've had to build specialized very long outflow pipes to give the brine even a change to level
Unfortunately, most of the cost of water desalination is capital cost. You simply can't afford to build a desal plant and run it only 25% of the time.
Take the Carlsbad plant in San Diego. It cost $1 billion to build, and it produces about 200k tons of fresh water per day. Let's say you build a similar plant and to finance the build you use municipal bonds that have a yield of 3.6% (the current level for 30 year muni bonds). That's 0.30% per month, or 0.01% per day. So only the interest on these bonds is $100k per day, which is 50 cents per ton of fresh water. According to wikipedia, it takes about 0.3 kWh to desalinate 1 ton of water [2]. In my state (NY) the average cost of electricity for industry consumers was about 7 cents for 2023 [3], so that would mean 21 cents per ton of water. If that cost goes to zero, you save 21 cents for each ton of water. But if you reduce the plant utilization from 100% to 25%, you increase the interest cost by 150 cents.
In order for desalination to be a useful target for peak electricity consumption, we need to find ways to massively reduce the capital cost of building desal plants. By "massively", I mean a factor of 10 or more. Is it possible? Yes. Is it guaranteed? No.
> Creating fresh water from sea water is extremely energy intensive, but there's nothing easier to store than giant bodies of water.
You also generate brine, you know, and that is its own environmental disaster that must be disposed of. In addition, maintenance of facilities in contact with salt water is murderously labor intensive.
Desalinization is economically useful up until you provide everybody with drinking water. Once you pass that point, desalinization is way, way, way less useful.
Mix the brine with the treated sewage you are discharging. You're probably discharging a little less than you take out, but that gets you closer to the original salinity.
Well if electricity is so cheap/free. Then brine left behind is not a problem as you can get a lot of chemicals out of it by processing it. Doing that though needs a lot of energy so it's not viable currently but would be with cheap/free electricity
yes you can https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-018-0218-y
the brine left behind is just not salt but many other minerals like lithium which require a lot of energy to separate out. But when you have free energy/electricity a lot of other things become viable.
Most people so far don't comprehend the kind of huge change free/extremely cheap electricity would bring to the world. We have the tech to do a lot of stuff but it is not cost effective cheap electricity will change that.
Well, money is, in essence, an exchange for energy, so if energy is free we'll see a significant change in our economy system and my guess it's gonna be a wild ride
Yes, and that free energy will be seeking an equilibrium (where excess energy converts back into liquid capital) through clever uses and previously non-economical activities like separating lithium from brine. The great news is that each niche is a business opportunity. We, the clever ones, can spot those opportunities, build the tech to make them possible and build the companies that live in those new energy niches.
I'm not a chemist nor have access to the paper. Can you summarize what happens to the seawater salt if that's applied? Surely it will still need to be deposited somewhere.
Apparently seawater has 3.5% salinity. So desalinating enough to water crops/supply cities leaves you with a lot of salt.
A lot of this is possible already but not economical as most of the process to extract minerals from sea water require a lot of energy/electricity where as it is extremely cheap comparable to mine them directly. But free energy electricity would change that.
Metals that can be extracted from seawater include:
Sodium (Na): One of the most common metals found in seawater, sodium can be extracted through solar evaporation or electrolysis.
Magnesium (Mg): A metal that can be extracted from seawater.
Calcium (Ca): A metal that can be extracted from seawater.
Potassium (K): A metal that can be extracted from seawater.
Lithium: A metal that may become more important in the future as demand for lithium batteries and fusion energy increases.
Copper: A high-value metal that is often present in seawater.
Nickel: A high-value metal that is often present in seawater.
Cobalt: A high-value metal that is often present in seawater.
I wonder if the salt extracted during desalination could be dumped on top of underwater salt domes? Salt domes are one of the sources of the salt in the ocean [1].
The idea is that our salt would cover part of the salt dome, preventing that part of the salt dome from providing salt to the water. Instead, the salt that would have come from that part of the dome comes from our salt.
Dramatically increasing the saltiness of salt water can have some negative effects. If you’ve ever kept an aquarium you’ll know that sudden changes in water composition kill your pets pretty quickly.
A solvable problem, but a problem that requires a bit of careful consideration.
Capital cost of these plants is significant, which is why most of them run 24 hours per day. If you only run them 8 hours per day, you triple the capital cost.
How do you power such plants? Good thing if you're an oil-rich country that can just readily burn what flows from the wells anyway (say, UAE). A bit harder if you don't have anything like that (say, Namibia or West Sahara).
You also have to consider the material cost. RO membranes require continuous maintenance , are expensive, and generate a massive amount of brine waste water. So while having cheap energy definitely helps, there are many expensive problems with RO filtering at scale.
I have run a dehumidifier off of excess solar before to collect water and use on plants. It was mostly for fun, and not ideal bc of possible contaminating chemicals from the dehumidifier involved, mold, and lack of minerals for the plants, but hey, it worked.
Are you doing hydroponics or something? Because the soil has more minerals that you could ever possibly get from water. I mean the ground is where those minerals in regular water come from in the first place.
I just don’t trust my random chinese amazon brand dehumidifier’s internals to be totally food-safe. At the very least the water is condensing onto some unknown (to me) metal, touching some mystery plastics.
It was a peak ~700W device, and quite efficient for its price. It’d produce a few gallons overnight in summer in southern california when attached to a rather large battery.
Fresh water is already naturally generated by surface evaporation of the oceans under the sun's rays, i.e. it's already a solar process done on a global scale.
Deserts are coming to you, at least seasonally. With less snowpack, many cities even in temperate climates are seeing their summer water supply dry up.
The best mental model for a heat pump is that they can maintain a certain temperature differential, say 80F. If it gets to be 0F outside and you want it to be 70? You don’t need to switch to a fully separate heating system, you just need to warm up either the incoming or outgoing air an additional 10 degrees via a small resistance heater. The super wide range heat pump systems will do that automatically, and the principle really applies to any differential you could want.
> The best mental model for a heat pump is that they can maintain a certain temperature differential, say 80F. If it gets to be 0F outside and you want it to be 70? You don’t need to switch to a fully separate heating system, you just need to warm up either the incoming or outgoing air an additional 10 degrees via a small resistance heater.
Are your 70 and 80 switched? What you describe doesn't sound like it needs any addition.
The wide range ones are basically two heat pumps back to back using different working fluids. They should only be used in applications where they are really required as there are obviously impacts to the COP.
About ten years ago I set custom vibrations for my top contacts on my phone to be the Morse code representation of their initials. Ever since, I’ve had the super power of knowing who is texting or calling me without pulling out my phone. I’d say that alone has made a quick memorization of the alphabet worth it.
More specifically, it is a rocker switch. One side is for dit, the other for dah. It makes the dits and dahs unambiguous, and easy for someone to quickly learn to use. I don't know of any phones with a rocker switch on them.
I thought it would be a fun thing to have on a phone.
Koch method is to do "full speed" Morse code from the beginning, but only learn 1 or 2 letters at a time.
This Javascript page starts with the letters "k" and "m" for Lesson 1. Then, in Lesson 2, you learn "k, m, and r". Etc. etc.
The way the app works is click on the "k" to hear how "k" sounds. Then click on "m" for its sound. Finally, hit the "Start Lesson" button, and the computer will make a random mix of k and m (and extended pauses, which means "space").
You type in "k m k mm mmkkm" or similar into the textarea, and the computer then sees how accurate you were.
Less than six months ago I found this same site and I was practicing religiously multiple times a day. Several weeks ago I interrupted my practice for one reason or another and last time I tried my score had dropped to below 40%. I need to start practicing again.
I haven't learned the full alphabet yet. I'm still missing letters q, g, h, z, x,c, v and all the digits.
Something I've found interesting is how much difference it made changing the tone frequency. My brain definitely got used to a certain tone initially, and when I first tried changing the tone my recognition ability dropped quite a bit. So now I change it occasionally to keep my brain on its proverbial toes.
I wish there was a way to practice just the letters I have more difficulty with; namely, the ones which were added later.
What an impressive company. A good reminder that, even in a market with umpteen competitors, success comes down to execution. Hope they keep up the good work.
Railway does look impressive. However, as someone in the market for a Heroku alternative - I’d say there really aren’t any Heroku competitors. At least nothing directly comparable. The thing that keeps me (and I’m sure other small business owners) tied to Heroku is just how much they take care of for you. I literally never ever want to think about my infrastructure beyond initial setup. Heroku, to my knowledge, is the only provider that allows me to do this while servicing more than 100,000 users.
Oh there are numerous alternatives to Heroku. Just look for "PaaS" and your favourite software components (programming language, DB, CDN etc) and you'll find a list.
I find Platform.sh is an excellent alternative to Heroku, dare I say better. Same thing - configure once and operate forever, scale as you need...
Really Heroku used to be a big name but it is now declining, and lets face it - many used it just because it had a tiny plan for free.
If this is the kind of experience you’re looking for I would check out Platform.sh. (Full admission, I work there)
You get a good level of abstraction for infrastructure (github.com/platformsh-templates for examples) that gets provisioned automatically, plus a built-in relationship between branches and envs that results in true staging environments for every pull request.
Like others have said there are a number of Heroku alternatives out there that are more or less viable to meet your requirements, which I've gathered to be:
- Serving >100k users
- Helping you to achieve SOC 2
In my capacity as one of the leaders at a Heroku alternative PaaS, I've studied the PaaS market a bit to understand the space and available alternatives to Heroku. Here's what I've found about some of the most popular:
- Fly is managing its own infrastructure allowing it to be extremely competitive on cost. But on the flip side, its heavy focus on infrastructure is missing the “managed” options that make PaaS so valuable, such as a true Managed Database offering. This IMO makes it less of a viable alternative to Heroku.
- Render is offering a more truly “managed” alternative, and is innovating on cost as well. But it’s early and is still missing some table stakes reliability features that you'd probably expect from a Heroku alternative.
- Railway has a blockbuster FTUX, I love deploying and using PostgreSQL databases in the UI without even signing up. Coincidentally probably how it got to its count of 250k developers. But it’s own docs caution that it’s not exactly production ready, especially its databases.
- Platform.sh has grown really well by focusing on enterprise marketing teams and their use cases. I think this is a great niche for them and has paid off well. In their capacity of working with enterprises I'm sure they could handle SOC 2, etc.
- Aptible has run critical web apps and APIs dealing with sensitive data for hundreds of companies and has helped a few go public or get to billion dollar acquisitions. I am certainly biased, but Aptible seems to be the only non-Heroku PaaS focused on product/engineering teams that has repeatedly handled true "production" requirements, like your larger user base (many of our customers fit this description) and SOC 2 (most of our customers use our security & compliance dashboard for this). But that comes at a cost: Aptible is typically more expensive than the others, perhaps save for Platform.sh.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the leaders at Aptible, which in my (admittedly biased) view is the best positioned alternative to Heroku for product/engineering teams that have any sort of scale or production use case.
(Render CEO) Other than Postgres PITR and HA which are both in active development, are there other 'table stakes reliability features' on your list for Render?
Congrats on the launch! The novel (for robotics) business structure looks interesting. How are you planning on kickstarting the ecosystem? It looks like you need at least one or two competent companies above you on the stack before you can start getting real-world feedback. (1) Do you have in mind who these companies will be? Do they exist yet or do the need to be created? (2) One of the super difficult things about robotics is reconciling the difference between a clean sim and a messy world. How will you get feedback on how your robots are operating and iterate if there’s an independent company sitting between you and the customer?
Thanks! It would be lovely if posting this one time in HN single handedly kicked off that ecosystem -> so everyone reading should quit their jobs and build robots /s
More seriously - there are a surprisingly large number of groups out there building robots and looking for help. Some groups already have not-built-here syndrome, but our hope is that by being a free thing you can just initially build on people will be "Polymath Native."
Your sim question is especially poignant. Our sales line is that reconciling sim:reality is our problem to solve for you. The more real answer is that we're specifically focused on vehicles in environments that are "relatively clean" - i.e. controlled (even if, in fact, they're a landfill). We're also only really selling to technical users - who are hopefully sophisticated to solve >0% of the problems.
You can’t join unless you’re an accredited investor. That’s because, like for many other fun similar things, the enterprise passes the Howey Test and is considered a security under the Securities Act of 1933.
It’s funny how they try to disclose-away the problem at the bottom, even though they’re obviously worried about it enough to block retail investors (if a security only sells to accredited investors, you can basically do whatever you want.)
This is an excellent point! I found the disclaimer at bottom of home page:
No offers to sell or solicitations of an offer to buy securities or any other type of investment are being made or solicited by Legends Incorporated at this time.
I am very familiar with the Howey Test. From time to time, HN try to "hack" the Howey Test with various mental gymnastics, but always fail.
Real question: Could Legends Solar structure the investment like Cadence Real Estate? (Not a shill for them!) Cadence is basically mortgage-backed securities on multi-family properties for retail / mass affluent. They are operating for more than 10 years now. If their legal structure was not sound, I assume they would be enforced upon by SEC & friends.
I feel "direct green energy investment" for retail / mass affluent investors has huge untapped potential -- like 10s of billions of USD, maybe 100s. It makes me so frustrated that I cannot push ahead solar and wind projects with my own money. I want to transition power supply as fast as possible. Oh yeah, please add utility-sized battery installations to that list also. When I look at solar potential in India (see "Bhadla Solar Park"), it boggles my mind. There is SO much potential. Same for Middle East, North Africa, and Australia. All could use/export the electricity or convert water to hydrogen, then use/export.
The exact legal and financial structuring is still in progress. We will likely use a structure similar to that used by Reg A+ crowdfunding platforms like Masterworks.io. In fact, I've been in regular contact with their GC to validate this. There are other structures we could use, as well.
My plan is to keep things simple, to answer your other question. As little abstraction and structured securitization as possible. We want it to be as close to a one-for-one analogy for true direct equity ownership in an actual panel as we can make it.
This one is easier to get around Howey test if done right. But I can't tell from the site whether they'll do it this way.
As a buyer the key is to provide direct ownership of the panel, and a contract where I pay for a service to install / upkeep the panels, and a contract to sell electricity. In this case I am buying an asset, and my profits don't depend on greater or less input by the company.
The Howey test is: "a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party."
The key for this service is that my profit is not tied to the efforts of the 3rd party, it's tied to weather, and electricity prices.
Now they may structure it, such that it is a common enterprise, in that case it will pass the Howey test, and be a security. However if they sell the asset, and include a service agreement, then it doesn't pass the test.
Edit: as an example, when you buy crypto miners from Compass, and pay them monthly to host them for you. Compass is not selling a security, they are selling as asset that generates revenue, but profit is not tied to the effort of the 3rd party.
Edit2: Nevermind their site uses language like 7.3% return, shares, and cash dividend, so indeed it's a security and passes the Howey test.
We are currently working with accredited investors, but we are working to launch a product for retail investors. Recent changes in crowdfunding regulation, Reg A+ in particular, make our lives a bit easier, and we have some very committed finance partners working to structure a financial product that will be appealing to retail investors.
Solar panels are fairly simple and inexpensive to install, relative to other energy sources. Best of all, they can be scaled to on-site demand since there is not a large upfront cost.
I would not say that is the problem we are solving. The problem as I see it is that most people have no idea what they actually own through their investment. We make it simple to know through great design and communication, that carries through from the financial structuring to the UI/UX, we are doing it all custom from the ground up.
We start with solar because its a pretty safe investment and people love it.
My frustration comes partially due to some of my personal circumstances:
-Filthy unlanded tech scribe peasant.
-Have some savings, it is time to invest, but I don't have hundreds of thousands.
-Cannot afford land close enough to where I live (Tokyo) to fruitfully manage it.
-Due to legal reasons, there is a language barrier to the better ones among more accessible investment platforms I have found I can use.
I would love to be able to invest something like a couple thousand dollars in an endeavour such as Legends Solar. I would like to get into a real investment of some sort. Ideally without prohibitive amounts of red tape.
From their ToS:
Best Effort Service for RV Users. Network resources are always deprioritized for Starlink RVs users compared to other Starlink Services, resulting in degraded service and slower speeds in congested areas and during peak hours. Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of the Service are not guaranteed. Service degradation will occur most often in "Waitlist" areas designated on the Starlink Availability Map during peak usage hours. See the Starlink Specifications for expected performance of the Starlink for RV Services.
I'm not sure it could even work any other way. Either mobile users are subject to deprioritization or there is no such thing as guaranteed service for anyone, including mobile users still.
It’d kinda be a fun feature to implement paid priority - someone on mobile can pay $5 to be prioritized and someone fixed who offered to be deprioritized gets $4 or something.
Okay, but the top comment as I’m writing this is someone saying they have already been using the standard service, in a mobile fashion, mounted to the top of their van.
So my question to Starlink would be, what’s the difference? If I want to get an RV and work remotely using Starlink, why wouldn’t I just get the standard service, and avoid these restrictions on the RV service? I suppose the more flexible monthly billing & the ability to pause service on demand are the killer features?
The language of that TOS is quite concerning to someone thinking of using this in a professional setting.
Presumably the standard Starlink service will be restricted to your registered address, or will switch to the de-prioritized RV mode when outside your registered service area.
People talking about using it while roaming currently also say they are switching their service address in their account for each new location.
I’m not sure how it ties in with roaming capability but they do have a Business offering for those needing higher reliability and allocated bandwidth.
This comment seems to make a lot of assumptions about the scarcity of bandwidth for Starlink. If there's enough bandwidth for everyone, why would deprioritization be needed?
If there were enough resources for everyone then by definition there couldn't be deprioritization as there is nobody to deprioritize you for and vice versa.
Something funny about bubbles. I’ve heard it said that housing prices in 2005 were outrageous, so much that they could only possibly be justified if the population somehow banded together to stop most new housing from being built. Likewise I’ve also heard something about the dotcom bubble- that the valuations of tech firms in 2001 were outrageous. That the multiples given could only ever be sustained if American consumer tech came to dominate the world…
People protested to stop twenty-eight units from being built next to a train station on a commercial lot. The zoning board had a 3-2 vote, with three in favor of the development against two who opposed it. However, the law is such that a 3-2 vote is not enough to approve it, so the owner was prevented from building more housing.
Multiple levels of government prevent housing from being created and this issue clearly cascades throughout the entire country.
5 story building next to train station... And I realistically would expect at least 7-9 here. Maybe force them to build underground parking making it more expensive, but still, that is sort of area you should aim to densify in future.
Still a good thing, but title is misleading. 40% of India’s electricity does not come from non-fossil fuel sources. Instead, 40% of their installed capacity is non-fossil-fuel based. There’s a big difference because of the expected capacity factor of wind farms and solar farms vs fossil fuel plants. Even if 40% of your installed capacity is solar, with a capacity factor of 50%, you may be getting only 20% of your Joules from solar (fossil fuel plants generally have very high capacity factors)
