There needs to be more general understanding of energy density and scalability, which is why I don't think we'll get away from fossil fuels without nuclear or fusion.
In order for renewables like solar and wind energy to truly take the burden off a grid, we have to have large capacity energy storage solutions that balance the grid over a 8+ hour period. That way we can handle peak demand of the grid during high load which often happens when there's little light and on hot days when the wind doesn't generate nearly as much electricity.
Yes. Batteries are coming. I think many people truly misunderstand the full power with which solar/wind + batteries will transform our societies (and by the way also giving more resilient and insular power networks than centralized power plants can ever give)
One thing often missed in these conversations is energy storage is not equal to generation capacity. To get solar to power a full 24 hour cycle, you need 2x the installed capacity compared to a "traditional" generator. One part for the daytime baseload, one part to charge batteries for storage at night. And realistically with seasonal/weather variations, probably far greater than that again.
So saying that solar has caught up with nuclear, well that's great, but it's a long way off where it needs to be, and energy storage is even further off again.
At least in Australia, the solar + battery combo has become realisically genuinely competitive against energy costs from the grid for domestic use. At commercial scale, there is still a long way to go.
This can be done in a distributed way using home batteries. This would increase demand for peak solar production for use outside this peak. At the moment solar production creates a large price disparity that can be corrected with home batteries.
Transmission lines can act like storage when there is PV to the east or west of you. This doesn’t remove the need for storage, but can dramatically reduce it.
The old model of cheap peaking power plants and cheaper base-load power is equivalent to cheap peaking power + cheap but inconsistent green energy. It’s a very complicated optimization problem to work out the optimal mix of locations and quantities to of each, but price signals can help assuming you haven’t completely distorted the market.
Chile still wants transmission north south because in the winter solar closer to the equator has longer days and in the winter solar near the poles does.
Oh boy, you are very naive, ain't you? No country will put their energy stability in hands of their neighbors. Or do you see China, Korea, India and Russia interconnect their grids? What other supranational grids you know of?
Note how there are only 7-8 regional connections spanning multiple countries (counting Europe and North America as one block each). One is there for historical reasons (IPS/UPS, Russia), others for economic integration (post-Soviet) or political affinity. With the exception of one, none are integrated with aggressive countries, and in most cases the distance isn’t far enough for it to become reasonable to do what you think can be done. The US ended up with separate interconnections because a single one proved unstable anyway. Hell, Japan has two networks!
DC links do exist outside those blocks, but they’re bilateral and small. The problem isn’t that it’s technically impossible, it’s that states won’t make their grid reliability depend on a neighbor. Just to point a single case, in 2018 a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia was enough to throw off the frequency of the entire continental European grid. Something being technically possible doesn’t make it practical
The nice thing about maps is they show every country, so you can quickly see how few lack such links. If like tables add up what percentage of countries aren’t tied in with at least one of their neighbors. It’s a short list, even NK is tied to China.
You may discount England but it’s got enough DC links to move a large fraction of demand.
Japan has two networks for historic reasons, but they can move well over 2% of each grid’s average demand to the other. It’s just significantly less efficient but that’s relatively minor vs the other disadvantages of a split 50hz vs 60hz national grid.
"
* We have seen a number of cases where a security bug identified
* by AI tools is subsequently independently discovered by a
* different researcher. This suggests that adversaries who do not
* report bugs to OSS projects are likely to be able to discover
* these bugs too. Given this, the OpenSSH team will, for now, be
* making more frequent releases to get bugfixes into users' hands
* more quickly rather than batching them until the next planned
* release."
There's simply no real reason that a mobile device can't function as a desktop from a technical level either in software or hardware. Simply dock your phone or it could be even wireless. Boom! Go from mobile experience to desktop experience. It seems they want to cram the mobile experience into a traditional desktop environment (mouse and keyboard driven with windows paradigm). IOS and Android have not embraced desktop paradigm. We simply need a unified SDK to support both experiences and the store downloads the appropriate assets. We're beginning to see somewhat of these concepts with foldables phone coming into the market.
I'm browsing from a Pixel 9 phone running GraphenOS phone, plugged into a 4K monitor, and paired with a bluetooth Logitech MX Vertical mouse and a MX Keys Mini keyboard. Works prefect. I don't miss my Macbook Air M5 much.
Apple having shown that the same CPU they use in some iPhones and iPads, Apple A18 Pro, worked perfectly well to build a laptop around running macOS, the MacBook Neo, should take the logical next leap in making an iPhone/laptop blend.
Make an iPhone and corresponding docking station, where the docking station is a MacBook shell + screen + touchpad + keyboard + battery that you slot the iPhone into in order to use the iPhone as a laptop. The slot you push the iPhone into would be reminiscent of the PCMCIA slots of old, but having the dimensions of the iPhone and connecting via ThunderBolt 5. When slotted into the shell, no part of the iPhone will extend outside of the shell. To eject, you push it in slightly and it pops out same way you push on a microSD card to eject it from many devices.
I would very much like one of those, and have done for years. Like the old PowerBook Duos, where you slotted the laptop into a docking station for extra ports, graphics etc.
That's sort of the point of the Googlebooks. They run Android internally, and then to get Android to support Googlebooks, they had to add/improve things like multi-window support, very large monitors, keyboards, mouse support, etc.
If you have a USB dock that your keyboard/mouse/display is plugged in to, you should be able to stick it in your Pixel phone's USB jack and get a desktop experience. Some of my team would actually test keyboard support that way, by plugging a keyboard into a tablet.
Android actually does have a desktop mode when you connect an external display. I'm not sure how much this is standardized / merged into AOSP, but I use it with my stock Pixel 10 Pro.
I would describe the experience as... passable. Historically it was quite glitchy but recent OS updates have improved it. The biggest issues resolve around apps which do not scale their UIs correctly.
From what I read that's the entire point of the whole Googlebook replacing Chromebook thing. The whole desktop is based on Android so all android phone and tablet apps are native. Naturally there will be SDK changes as some apps release versions optimized for desktop.
Google probably wants it so they can extend their app store empire to desktop apps and games.
I predict it will be regulated in the west, with approved models only to the public. Corporate and verified individuals only for the high-end level models. Most likely the end of open source competitive models. Not sure what the east will do.
If that's the case, then why do we go to work on a computer instead of a phone? Oh, wait. A screen. A mouse, a keyboard. Really, if they wanted to, you could simply dock your phone and have that experience if the company was willing to put in the time.
I'm not dreading increasing AI. I firmly believe that LLMs in their current form cannot even achieve AGI. We need to break past barriers like not thinking in tokens and a model having a sense of prediction semi independent of its output.
Truly, even with the current level of AI, we should be concerned how people should learn. This is true of adults, but incredibly important for children. Should we become dependent on these tools to the point where we feel like we can't achieve our day-to-day work?
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