technicalbard

9 ms·

1.
by technicalbard 3y ago
I used elm before pine, on a terminal hooked to a Bull-Honeywell machine running Multics...
2.
by technicalbard 4y ago
Except it won't work. The intermittency problem of renewables doesn't make them cheaper - there is no low-cost solution to that. The intermittency makes energy more expensive. Further, their population is already shrinking. La
3.
by technicalbard 4y ago
The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2 years. In the middle of WW2. The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other industrial projects is regulatory capture.
4.
by technicalbard 4y ago
Wrong. Storage has opex, because it has energy losses. Not all the energy that goes in can come out. 2nd Law and all that. On top of that, there will be maintenance and operating staff costs.
5.
by technicalbard 4y ago
Wind would need to guarantee dispatchability on demand to fix a price. Offering low prices when it can is not the same as reliable on-demand sources.
6.
by technicalbard 5y ago
This is true of all knowledge-work. Traditional engineering is fraught with the same problem - you don't know EXACTLY how you will solve the challenges, so how can one accurately estimate them? Even worse - if you don't have a c
7.
by technicalbard 5y ago
So they are building LISP inside Excel.... It is now a corollary of Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming...
8.
by technicalbard 6y ago
If the Vikings had brought the beads to Greenland or Labrador and trader with the Inuit, the Inuit could have traded those beads across the arctic of Canada in a couple of hundred years - EASILY. Remember that the Inuit of North America on
9.
by technicalbard 6y ago
Umm. Totally misses that the LISP family of languages predates both C and ML and introduced many of the features he cares about...
10.
by technicalbard 6y ago
I'm an amateur developer and I write checking code in functions all the time because you can't be certain of the source of the data!!!
11.
by technicalbard 6y ago
That it can do units too makes this a possible replacement for MathCAD!
12.
by technicalbard 6y ago
I know companies that live in legal fear of discovery and destroy lots of things that have potential data-mining value. Imagine a firm that deletes all email more than 365 days old...
13.
by technicalbard 6y ago
Awesome. I loved FORTRAN when I was at University
14.
by technicalbard 6y ago
This is curious given there are well documented findings that which school you attended doesn't correlate to actual success. This is true in Engineering and Law. The problem, particularly in the US, is that the skills that are tested
15.
by technicalbard 7y ago
It is still debatable whether carbon emissions are falling. Most of the country hasn't got enough data under a carbon tax, and oil and gas pricing has swung more significantly over the last 10 years than the carbon tax impact, and tha
16.
by technicalbard 7y ago
The problem of a planned economy is the economic calculation problem and lack of a mechanism for decision making (i.e. prices). Mises and Hayek laid this out VERY clearly, as early as 1922. The planner cannot possibly know enough to make
17.
by technicalbard 7y ago
Ah, something Common Lisp has had for over 30 years.
18.
by technicalbard 7y ago
Generating power from very small temperature differences (2-3 degrees) with require gigantic surface areas to move energy. 25 mW/m2 is a TINY flux rate, and they are talking about how to get it to 0.5 W/m2? Need a bigger tempera
19.
by technicalbard 7y ago
The thermodynamics of this are a disaster, which will drive their cost of capture higher than this range. Capturing CO2 from coal fired power plants costs about $100/tonne and is easier due to substantially higher concentration than d
20.
by technicalbard 8y ago
I still don't understand why Common Lisp isn't more popular
21.
by technicalbard 8y ago
But deployment is slowing in jurisdictions that have decided they can't afford the subsidies and what it does to power prices.
22.
by technicalbard 8y ago
Giant mirrors in space, redirecting energy to the surface of the earth...
23.
by technicalbard 8y ago
Except the reactions happen at 300C, and the FT reaction is exothermic between H2 and CO, not CO2. taking CO2 apart is endothermic. And then you need to refine the hydrocarbons (because they will look like diesel or wax, not gasoline).
24.
by technicalbard 8y ago
No. The prices they quote are JUST getting the CO2 out of the air. Other technologies for getting CO2 from Flue Gas using amines or ammonia have been commercially demonstrated at scale for similar prices. The hydrogen production, FT react
25.
by technicalbard 8y ago
Why anyone would try to capture CO2 from AIR (at 410 ppm) when you could get it from flue gas (from a power plant), where it exists at tens of thousand of ppm (i.e. %) is beyond me. The technology has been commercially demonstrated to capt
26.
by technicalbard 8y ago
CaO generally does not exist in natural stone deposits (no alkaline or alkali earths exist as oxides because they are very reactive). You produce CaO from CaCO3 by calcining and driving off the CO2 (which is emitted to the atmosphere).
27.
by technicalbard 9y ago
This is a crazy scheme. If you want CO2, there are much easier places to recover it than from AIR. Flue gas of furnaces/boilers, chemical plants that make it as a byproduct, etc. Worse, their whole plan needs a source of hydrogen, wh
28.
by technicalbard 9y ago
I don't see a lot of engineering design, analysis and simulation software being done in the browser or mobile device. There are a few examples, but the really powerful stuff is desktop Windows (some still in WinForms) or Unix/Lin
29.
by technicalbard 9y ago
Electrification will only reduce CO2 emissions if the power SOURCES are also carbon free. Since wind and solar are still a VERY small amount of the grid, and are very expensive without subsidies, the only real alternative is nuclear reacto
30.
by technicalbard 9y ago
Except that socialism will always fail due to the lack of information problem. Mises explained this logically and consistently in 1922 in his book "Socialism". He further predicted that all socialist systems will end with totali

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