Adding that I've worked on a CLI install flow which walks you through setting up Zotero, reMarkable, and key optional features as switfly as possible.
It leaves aside power user features (e.g. emails, GitHub Actions to sync when laptop is asleep, etc.), which are listed here: https://distillate.dev/power-users.html
First sentence is blatantly false. Regulation of trade and commerce between member states is the foundation and raison d’être of the European Union, exactly like the interstate commerce clause for the US federal government.
This is exactly what I've been hoping for after a week of pairing with chatGPT. The LLM is a powerful source of recommendations, but too much gets lost in translation between browsing/context and the chat UX. Excited to try this!
a quick skim suggests this guide is largely motivated reasoning rather than being objective, as it immediately jumps to solar, wind, and batteries as its conclusive remedy. that's unrealistically simplistic, despite its length. something as large and complex as our global energy supply will need us pursuing every option simultaneously. and the most immediate thing to tackle is coal (being the most polluting, estimated to kill millions per year), for which nuclear needs to be a significant component (being baseload).
There are many different consensuses. In this case the most important consensus is what is the opinion shared by the operators of electricity grids and the like, because ultimately they will need to match energy supply and demand.
Their consensus is that specifically batteries are completely nonviable for long-term balancing of intermittent energy sources. Physics simply do not add up.
Batteries are not produced at a scale nearly large enough to be impactful. The world consumes 2,500 TWh of electricity per hour. And that's set to increase as less wealthy countries develop and start demanding A/C, street lights, etc. And on top of that, electricity production is only ~40% of carbon emissions (meaning, electrifying heating, transport, metallurgy, etc. will drive up electricity demand even further).
By comparison, the world produces 300-400 GWh of batteries each year. Most of which is going to electronics and electric vehicles. Battery production has been increasing, but it's unclear if the supply of input materials can keep up. The price of lithium jumped 400% last year: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
Moore's law is the exception, not the norm, because making chips faster works by making transistors smaller. This doesn't apply to most products, as even zero manufacturing costs cannot bring cost below input materials. Imagine the cost of a car went from $500,000 in 1910, $50,000 in 1920, and $5,000 in 1930. Is is safe to assume that a car would cost $5 in 1960 and $0.50 in 1970?
That's my point: electrifying heating and transportation will increase electricity use beyond the current 2.5Tw and make it even harder to provision the same duration of grid storage. I added the content in parentheses in case this was unclear.
Higher electricity demand is a problem is you're trying to. Build grid storage. And no, not everyone is onboard with the idea that battery cost is going to plunge by orders of magnitude. In fact, the opposite trend is happening. Battery costs have increased recently: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
> the state's higher storage target and DPS and grid operator support will slash costs to $150-$200 kWh by the end of the decade, based on BloombergNEF estimates.
They have dropped an order of magnitude since 2008, so I'd maybe expect a few more years before it does it again but that does appear to be the current prediction.
If their predictions are that costs are going to decrease, but when push comes to shove costs increase above expectations then what does that say about the value of these predictions?
I think he is over optimistic about future and not taking human factor into consideration (human nature, geopolitics, wars, upcoming big crisis around the world because of climate change effects, huge human migrations etc). What he describes is the best case scenario.
right, it's the most optimistic possible scenario, if all of the assumptions (of which there are a lot) are correct and as you point out, all omissions (of which there are a lot, despite the length) are negligible. there are some citations, but the narrative project a certain future way beyond what the meager research suggests.
the article does provide a nice survey of clean tech, but the conclusions should be disregarded.
Nuclear is very important. It's just not scaling fast enough.
I don't see a future where next-gen SMR nor fusion gets to cost parity with renewables quickly or easily. They will have to scale up via beachhead markets adjacent to existing electricity demand sources.
Long term, I do think economically viable fusion will supplant renewables, but that's decades away.
nuclear is not scaling fast enough because it's been subject to 40 years of negative mediopolitical narrative reinforced by poor market and technical regulation. nuclear easily gets to cost parity with renewables when you consider the needed storage for baseload usage and the more advanced grid control variable generation requires.
in the US, had we continued to build nuclear at the rate we were between the 70s and 90s, we'd be at over 50% nuclear for electricity generation, which would have knocked coal completely out of the equation, leaving only nuclear (baseload), gas (variable demand), and renewables (opportunistic generation). over 70 years, fission-based nuclear has caused 99+% fewer human deaths than fossil fuels have.
and yes, there's no need to pin any hopes on fusion right now, which is decades away at best.
If we wanted to build nuclear out like it was the 70's we needed to ensure that 3MI didn't happen in '79. This was the death of the industry in the US. Chernobyl buried it in a lead coffin 6 feet deeper, and Fukushima topped it with concrete. On top of that in the war in Ukraine with fighting around the nuclear power plants has made us that much more aware that the stable political environments that nuclear requires cannot be guaranteed.
We're now seeing nuclear plants in a conventional warfare warzone for the first time in history.
Creators of a Texas plant thought it would never freeze (or that if it did it wouldn't matter with the government's gift of a an extremely small liability cap on nuclear), so they didn't put enough safety stuff for that scenario and had to shut down a reactor unplanned.
What’s baseload? If you mean minimum demand from the grid, in Western Australia where I am it’s around 5% of peak demand,
In South Australia it’s zero.
In Western Australia coal will be gone by the end of the decade. In South Australia it’s gone already and generation from gas is on a strong downward trend too.
Australia’s conservative electricity system planning is expecting the country to hit 80% renewables. That’s going to end up being the lower bound.
> What’s baseload? If you mean minimum demand from the grid, in Western Australia where I am it’s around 5% of peak demand, In South Australia it’s zero.
Hi Weddpros -- thanks for the feedback. As it turns out, we agree with you. That's why we've been working on a complete overhaul of http://data.gouv.fr to be soft-launched soon, and we think you'll like it!
If you've followed http://etalab.gouv.fr (mostly in French, sorry), you may have heard we launched an open and collaborative re-design process in the spring and summer, which lead to more than 60 substantial contributions and 9 events organized by our community of users throughout France.
We then brought in a team of hackers to work inside of government -- believe it or not, this is most likely the first instance of this in the French government; unsurprisingly it worked very well -- and redevelop the whole stack based off of CKAN.
As a French expat, congratulations. There are a lot of things I'm not happy about France, but the role of open source in the public IT policy is definitely something to be proud of. Keep up the good work and keep us posted.
Now, if Danish lawmakers would only take a hint...
It was a temporary bug, your github is back online.
Building on the OpenSource CKAN project is a good thing.
Similarly, you should thrive to help people build on OpenData.
What really concerns me is the actual data that's made available, more than the technology used to serve it.
For the time being, it looks more like electronic document management than OpenData to me. The philosophy behind OpenData is not just "let's put office documents online", it should be more "let's see what they'll do with our data". Otherwise, where's the innovation? (except for the ideology)
Completely agree with the "let's see what they'll do with our data" philosophy!
The three stated objectives of France's open data policy are:
1. to make government more transparent and accountable,
2. to improve public policies and public service delivery, and
3. to enable entrepreneurs and civic innovators to develop create new services based on this data.
That's why we've brought together more than 30 key players in the French innovation ecosystem (VCs, angels, research institutions but also media, larger French corporations, Google, Microsoft etc.) and organized a series data-driven startup contests called DataConnexions.
My personal favorite is an app developed jointly with the Greater Paris transport authority that uses context-based modeling to predict train occupancy levels at each time of the day, in real-time, taking into account any perturbation on the network and live feedback from users: http://tranquilien.com
We developed the "Open Licence" in consultation with citizens, the Open Government Data community in France (Wikimedia Foundation, Regards Citoyens, etc.), and governments worldwide (the Transparency Team at the Cabinet office in London) during a series of more than 50 workshops and meetings in 2011.
Glad you like it. Feel free to send feedback and/or <3 to my team mate Alexandre Quintard (@AlexandreQK) of Etalab (data.gouv.fr).
Using it on the recent public feed of data from JCDecaux on the latest iteration of my project [1], hope I am referencing the license accordingly! On the source I am referencing the link to the JCDecaux website, but could to etalab easily :)
EDIT: Forgot to add, I should also release my data under a license and have contemplated using the "Open Licence", but I am not yet sure on what will suit best.
At the last G8 Summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland this past June, the Chiefs of State had agreed on an Open Data Charter committing their respective governments to make efforts to bring more open data online in machine-readable formats.
Today France releases its action plan for the implementation of the Charter, and specifically commits to releasing more governement datasets and APIs for hackers and startups to experiment with.
Specifically, we're committing to:
- progressing towards publishing data openly by default,
- building an open platform to encourage innovation and transparency,
- developing Open Data policy in consultation with citizensand civil society,
- supporting open innovation in France and throughout the world.
I'd be very interested in HN's feedback on how useful this can be for you, and what else you'd like to know about our Open Data policy and how we're trying to improve it!
Could you point to the source of the "hackers and startups" quote? Didn't find it in the main article. (Edit: sorry if this is on a tangent)
(Edit 2: well, I didn't think it was a downvote-worthy tangent, considering the word's connotations debate and this being an official govt url)
Our objective to support "hackers" and the startup ecosystem is mentioned under Commitment #4 (supporting open innovation in France and throughout the world).
I know that nicknames are here because of anonymity and so on, but can I ask you who are you to say that ?
In the current context, I can hardly see any window for introducing disruptive innovation (I mean it, there is room for that) in France. Those who wants don't have money (mayors, univs, scientists), and those who have don't want it cause of so many reasons (employment would be the first).
Stays the middle-size societies, where the entry ticket is damn so high and who are busy too think about the next tax that will be created/canceled/rebranded/transformed/increased/wasted.
Of course! My name is Romain Lacombe and I'm the head of innovation for the French Prime Minister's taskforce Etalab (data.gouv.fr) for Open Government Data, which was created in 2011 by the former government and was reinstated by the current one.
Whether or not there is room for disruptive innovation for France, only the future will tell -- and those who build it. :)
All I can say is that we're hard at work to make the most of the transformative power of open data and direct collaboration with hackers and startups, and this plan is a significant commitment from our government which I wanted to share with the HN community for constructive feedback.
(PS for what it's worth: I'm an entrepreneur myself, launched a venture-backed startup in the Valley in 2008-2010 myself which was later acquired.)
Thank you so much! We want to leave the site neutral. The one thing we want to introduce is some comments from people who worked on it or some data around usability.
This is a great product idea, and a very simple yet powerful take on its execution. Others have pointed many ways it could be improved (scrolling, the "x" on the comment panel, etc.), but I cannot emphasize either how interesting this could be.
This makes me think of "Project Syndicate", at http://www.project-syndicate.org/, the public debate venue for economics/public policy thought leaders from across the board. They have an interesting discussion system based on comments users post about paragraphs. Maybe there's an avenue for future cooperation there?
One way the product could improve is if the social component of the annotation concept was made more obvious. An explanation of what happens when someone comments would be welcome.
Also, will the be available as a private/semi-private product? I could use this for my Kindle books, but would want to share only select highlights among the many I make.
Overall, great job! Good luck with the YC application!
