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giblfiz commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant   7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik
baking · 9 months ago
He's using the tax credits to undersell projects with storage that would have been more positive for the grid. Solar without storage in Texas is coal to Newcastle. Subsidizing bare-bones solar is not good for the grid.
giblfiz · 9 months ago
Battery and and solar with battery have (nearly) the same tax credit advantage.
giblfiz commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant   7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik
buckle8017 · 9 months ago
Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.

They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.

His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.

giblfiz · 9 months ago
Hey, original author here.

  > Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
Yep, very much so. I was well aware that I didn't have a clue, and thought that I could make up for that with professional expert advice, elbow grease, a pretty good combination of tax advantages, and a willingness to learn.

The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.

Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.

You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.

giblfiz commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant   7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik
AtlasBarfed · 9 months ago
Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas

I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?

giblfiz · 9 months ago
Original author here, If you look a little more carefully the thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping our way thru it bit by bit.

Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded)

This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.

giblfiz commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant   7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik
ur-whale · 9 months ago
If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only locally to mine Bitcoin?
giblfiz · 9 months ago
Hey, I'm the original author here.

I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.

giblfiz commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant   7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik
bri3k · 9 months ago
Don't forget in the middle he states that this is a tax dodge on capital gains from said crypto money.
giblfiz · 9 months ago
I'm the original author. I'm not sure why you got down-voted for this, this was absolutely a "tax dodge". The polite term is "tax mitigation strategy", I'm also not sure why this is seen as an openly negative thing? The government wants a type of thing done, they say "hey, we won't pay people directly to do it, but we will subsidize it thru tax incentives"

I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's good for the world, I will do it in return for tax incentives"

Why exactly is that bad?

giblfiz commented on Requiem for a Solar Plant   7goldfish.com/articles/Re... · Posted by u/akkartik
gwern · 9 months ago
One of the problems with undisclosed and thoughtless use of LLMs for writing, like ChatGPT in this case, is that it undermines trust.

Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like.

If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims?

Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.)

Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ .

> This is a much better read than I expected.

Hm...

giblfiz · 9 months ago
Hi Gwern, I'm the owner of 7goldfish, the developer in question, and a fan of yours via reputation and the occasional comment I run into on Reddit.

First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities)

Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it.

That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time.

I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted".

For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.

giblfiz commented on Eggs US – Price – Chart   tradingeconomics.com/comm... · Posted by u/throwaway5752
zo1 · a year ago
This is disturbing and not what I found with eggs at all - Are eggs somehow different in the US compared to the rest of the world?
giblfiz · a year ago
Yep. In the U.S. the eggs are all machine washed which removes a natural protective outer coating (as well as dirt).

This means that they don't store as well or as long, and really should be refrigerated. It _might_ reduce salmonella.

giblfiz commented on Nine writers on their Adderall use and experiences   pioneerworks.org/broadcas... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
giblfiz · 2 years ago
Slate Star Codex did a great write-up of risks and rewards of adderall from their perspective as a "gatekeeping psychiatrist"

It's a super informative, and kind of technical read.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

giblfiz commented on Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling   independent.com/2024/03/2... · Posted by u/shortformblog
giblfiz · 2 years ago
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

SOMEONE SHOULD KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF OUR PRECIOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE.

They could even keep in on the internet!

We could call it the "Internet Archive"

And with this amazing technology, there could even be a way we could go way back and look at things that were published before, right on the internet as well.

We could call it the "wayback machine"

Oh wait: http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress....

Seriously though, three out of four times when I see someone crying "but our precious cultural heritage" it's something that has already been taken care of by archive.org, or that it would be trivial to have them help out with, instead of trying to force the hand of some corporate giant.

Did you know that archive.org even has a special legal exemption to ignore copyright law for archiving software?

giblfiz commented on Apple cider vinegar for weight management   nutrition.bmj.com/content... · Posted by u/jfoster
smcleod · 2 years ago
200ml/day at $7.47/L AUD you'd really hope it was worth it!
giblfiz · 2 years ago
Not sure where you got that number... Protocol described in the paper was:

>Groups 1, 2 and 3 consumed 5, 10 and 15 mL, respectively, of ACV (containing 5% of acetic acid) diluted in 250 mL of water daily, in the morning on an empty stomach, for 12 weeks.

u/giblfiz

KarmaCake day190November 10, 2010View Original