It could be, for the EU not Norway at least, that there was a consumption uptick but it's hidden because people charge their cars with their own solar panels. But even this is indicative of how the grid will work in the future.
It could be, for the EU not Norway at least, that there was a consumption uptick but it's hidden because people charge their cars with their own solar panels. But even this is indicative of how the grid will work in the future.
This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
I'm a nobody PHP dev. He's a brilliant developer. I can't understand why he couldn't see this coming.
But sometimes, occasionally, a moonshot idea becomes a home run. That's why I dislike cynicism and grizzled veterans for whom nothing will ever work.
Browsers are able to parse a webpage from 1996. I don't know what the argument in the linked comment is about, but in this one, we discuss the relevance of creating a 1996 page vs a pelican on a a bicycle in SVG.
Here is Gemini when asked how to build a webpage from 1996. Seems pretty correct. In general I dislike grand statements that are difficult to back up. In your case, if models have only a cursory knowledge of something (what does this mean in the context of LLMs anyway), what exactly they were trained on etc.
The shortened Gemini answer, the detailed version you can ask for yourself:
Layout via Tables: Without modern CSS, layouts were created using complex, nested HTML tables and invisible "spacer GIFs" to control white space.
Framesets: Windows were often split into independent sections (like a static sidebar and a scrolling content window) using Frames.
Inline Styling: Formatting was not centralized; fonts and colors were hard-coded individually on every element using the <font> tag.
Low-Bandwidth Design: Visuals relied on tiny tiled background images, animated GIFs, and the limited "Web Safe" color palette.
CGI & Java: Backend processing was handled by Perl/CGI scripts, while advanced interactivity used slow-loading Java Applets.
That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users.
It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insane number of crashes, out-of-memories, pegged CPUs, and security vulnerabilities that pushed things over the edge. You can only sit through so many dozens of Adobe 0-days before it starts to grate.
Everyone, well almost everyone apparently, was relieved we didn't have to deal with any of that anymore.
It is possible, just may be not in the U.S.
Note: given renewables can't provide base load, capacity factor is 10-30% (lower for solar, higher for wind), so actual energy generation will vary...
On the other hand, I think we will not actually need 100GW of new installations because capacity can be acquired by reducing current usage by making it more efficient. The term negawatt comes to mind. A lot of people are still in the stone age when it comes to this even though it was demonstrated quite effectively by reduced gas use in the US after the oil crisis in the 70s. Which basically recovered to the pre crisis levels only recently.
High gas prices caused people to use less and favor efficiency. The same thing will happen with electricity and we'll get more capacity. Let the market work.
The Energiewende was completely mismanaged and if you have any inclination towards renewables you should hate the German government for it. Here are the mistakes:
- The German government only subsidized renewable production, by guaranteeing a fixed price. This means that energy storage was completely neglected, leading to very high fluctuations in energy price. German industry had to adapt, by only operating under certain wind/sun conditions.
- They sold out their key renewable energy manufacturing to China. One would think that it would be prudent to keep solar panel production in Germany at all cost, when you are betting your future on it. But apparently nobody was concerned to sell it out to China. The same goes for letting Windturbine manufacturers go bankrupt.
- Prematurely shutting down nuclear. The loss of the nuclear plants meant that on-demand energy generation became more difficult. Further increasing problems with energy prices during periods of darkness and little sun.
I am not against Germany relying on renewables. To be honest I think it is a good thing for multiple reasons, among them is also the fact, that it gives Germany further autonomy from importing fossil fuels from either the US or Russia. But the way this transition was performed was a total failure. The people responsible either lacked basic understanding or willfully ignored them. Attributing recent economic hardship to the Energiewende is true to some part, but the real cause is a persistent failure of politics.
>and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices
Any person who thinks that this is any more than a figleaf lacks basic economic understanding. Where does the German government get money? From German industry. The industry price is a tax break.
But you are also right, just continuously talking about the price of energy is another way to avoid talking about the structural issues. Lack of cost competitiveness does not just come from differences in the price of electricity.
The hard truth is that the Chinese are very good at manufacturing. Even for high quality products. For decades they have only gotten better and have taken over more and more industries, they did this by being cheaper and better, while also innovating. The future of the German industry depends on rising to that challenge and actually being able to stay better than the Chinese.
If you work somewhere in German industry, a phrase you are going to hear is "so haben wir das immer schon gemacht" (this is the way we have always done this) and you will find an institutional unwillingness, from the management down to the staff, to engage in radical change, to try new things and to embrace new technologies. This protects German industry from fads, which quickly fade, but it also means that it is always at risk of drastically falling behind when it comes to genuinely superior ways of working.
I don't work in the industry, but I agree with this assessment. I don't want to reduce all Germans to a stereotype, but I agree there is just a lot of inertia and being successful because it used to be successful. Like e.g. Intel, and it will eventually run out. The whole Europe reminds of the tired part in that wired vs tired meme. People live a good life, which is good, but it makes them want to strive to preserve that. So no wonder they trust their fortunes to someone like Friedrich Merz, a bean counter, whose biggest accomplishment in life was that he submitted a tax report on a "Bierdeckel". That's not the way to go forward.
One of the last worldwide relevant things coming out of Germany was the Energiewende, yet many people outright reject it because it interferes with their comfort and the way it used to be done. But in reality either by luck or genius, completely nailed it and was the first in creating a completely new world. But then nothing.
Which is fine, except putting hopes into a technology that has failed repeatedly for 60 years is in itself irrational.
HN would do itself a favor if it learned the lessons of "worse is better" and applied it to, well, almost anything. In this case, a moonshot to advance nuclear globally might bring realistic results in 10-15 years. By that time the world will already be decarbonized by renewables as it's already happening. At best nuclear might be that last missing piece to get to 100%, but even this I would no longer bet on. There is already insane growth in undeveloped countries which will push demand even further. Renewables are ridiculously cheap.