> Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap
Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above.
What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet?
> we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...
Energy is never lost, however, it’s transduced into less and less useful forms due to entropy.
I also do have some methods baked in for doing exploration. "Epsilon greedy" is a common simple approach where x% of the recommendations are purely random. I do a bit more of a linear thing where I rank all the posts by how many times they've been recommended, then I pick a percentage 0 - 100, then I throw out the top x% most popular (previously recommended) items. that also gives you some flexibility to try out different distributions for the x% variable.
The source is at https://github.com/jacobobryant/yakread
I also appreciate being introduced to the digital public infra initiative.