Readit NewsIt struggled with tasks I asked for (e.g. download the March and April invoices for my GitHub org "myorg") -- it got errors parsing the DOM and eventually gave up. I recommend taking a look at the browser-use approach and specifically their buildDOMTree.js script. Their strategy for turning the DOM into an LLM parsable list of interactive elements, and visually tagging them for vision models, is unreasonably effective. I don't know if they were the first to come up with it, but it's genius and extracting it for my browser-using agents has hugely increased their effectiveness.
The key thing was to keep the SaaS-y bit as boring as possible, which meant a corporation. This is in Europe but the equivalent would be Delaware C corp.
Shares in the corporation were then given to the wrapping organization (in my case the foundation, but this could be more-or-less any legal structure that can have assets). Downside is two sets of accounts, upsides are that M&A gets a ton easier later on, and taking on employees is simple and not colored by the legal quirks of the parent organization. The potential complexity of SaaS accounting (revenue recognition, R&D credits, etc) is also kept inside a simple, normal corporation which every CPA is super-familiar with, so you're not consulting niche experts every time something new comes up.
I advise a quick consult with a tax lawyer before doing anything, because it's easy to say you'll deal with this later but some changes have unforeseen implications if not done at the outset. (I punted on some of the setup for a year while I focused on finding product/market fit, and that turned out to be a mistake that the lawyers had to fix at some cost. A year more and it might have become unfixable.)
However, there certainly are cases in the Amazon of folks visiting native communities, quizzing them to extract hard-won knowledge about the potential medical efficacy of local plants, collecting samples and then disappearing off to commercialise the results.
It’s not the results of evolution that belong to a modern nation state, but the intellectual property of the communities certainly is valuable- as can be seen from the efforts made to extract it, rather than just collecting plant samples at random.
I think you are confusing things by conflating the thing and the knowledge of the thing.
The Higgs Boson exists, irrespective of human knowledge. That doesn’t prevent Peter Higgs from garnering some kind of reward for his work.
What if, instead, we either observe that they simply exist, or imbue them with their own rights, or consider them the birthright of all humanity?
We've seen that attempts to consider them as intellectual property for the purposes of ensuring their conservation have failed. We can also see that it hasn't driven the anticipated licensing revenue flows to poorer nations. But which approach would lead to greater good for humankind over a long time horizon?
Brazil is rolling back the free-for-all that was established under Bolsonaro, but if they're handling it delicately, that's likely good news.
sand's heat capacity = 830 J/kg degree C
sand battery size is "13m tall and 15m wide". Assuming most voluminous possible shape that's 13m * 15m * 15m = 2925 cubic meters of sand (100% fill, no account for insulation, etc.)
Dry sand density is about 1600kg/m3
Total weight of sand would be 2925m3 * 1600kg/m3 = 4.7Mkg (4.7kt)
4.7Mkg of sand has a heat capacity of 830J/kg * 4.7Mkg = 3.9 * 10^9 joules / degree C (it takes this much energy to heat up entire battery by one degree C)
So from this, we get that 100MWh of energy would heat up the battery by (3.6 * 10^11 J) / (3.9 * 10^9 J/C) or about 100C.
If we include a different shape (a cylinder), and account for a thick insulation needed, this becomes closer to 200C of temp diff.
I guess it checks out... It is going to be more difficult to estimate heat loss.
But sand is quite expensive so my question is, why sand and not water? Water has 5 times higher specific heat per weight, about 3 times per volume. Water is way cheaper than sand and much easier to find, transport and extract energy from. The only real problem with water is you can only heat it up to 100C.
At a guess, and I confess I'm not capable of running the numbers, this offsets the much higher temperature delta of sand.
To paraphrase XKCD: Communicating badly and then acting smug about it when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. And falling for the mistake is not evidence of a lack of intelligence. Particularly, when emphasizing the trick results in being understood and chatGPT PASSING your "test".
The biggest irony here, is that the reason I failed, and likely the reason chatGPT failed the first prompt, is because we were both using semantic understanding: that is, usually, people don't ask deliberately tricky questions.
I suspect if you told it in advance you were going to ask it a deliberately tricky question, that it might actually succeed.
Indeed it does:
"Before answering, please note this is a trick question.
Two trains on separate tracks, 30 miles from each other are approaching each other, each at a speed of 10 mph. How long before they crash into each other?"
https://chat.openai.com/share/3ec44348-6bac-40c3-a910-e0bab9...
For my own projects I use a managed Northflank cluster on my own AWS account and likewise... just a fantastic experience. Everything that Heroku could and should have been. Yes the cluster is a bit pricey to stand up both in terms of EC2 compute and management layer costs, but once it's there, it's there. And the costs scale much more nicely than shoving side projects onto Heroku.
At this stage I consider managed k8s my default go-to unless it's something so lightweight I just want to push it to Vercel and forget about it.