Womble

Search results have been degrading for a lot longer than LLMs have been a thing. Peak usefulness for them was around a decade ago.

CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).

This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.

Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months. The big advantage I see here is that unlike those other technologies capacity is dirt cheap to build, its just a metal tank. So whenever a renewable plant would curtail its output it can instead redirect to creating gasoline to burn when the renewables arent producing much electricity.

I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.

Just on a technical level that is an amazing ad compared to the usual political soundbites in front of a few images.

And those people who think LLMs will replace software engineers any time in the near future are wrong. But it can still be the case that LLMs are democratizing coding ability to those who otherwise wouldnt have it while at the same software engineering as a discipline isnt going anywhere.

Its not just basic scripting either, often when people start coding in earnest their programs are just a huge pile of statements connected together with if statements and mutating global variables. and LLM can help show best practices like encapsulating logic into functions and isolating side effects.

I think you are vastly overestimating the level that statement is pitched at. The overwhelming majority of people dont even know how a for loop works. However they can ask an LLM to write a script to change this list of files with inconsistent numbering conventions and put them in a consistent order. That’s the level of spreading out the ability to program that we are dealing with.