In many settings you get a hdmi cable where the other end is installed out of view, so that’s not an option. But HDMI is a bad standard anyways, so I’m fine with having to carry an adapter

yoo, return of the flying aircraft carriers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zveno_project

Not my Hetzner server!

Maybe I wasn’t clear in my comment. I think it’s fine if they quote what somebody tweeted. I don’t think it’s fine to have Twitter embeds in articles.

Come to think of it, I should write a uBlock origin custom rule

I agree it’s going to be a challenge. But I’m sceptical nuclear is going to help there; from historical experience, it takes upwards of 20 years to build a reactor. Even if that gets expedited through modern technologies, we’re still talking something like 15 years until they come online, and you’re still paying all the upfront costs throughout that time. Whereas solar can go from concept to grid in 2 years, and batteries aren’t much worse.

The desert indeed makes large-scale warm water storage infeasible, but the kind of home setups I mentioned first should still be good to go, it’s basically only your preexisting heating loop times 2 or 3, that’s negligible compared to farming demands, and it stays in the loop forever (except for leakage). Storing warm water that you’d use anyways also doesn’t increase demand.

The desert has the benefit that solar can be really well calculated, since you (mostly) need to consider seasonal changes in sunlight, not cloud cover. That can be planned around

You got a point about the heat pump efficiency though. For new communities there should be a trend towards centralized heating that provides for a whole city block, to make use of economy of scale and raise efficiency beyond what is reasonable for a single home. But that’s dreaming to far, probably

Maybe not quote, but embed. They should still quote noteworthy things on there, but don’t force us to interact with the site

There’s no value in anything just because it’s made with “love”, that’s an illusion.

Wow, that’s a horrendously bleak and depressing take. Of course you can’t put a price tag on that (why would you want to?), but you’re not seriously suggesting that human love has no emotional value, right?

A love letter from your partner, or the diary of a passed relative, or your child’s drawings? All of these things might be objectively worse than something a machine could produce. But would you feel the same when you received a love letter that’s just been printed off of ChatGPT? Humans are more than profit-producing machines, despite what capitalists want you to believe. And there is value in human interaction.

That’s pretty cool! Still seems to have some issues, but as the technology matures, that seems like a promising technology. I didn’t know seasonal warm water storage was a thing

Because it makes no sense, environmentally or economically speaking. Nuclear is, as you said, base load. It can’t adjust for spikes in demand. So if there’s more energy in the grid than needed, it’s gonna be solar and wind that gets turned off to balance the grid. Investments in nuclear thus slow down the adoption of renewables.

Solar is orders of magnitude cheaper to build, while nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, even discounting the waste storage, which gets delegated the the public.

Battery technology has been making massive gains in scalability and cost in recent years. What we need is battery arrays to cover nighttime demand and spikes in production or demand, combined with a more adaptive industry that performs energy intensive tasks when it’s abundant. With countries that have large amounts of solar, it is already happening that during peak production, energy cost goes to zero (or even negative, as traded between utilities companies).

About the heating: gas can not stay the main way to heat homes, it’s yet another fossil fuel. What we need is heat pumps, which can have an efficiency of >300% (1kWh electricity gets turned into 3kWh of heat, by taking ambient heat from outside). Combined with large, well-insulated warm-water reservoirs, you can heat up more water than you need to higher temperature during times of electricity oversupply, and have more than enough to last you the night, without even involving batteries. Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium. Batteries cover electricity demand as well as a backup in case you need uncharacteristically much water. This is a system that’s slowly getting adopted in Europe, and it’s great. Much cheaper, and 100% clean.

They’re bringing out the Galactica