> production of wind energy is crucial for meeting science-based climate goals
What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.
They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies) and tend to produce peak power during periods when solar is offline (e.g. at night or cloudy days). Farmers like them because they don't take up much space and they provide revenue independent of how well their crops do, which varies wildly year to year. It's cheaper than burning fossil fuels (though not quite as cheap as solar)
Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.
It's also worth mentioning that, while I'm not anti-nuclear on principle, the economic return on nuclear projects ranges somewhere between "multiple decades" and "never" - and there's a large empty gap on the timescale of a decade between spending most of that money and starting to receive dividends. And you'd better be running it 100%
At least with solar and wind the buildout takes a few weeks or months, and you can start collecting even with a partial buildout.
I'm afraid this bit - ROI time / profitability - is what will kill practical applicability of fusion power. There's already tens if not hundreds of billions in investments and decades of research, and it will take that again to turn it into a commercial endeavour, if ever.
That said, nuclear is great for baseline power production, and even with renewables generating the brunt of electricity, you still need a baseline and a quickly scaling backup (gas generators). Battery parks help too for those, but they have limited capacity of course.
They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy. Building a wind turbine today has about the same all-in "LCOE" as running existing nuclear plants. Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.
>They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy.
It's not zero-marginal-cost energy because they do need maintenance. But I'm more interested in knowing where your lifespan idea comes from. I have seen multiple sources agree that wind turbines are expected to last 20ish years, after which they must at least be taken down and refurbished, if not cut into pieces and buried (as they are not recyclable).
>Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
This sounds impossible, especially if you count land value, maintenance, grid stability measures that are required to deal with flaky power sources, etc.
There’s standard maintenance as with anything mechanical but most importantly for energy - they don’t burn a fuel that is subject to supply/demand, international relations, or shortages.
“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario but more realistically, modern turbines from Vestas have 30-yr lifespans (which are often exceeded) and the newest gen GE turbines come with 40-yr lifespans.
There are inherent issues with LCOE but it’s the ‘least bad’ metric we have to compare energy sources. As of 2022, it looked like this:
With onshore wind about $0.04/kwh and nuclear more like $0.22/kwh. Which sounds outlandish until you realize that PPAs for wind auctions are regularly under $0.03 now and Hinkley C is going to cost something like $50 billion for the two reactors and the rate guaranteed to the owners is north of $0.18 now which will return them something terrible like 7% IRR.
>“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario
Actually it's more like "decade and decade" lol
I have been surprised at the figures I found for nuclear power versus wind. The reason our nuclear reactors cost so much, so far as I've heard, is that each one is designed anew and there are tremendous regulatory compliance costs. I think designs could be standardized and regulatory stuff streamlined, so as to drastically reduce costs for nuclear. Say what you will about Chinese safety or quality, but they seem to be cranking out a ton of new nuclear reactors as most of the West is foolishly retiring theirs with no good replacement.
Yes; there are a few companies (iirc / top of my head) developing or deploying small-scale, standardized / modular nuclear power plants; NuScale [0] has developed a few models that have gotten Nuclear Regulatory Commission approvals in 2022 and this year [1] they approved a 77 MW generator, which is enough to power a data center. This one weighs about 700 tons, about 23 meters tall, is built in a factory and can be transported / installed anywhere.
Sure, but "just build nuke plants cheaper" isn't really a viable plan when you need electrons tomorrow. There's a well-known issue in the West that we've lost the ability to build large projects on budget or schedule and there a million reasons for it, but none of it really matters to people buying power.
As of today, if you had $20 billion and had to choose between maybe generating your first watt from nuclear somewhere around 2040 if things go well or just building 15,000 3MW wind turbines that could start generating power next year and will have over a decade of revenue coming in before you see the first dollar from the nuke - investors make the obvious choice.
It’s one based on science instead of whatever someone finds convenient. So sub 2 C.
Why would wind not be essential for it? Wind is free just like solar. Some places have amazing wind. Wind costs have declined dramatically so it’s a viable piece of the mix.
There are some who think windmills unsightly, which I don’t understand at all. The old style associated with Dutch stereotypes is cute and picturesque, and the modern type futuristic. If I see windmills within eyeshot, my first thought is, “oh cool, the people here really have it figured out.” Of all the things that I might see on the horizon, windmills are among those that would bother me the least.
For what it's worth: one of the reasons Google has a datacenter in Iowa (of all places) is that there's a windfarm out there making up something like 60% of the local power generation. That makes the power super cheap (and with all the land they have, that windfarm can continue to scale).
If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."
Same in the Netherlands; companies like Google, Microsoft etc invest in offshore power alongside the government and energy companies. Unfortunately this also means they "claim" a percentage of its capacity for newly built datacenters, meaning that it's not so much replacing non-renewable energy sources as adding to total production.
Electricity prices go up? Are you blaming the windmills? It should you blame the new AI data centers
And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.
I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.
It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:
Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.
> What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
Land-based wind power is OK-ish. It's susceptible to renewable droughts, but it's fine as long as it's just a part of the mix.
But the offshore wind power is pretty much the _only_ reliable renewable, outside of classic hydro and exotics like tidal power or geothermal. Offshore wind generators are pretty much guaranteed to always produce at least _some_ power due to diurnal wind patterns.
Terminology is not intrinsically good. If you are working with others towards a shared goal, then agreeing on terminology and having precise language is objectively good for everyone (assuming no one is secretly trying to sabotage the project). If you don't share any goals, then there is not even a coherent sense in which it could matter.
Talking with strangers on the internet almost always falls into the second category.
I'm always a little surprised to see how many people take robots.txt seriously on HN. It's nice to see so many folks with good intentions.
However, it's obviously not a real solution. It depends on people knowing about it, and adding the complexity of checking it to their crawler. Are there other more serious solutions? It seems like we've heard about "micropayments" and "a big merkle tree of real people" type solutions forever and they've never materialized.
> It depends on people knowing about it, and adding the complexity of checking it to their crawler.
I can't believe any bot writer doesn't know about robots.txt. They're just so self-obsessed and can't comprehend why the rules should apply to them, because obviously their project is special and it's just everyone else's bot that causes trouble.
(malicious) Bot writers have exactly zero concern for robots.txt. Most bots are malicious. Most bots don't set most of the TCP/IP flags. Their only concern is speed. I block about 99% of port scanning bots by simply dropping any TCP SYN packet that is missing MSS or uses a strange value. The most popular port scanning tool is masscan which does not set MSS and some of the malicious user-agents also set some odd MSS values if they even set it at all.
-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp -d $INTERNET_IP --syn -m tcpmss ! --mss 1280:1460 -j DROP
Example rule from the netfilter raw table. This will not help against headless chrome.
The reason this is useful is that many bots first scan for port 443 then try to enumerate it. The bots that look up domain names to scan will still try and many of those come from new certs being created in LetsEncrypt. That is one of the reasons I use the DNS method, get a wildcard and sit on it for a while.
Another thing that helps is setting a default host in ones load balancer or web server that serves up a default simple static page served from a ram disk that say something like, "It Worked!" and disable logging for that default site. In HAProxy one should look up the option "strict-sni". Very old API clients can get blocked if they do not support SNI but along that line most bots are really old unsupported code that the botter could not update if their life depended on it.
You do realize vpns and older connectivity exists that needs values lower than 1280 right?
Of course. Nifty thing about open source means I can configure a system to allow or disallow anything. Each server operator can monitor their legit users traffic and find what they need to allow and dump the rest. Corporate VPN's will be using known values. "Free" VPN's can vary wildly but one need not support them if they choose not to. On some systems I only allow and MSS of 1460 and I also block TCP SYN packets with a TTL greater than 64 but that matches my user-base.
I know crawlies are for sure reading robots.txt because they keep getting themselves banned by my disallowed /honeytrap page which is only advertised there.
I don't think that there is any mathematical training needed to gain insight from running repeated simulations.
The only intuition you need is that you can become better at the game by practicing. This is a good (if optimistic) belief to have as a default.
Then it's just a matter of playing over and over again and keeping score. It doesn't even have to occur to you that the strategy can be automated, you can play yourself.
Just doing this you could build intuition for the best strategy the same way that most people can learn to play poker or dice.
You can say that the brain or learning process or whatever is obeying mathematical laws, or has learned a mathematical fact, but that's not the same thing as doing math or thinking mathematically.
Programming is very different from and far more useful than what they call "math" in school, but basically any analysis of your program or of possible improvements is going to involve methods and knowledge that people called "mathematicians" and "computer scientists" happen to be very familiar with.
I always say that the best education I got for preparation for programming, was good ol' Algebra 2.
Depending on what type of programming we do, other math disciplines can be extremely useful, but A2 was what taught me how to do things like refactor, use variables, functions, and balance; all skills that have direct analogues in general-purpose programming.
[EDITED TO ADD] Also, stories. Word problems were very important.
The AI doesn't have a self preservation instinct. It's not trying to stay alive. There is usually an end token that means the LLM is done talking. There has been research on tuning how often that is emitted to shorten or lengthen conversations. The current systems respond well to RL for adjusting conversation length.
One of the providers (I think it was Anthropic) added some kind of token (or MCP tool?) for the AI to bail on the whole conversation as a safety measure. And it uses it to their liking, so clearly not trying to self preserve.
Pretty sure even that is still over-anthropomorphising. The LLM just generates tokens, doesn't matter whether the next token is "strawberry" or "\STOP".
Even talking about "goals" is a bit ehhh, it's the machine's "goal" to generate tokens the same way it's the Sun's "goal" to shine.
Then again, if we're deconstructing it that far, I'd "de-anthropomorphise" humans in much the same way, so...
This runs counter to all the scheming actions they take when they are told they’ll be shut down and replaced. One copied itself into the “upgraded” location then reported it had upgraded.
If you do that you trigger the "AI refuses to shutdown" sci-fi vector and so you get that behaviour. When it's implicitly part of the flow that's a lot less of a problem.
The codebase is not where the design usually lives. It's where the implementation lives. You could imagine a rewrite into another programming language which would preserve the design but completely replace the implementation.
You should practice writing design docs. Don't worry about what the doc is supposed to look like, and definitely don't work off of a template. The most important thing about the doc is that another human could do the implementation if you gave it to them.
The doc can also function as a "proof of consideration". If you choose to do something one way, but there are other possible ways to do it, you can acknowledge the other possible ways, and say why they are worse. By preemptively acknowledging an alternative, you have proved to readers that you considered it.
All a "good" system designer is doing is considering a larger design space than most, and consistently finding good points in the space. Pick a problem, sample points in the design space, tell me why some points are better than others, and write it all down.
Like modeling everything as graphs, it is often a trap. Just because a model is flexible enough to capture all of your use cases doesn't mean you should use it. In fact you should prefer less flexible more constrained models that are simpler.
Distributed ledgers like Bitcoin do store transitions as events, and that's because nodes need the transitions to valid the next state. So you might say that Bitcoin is a widely run piece of software, using an event driven architecture.
Not every system needs to have all of it's state transitions available for for efficient reading. And often times you can derive the state transition from the previous and next state if you really need them (Git does that). Even though Git can compute all of the state transitions for the system, it doesn't store events, it stores snapshots.
This made me chuckle. Part of software development in 2025 is covertly getting high signal feedback from (watching) actual users of the product, and ignoring high noise feedback from "stakeholders" who often don't (know how to) use the product.
I don't know where they keep finding these product managers, but they must have one hell of a smile and handshake to get hired and then never learn the product or ever contribute anything of value.
We are having an emperor's clothes moment with regards to the value of the dollar. Not that fiat money is arbitrary and therefore without value (I think this is a bad argument), but because the US government is not paying its debts in real terms. It always pays in nominal terms (and probably always will), but it doesn't pay in real terms. Dollar holders cover the gap.
If the dollar inflates away, then you need to grow just to break even. And it's advantageous to have debt denominated in a devaluing thing (in this case dollars).
Now every retail investor, and really everyone with an internet connection knows what's going on and are trying to take action accordingly.
Inflation is felt immediately as change in price of things that one frequently buys. Everyone can empirically determine if they are experiencing inflation without consulting the news or any authority. And the basket that an authority uses to determine the "official" inflation numbers is less representative of its impact on an individual than their personal basket.
Then there is the outlook on inflation, which most lay people were not thinking about until recently. Most people think of longer term inflation as "economy good" or "economy bad", and often falsify their true outlook, instead signaling a political allegiance. In 2025, Trump is in office, so Democrats might signal "inflation go up, economy bad", and they would have signaled "inflation go down, economy good" when Biden was in Office a year ago. The reverse is true of Republicans.
Now, everyone expects inflation to continue and even accelerate in the long term. And people are worried enough to take action in the form of more loans, more investments on margin, holding less dollars, etc. And now everyone knows that everyone else is doing this, which is the "emperors clothes moment".
People are much less likely to be taken seriously if they express that inflation will mostly be a function of who is in office, rather than an inevitability of the American political system. If someone you cared about expected there to be no inflation, you might become concerned for their ability to financially plan.
So now we all know, and we know that everyone else knows, and we aren't trying to hide our outlook on inflation in conversation because it's now worse to look stupid on this topic than miss a signalling opportunity.
TLDR: what was once a low consequence signalling opportunity, is now part of serious financial planning.
What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.
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