Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their basements by the million, so the aluminum-air battery may return to commercial use.
As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
You're overstating the current price of PV panels by a factor of three to five; it's closer to 3% of the 15-years-ago price than to 13%. That graph ends in 02023, at US$0.31/Wp, toward the end of the solar-panel bubble set up by the price-fixing cartel at the time. The actual current price is €0.11/Wp, or €0.06/Wp for low-cost (low-efficiency, no-warranty) panels: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...
€0.11 is 5% of US$2.39 (the Wp price on that graph from 02010), and €0.06 is 2.7% of it. However, my notes from 02016 say that the Solarserver price index for July 02010 was €1.62/Wp; sadly I did not note which module class that was. €0.11 is 6.8% of €1.62, but of course the Euro was worth more at the time...
This three-to-five-fold difference is why you're seeing this article now.
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.
Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
PEGs are in some ways more powerful than regexes, and in other ways less powerful, but usually the former matter more. This is not trivial to understand but I think it's not that hard either; it's a page of code: https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md
That version doesn't memoize and so doesn't enjoy Packrat parsing's linear-time guarantee, but you can easily modify it to do so.
Another subset of regexes that's easy to understand is this single-page pattern matcher by Rob Pike from TPOP: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/be... which is enormously less code than my single-page PEG parser generator above. But then, it doesn't have to compile itself.
Unfortunately, neither "waste time" nor "waste space" are approaches worth pursuing.
We already have too many programs being written that are too simple and thus slow and/or wrong. We need to write code that is as simple as possible, but no simpler.
In practice you can always make a program take less space if it can use more time, or take less time if it can use more space; the guiltless perfection you seek does not exist.
I feel like PEG parsing can be fast and space-efficient, but I haven't seen an existence proof yet.
Oh, that makes a lot more sense! I was puzzled as to how the new hardware could be so slow, but an inefficient interpreter easily explains it. I've seen over 1000× slowdowns from assembly to bash, so it sounds like ABAP is close to bash.
OT but why isn't longnow format LSB(LS Digit) first? 8102, 2102, etc. The problem is that years as variables are often processed as left aligned fixed length MSB first, so it's hard to make year processing code robust over wide ranges of time. If it had been LSB/LSD first, overflow checks can be just a truncation.
8102 and 2102 clearly belong to same age, 5491 and 8391 are more far apart but it's visually apparent that they share two LSDs, and a C program that displays rate of return of a 01-year bond will only have to care at most "654" part of year 654321 entered by user.
"02012" is more perplexing and it can be longer by whole 16 bits[than regular notation] or so[on some systems].
this was my take as well. twitter nostalgia not reality. I put the egalitarian age at around 2009 but you're right Kony-2012 was a huge pivot for social media
Python has a policy against maintaining compatibility with boring technology. We discussed this at some length in this thread the other day at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44477966; many people voiced their opposition to the policy. The alternatives suggested for the specific case of the cgi module were:
- use a language that isn't Python so you don't have to debug your code every year to make it work again when the language maintainers intentionally break it
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