Not really sure what the grift is here. Great Salt Lake Rising seems pretty reasonable reading their website https://gslrising.org/
To quote:
“We are coordinating across 30+ organizations to get water back to the lake. The immediate goal: 500,000 acre-feet of annual water savings by 2027.
- Acquire and retire U.S. Magnesium water rights — 80,000 acre-feet annually
- Aggressively remove invasive phragmites consuming 100,000+ acre-feet per year
- Restore Newfoundland Basin — 30,000 acre-feet
- Partner with agricultural water users through split-season leasing and crop optimization
- Expand secondary water metering for accountability and conservation
- Purchase and lease water rights to permanently return water to the lake
- Refine policy tools to make leasing, delivery, and conservation easier”
Seems to be associated with an all star group of Utah philanthropists. Not seeing what the angle would be other than restoring the lake.
Very cool, thanks for the detail. This leads me to wonder....why haven't Windows and Linux done any similar optimizations? I assume they do lots of hardware optimizations in all sorts of places, but this seems pretty core.
The challenge is that the competitive and economic pressures make this moot.
A person, entering the field via AI driven development, will have none of the qualms about skill, seniority, understanding the codebase, or craftsmanship. Those arguments are handwringing by the previous generation of engineers. Their focus is solely on the outcome and value produced from the input prompt. That aligns closer to how businesses see their codebase: something they have to prompt their engineers to produce in order to generate business value.
Similarly, new AI driven companies focused on delivering value at speed and lower costs will have none of the baggage of the legacy code companies with engineers stuck debating these questions. These new gen companies will be focused on delivering value, doing so at quicker speeds and lower costs, raising the level of competition for existing incumbents.
Will existing businesses be willing to spend money to purchase services from these new gen companies of AI developed products? Seems like it.
There are real problems with these AI developed codebases. They tend to collect baggage and start to feel like a house of cards. A big open question is whether AI models will continue to improve in order to patch all the vibe-holes being generated. Seems like they will improve.
Agree with this. I have Codex do analysis and feedback for Claude code. For whatever reason, Claude code seems to produce successful code more frequently, but it tends to have blind spots in performing analysis that Codex does a good job of picking up. The two together feel like a step up in state of the art.
I need a tool to put them in a loop together to get this done more efficiently…I guess I’ll plug this in as a prompt and go from there!
I've been following Sam for awhile, his business model makes heavy use of outsourcing production of components to skilled partners. It's no sweat off him if he makes the Impulse stove in California or not.
His point is that it's impossible to manufacture much of anything in California if you aren't grandfathered in. Seems pretty important for economic and security issues.
The electric induction cooktop he and his team has made is pretty cool! I'd check it out.
Would love to see nuclear do this, but the challenges to getting nuclear built are myriad. Regulatory burdens, cost to build reactors, painfully slow learning rate for nuclear reactor design and buildout.
Solar, while certainly not ideal, is comparatively trivial to build out. Functionally you buy and lay out cheap panels. Far smaller political challenges. Some friction around land use and interconnect, but compared to nuclear, orders of magnitude easier and the way forward seems clear with the existing political realities and economies of scale in action for solar panels.
Another point others haven't made, which Terraform Industries points out: that using solar to make Natural Gas is going to be the cheapest form of natural gas production.
You can effectively short circuit the existing fossil fuel industry and pull the hydrocarbons from the air instead of the ground to stay carbon neutral. No need to re-invent industry.
Really exciting for Terraform to hit this mark. Hopefully true, and not an April 1st joke. Casey Handmer (founder) is a pretty interesting guy. He also helped with the initial analysis of the crackle on the Vesuvius challenge scrolls that contributed to the breakthrough of reading the first passages from the scrolls. See https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien...
Highly recommend checking out more articles on the Terraform Industries blog and Casey's personal blog.
The scope of potential impact from building luxury apartments is wider than a price decrease. It' likely your area has a far larger demand for housing than the amount that is being built + existing housing stock, regardless of type (luxury vs affordable).
Put another way, building the luxury apartments helped prevent an acceleration of price increases across all levels of housing stock. Students from high income families need a place to live, and instead of taking housing stock from the affordable pool, further driving up costs, they have additional desirable supply at their income level.
But! That only prevented price increases due to limited additional supply and was insufficient to drive down costs. Overall aggregate demand still exceeds supply. The simply answer is to build more at all price levels. Small incremental increases of supply are unlikely to drive down costs.
The spat of news stories about electric car fires tends to be news sensationalism rather than the reality of residential fires.
By far, residential fires are started by cooking, home heating, malfunctioning electric wiring or lighting. Stuff you’ve already been living with for a long time!
Best thing to do is make sure your smoke alarms are working, regularly tested, and have an evacuation plan, practiced with your family.
To quote: “We are coordinating across 30+ organizations to get water back to the lake. The immediate goal: 500,000 acre-feet of annual water savings by 2027.
- Acquire and retire U.S. Magnesium water rights — 80,000 acre-feet annually
- Aggressively remove invasive phragmites consuming 100,000+ acre-feet per year
- Restore Newfoundland Basin — 30,000 acre-feet
- Partner with agricultural water users through split-season leasing and crop optimization
- Expand secondary water metering for accountability and conservation
- Purchase and lease water rights to permanently return water to the lake
- Refine policy tools to make leasing, delivery, and conservation easier”
Seems to be associated with an all star group of Utah philanthropists. Not seeing what the angle would be other than restoring the lake.