Neither WebRTC or WebGL are remotely ‘useless’. Very fair though to say that you would prefer to have them disabled and/or whitelisted for certain sites.
Calling the industry largely a scam is pretty strong. Of course for the small minority of technically competent people with interest and time it will always be cheaper to do something yourself rather than pay a business to accomplish the same thing. But most people cannot/do not want to do it themselves, and regulations are there at least partially to help protect them against the house-fire-waiting-to-happen untrained handyman.
Sure a bunch of businesses opportunistically up-charge, some I'm sure are predatory, and there are obviously efficiencies to improve, but overall scam it is not.
Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology.
There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.
Best comment by far. The post suffers from making good points about the lack of rigor and narrative nature of the book, but then does exactly the same thing to claim the opposite conclusion the book makes.
Primary energy sources are what they are, both your comment and the linked article seem to imply discussing them should lead to a deserved punch in the face. Can you help me understand why?
As far as I can tell, your link argues that if we overcome all the practical challenges (politics, resources, financing, technical innovation) and go all-electric for global energy, we only need ~1/3 as much input energy potential as we use today for the same useful work. That’s useful, but the hard part lies in those practical challenges. And the primary sources of global human energy use are a long way away from that goal.
So should we strive to get there? Sure. Should we be tactical about how? Yes. And the link seems to argue that as well. But is it reasonable to hit our 2050 goals based on the current global fossil fuel usage? Not really. So I’m really missing how this refutes Smil’s article, and why “primary energy” is such a stupid thing.
The problem with it is that it makes it easy to make bad faith arguments for why we can’t or shouldn’t transition (kinda like is being done here).
Take for example paragraphs like:
> Primary electricity (hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, and a small contribution by geothermal plants) accounted for no more than about 18% of the world’s primary energy consumption, which means that fossil fuels still provided about 82% of the world’s primary energy supply in 2022.
Are used as justification for why green green energy is a scam, it can’t be done, or it’s too expensive, etc., etc. after all 82% of primary energy is still from fossil fuels.
Except we don’t have to replace 82%, since 2/3rds of that is wasted. Of 100 kWh we’re already done 12 kWh and only need to add 27 (NOT 82) more kWh of electricity to replace all the fossil fuel usage. And that’s before talking about any efficiency gains (e.g heat pumps with COP >4).
Ah, seems like I was missing some context where the fossil fuel and anti-renewable folks have been using the term in arguments against trying to change.
I’m not sure of Smil’s politics but to be fair, there’s nothing in that quote that is inherently misleading. I can see through how others could spin it, and I’ll be more careful knowing the term has some politics behind it now. To me his argument in the article is that it’s not practical to expect a transition in a 25-year timescale, not that it’s impossible or not worth working on.
Heat pumps are a good example where the practice has been a lot harder than we might hope. Sure COP > 4 for heating is great, but the units are very expensive today, and in most of the US and Europe with sub-zero winter temps operate with much worse efficiencies, making them significantly more expensive to operate. I’m sure with effort those issues will improve, and major policy shifts can help mitigate some of the costs. But especially without a strong will today those changes are practically too far off for the 2050 target.
> there’s nothing in that quote that is inherently misleading
The discussion of the issue in terms of primary energy is the very thing that's inherently misleading. To move away from fossil fuels we do not have to replace the primary energy, we have to replace the useful energy that comes out the other side. From the Sankey diagram in the article I linked [0], 67.5 units of energy are not useful energy.
To put it to an extreme, instead of 67.5 units beings wastes, it could be 100 billion units for 32.5 units of useful energy produces. Focusing on the 100 billion is inherently misleading since they are irrelevant when the replacement technology basically creates the useful energy with over 100% efficiency at times.
Heat pumps. Yes their COP is lower during cold winters, but that brings in 2 discussions.
1) any COP value above 1 means that we'll need less primary energy than when buying something, and even in cold weather they manage a COP above that [1].
2) Lower COPs will cost you more, depending on what your natural gas prices are like due to any crazed lunatics invading their neighbours. Which conincidentally is only what pushes electricity prices up in many places that use natural gas for electricity (even just peak demand).
The capital cost difference also depends drastically on situation. Many climates need both heating and cooling, so the price of heat pump versus furnace + AC unit is much smaller than heat pump versus furnace.
> But especially without a strong will today those changes are practically too far off for the 2050 target.
I agree, and even replacing the 1/3rd of the primary energy will be a tough challenge. But Vaclav continual framing in terms of primary energy is actively used to push inaction. His critics have been vocal about this point (and others) for a while, he should know better by now.
Thanks, you have helped at least me think a bit differently about this. I still believe primary energy is a valid way to look at the problem, but see more clearly how easily it can lead an uninformed audience to a bad conclusion.
And on heat pumps - it’s sad to reflect that even if we replaced all heating, it’s still only a couple % of the total rejected heat. There are few easy wins in this game, just many different ways we need to chip away at it.
> it’s sad to reflect that even if we replaced all heating, it’s still only a couple % of the total rejected heat.
It's actually not as bad as it looks.
Even if the home heating is not the biggest contributor from that chart, it is still a worthwhile target. Though EVs are likely a more impactful choice.
One thing not captured by that chart are the 2nd order effects of either heat pump or EV switching. Part of what makes switching economically unattractive (aside from allowing the fossil fuel options to pollute for free) are the economies of scale present for fossil fuels. However, those same economies of scale can easily flip to diseconmics of scale as customers switch away. Every ICE car replaced by an EV makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, the same thing for heat pumps and natural gas andheating oil.
So for natural gas, removing the stream going to residential, significantly impacts the economic calculation for commercial and industrial uses.
For gasoline and diesel, the impact as even more serious. Out of every barrel of crude oil 70% gets turned into gasoline/diesel [0]. The unit economics there are going to be even worse as gasoline demand continues to drop.
A gas furnace converts 1 J of chemical potential energy (higher heating value for natural gas) into essentially 1 J of internal energy in the air (raising it’s temperature).
A heat pump can take 1 J of electricity and move (realistically) up to 5 J of internal energy from A to B.
A layman description (if not actually accurate) is that while a gas furnace (or electric resistive heating) can be 100% efficient, a heat pump can be 500% efficient.
Can you point me to the actual literature on the mechanics of heat pumps b/c I don't think you're explaining properly what's going on. If you can get 5J out of 1J then you have a perpetual motion machine & those are physically & logically impossible (assuming physically relevant axioms).
Links below, tldrs here: A heat pump does what the name suggests: it pumps heat. Resistive heating and burning gas is converting energy from one form into another. A heat pumps moves energy from A to B (making A colder and B hotter in the process) in literally the same way AC units
You get 5 J of heat out for every 1 J of electricity in because we're being funny with the units. You put in 1 J of electricity and the rest is put in as heat from your source (A) and then moved into B.
That obviously doesn't make sense if you know basic physics. Converting gas into heat by combusting it heats up the air in the room directly. Burning that gas in a turbine & then transferring that energy through a bunch of transformers to get to the heat pump can't give you more heat than what went into combusting the gas in the first place. This obviously doesn't work in reverse to cool a room but the direction I laid out is obviously correct.
You're not using funny units, you're confused about the thermodynamics of the situation. Heat pumps are more efficient air coolers than standard air conditioners but they're not giving you more energy than what you put into it.
> you're confused about the thermodynamics of the situation.
I assure you I am not, it is actually you who still seem confused about where the energy is coming from.
> they're not giving you more energy than what you put into it.
When you burn gas in a furnace, all of the energy that raises the temperature of the house comes from the gas.
When you run a heat pump you have two sources of energy:
1. Electricity running the thing.
2. Heat from the outside that you're moving inside.
#2 is where most of the energy that actually heats up the house comes from. The electricity is used to move it from outside the house to inside.
> Burning that gas in a turbine & then transferring that energy through a bunch of transformers to get to the heat pump can't give you more heat than what went into combusting the gas in the first place.
It actually can. A combined cycle plant can be ~60% efficient (chemical energy -> electricity). Say another 70% for getting it from the plant to your heat pump, then a COP 3 (or "efficiency" of 300%) gives you 0.6x0.7x3 or 1.26. So for every J of natural gas you burn in that plant, you'll heat your house with 1.26 J (compared to at best 1 J, realistically 0.9 J, for a gas furnace).
If you instead look at a ground source heat pump, you can get a COP of ~7 [0]. You're now putting ~3 J of heat into your house of each J of natural gas.
That's clever accounting but your overall system (house + outside + plant + fuel) is still less than 100% efficient. That's basic physics/thermodynamics.
Heat pumps are basically taking advantage of solar + geothermal radiation that ends up in the ground & air but once you account for the solar + geo radiation then it becomes obvious that all a heat pump is doing is accelerating the production of entropy. You're either normalizing the delta between inside & outside or increasing it but in both cases the overall entropy of the system goes up. Whereas your accounting seems to suggest you somehow get more energy than what was available which is obviously unphysical.
But my accounting was always about the energy that we as humans need to supply. This discussion was originally about how talking about the energy transition in terms of primary energy is inherently misleading.
A heat pump does not magically create the difference between work input and heat output, it pulls it from second source. But that source is free. All we have to provide is the work.
Replacing a gas burner with a heat pump does not require us to replace 1 J of chemical potential energy with 1 J of electricity, instead replace it with 0.33 J of electricity (or even less).
So there’s another force at work here that to me answers the question in a different way. Agents also massively decrease the difficulty of coming into someone else’s messy code base and being productive.
Want to make a quick change or fix? The agent will likely figure out a way to do it in minutes rather the than hours it would take me to do so.
Want to get a good understanding of the architecture and code layout? Working with an agent for search and summary cuts my time down by an order of magnitude.
So while agree there’s a lot more “what the heck is this ugly pile of if else statements doing?” And “why are there three modules handling transforms?”, there is a corresponding drop in cost to adding features and paying down tech debt. Finding the right balance is a bit different in the agentic coding world, but it’s a different mindset and set of practices to develop.
In my experience this approach is kicking the can down the road. Tech debt isn't paid down, it's being added to, and at some point in the future it will need to be collected.
When the agent can't kick the can any more who is going to be held responsible? If it is going to be me then I'd prefer to have spent the hours understanding the code.
This is actually a pretty huge question about AI in general
When AI is running autonomously, where is the accountability when it goes off the rails?
I'm against AI for a number of reasons, but this is one of the biggest. A computer cannot be held accountable therefore a computer must never make executive decisions
The accountability would be in whoever promoted it. This isn't so much about accountability, as it is who is going to be responsible for doing the actual work when AI is just making a bigger mess.
The accountability will be with the engineer that owns that code. The senior or manger that was responsible for allowing it to be created by AI will have made sure they are well removed.
While an engineer is "it" they just have to cross their fingers and hope no job ending skeletons are resurrected until they can tag some other poor sod.
What does Germany use to manage microorganism growth in it's water distribution system? As I understand cloramine/chlorine is used to keep the small amounts of microorganisms that will always be present in water and pipes from growing into a problem while it travels/sits in the distribution system.
As I imagine it, Einstein would no be happy with fixing a couple bugs and making a state machine. Einstein would add a new unit test framework and implement a linear optimizer written with only lambdas to solve the problem and recommend replacing the web server with it as well. This is tongue in cheek but gets the idea across.
The problem is that "work smart not hard" for software devs is counterintuitive because using your brain is the hard work. Einstein works too hard and creates code that's hard to reason about, Most doesn't work hard enough and creates code that's hard to reason about.
The originating example for an Amanda is someone who used her brain to recognize that the existing code was clumsily modeling a state machine and clarified the code by reframing it in terms of well-known vocabulary. It's technically an abstraction but because every dev is taught in advance how they work it's see-through and reduces cognitive load even when you must peel back the abstraction to make changes.
So this is a really good example of small sample size intuition being a big challenge. Fatalities happen on the order of billion miles driven - obviously people don’t come to that. Take a few thousand miles of positive experience sets a statistical floor on accident rates, but that is orders of magnitude away from how safe (or unsafe, depending on how you look at it) human drivers are on average. FSD and other, less capable L2 systems are amazing at paying attention in situations where humans fail, but also tend to have major limitations in places humans will largely do great most of the time. Your experience, as positive as it has been, doesn’t support the assertion that fatalities would decrease.
I see median human drivers all of the time, and I see median FSD all of the time. I don’t need to drive a billion miles to have a valid opinion that one is better than the other.
I’m sure things are very different out around the edges, as you note, but the majority of the time
humans in cars kill people
it isn’t because they were in an edge case - quite the opposite. They were just driving home from
the bar like they do every night.
