skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Nearly half of the US data centers planned for 2026 are getting delayed or canceled because nobody stockpiled enough transformers and circuit breakers in ~tech

    skybrian
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    Moving a bit slower doesn't seem like a bad thing since it will encourage efficiency improvements. Just since the start of the year there have been some interesting research papers about improving...

    Moving a bit slower doesn't seem like a bad thing since it will encourage efficiency improvements. Just since the start of the year there have been some interesting research papers about improving inference efficiency.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Can a country get too rich? Norway shows the potential pitfalls of uncommon prosperity. in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    The article talks about inefficiency in terms of wasted money. The question is what are the real-world impacts of that? It might be increased environmental impact or wasting people's time on...

    The article talks about inefficiency in terms of wasted money. The question is what are the real-world impacts of that? It might be increased environmental impact or wasting people's time on "bullshit jobs" compared to a more efficient system.

    A more in-depth investigation would answer questions like that.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes. The coding agent I use is more like a command-line interface, so that’s “traditional” in an old-school sense. It’s not “as you type.” One way to think of it is that I can imagine a command...

    Yes. The coding agent I use is more like a command-line interface, so that’s “traditional” in an old-school sense. It’s not “as you type.” One way to think of it is that I can imagine a command that does what I want, and then I can ask the AI to do that (in English). It will use the appropriate tools.

    But I can turn the tables by asking it if it has any questions or suggestions for improvements. I commonly ask it to review design docs.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want in ~comp

    skybrian
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    Are you using a tool that limits what you can ask for? At a prompt, I can ask the coding agent to do whatever task I want.

    Are you using a tool that limits what you can ask for? At a prompt, I can ask the coding agent to do whatever task I want.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on Competence is lonely. Nobody talks about why. in ~health.mental

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like a workplace has to be pretty dysfunctional for things like promotions and raises to be entirely independent of effort? Sure, there are places like that, but it seems pretty cynical.

    It seems like a workplace has to be pretty dysfunctional for things like promotions and raises to be entirely independent of effort? Sure, there are places like that, but it seems pretty cynical.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Colorado passes first law in the US to ban arrests based solely on colorimetric drug tests in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Colorado just enacted the nation’s first law banning arrests based solely on the results of colorimetric drug tests – a field test widely used by law enforcement across the country.

    The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.

    But these inexpensive tests also lead to false positives at alarming rates, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found.

    While the actual error rate nationwide is unknown, previous studies by manufacturers have put it around 4%. But the UPenn researchers believe the actual rate is much higher, from 15% to 38%. And a study by the New York City Department of Investigation showed test error rates from 79% to 91% in some correctional settings.

    10 votes

  8. Comment on Nation's largest urban battery is being built in Daly City, California in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't think this sort of comparison can be made without doing detailed calculations. For example, there are limits on how much energy power lines can transmit, so time of day might matter? Some...

    I don't think this sort of comparison can be made without doing detailed calculations. For example, there are limits on how much energy power lines can transmit, so time of day might matter?

    Some power is generated locally (for example, residential solar), so it seems like having some local storage might be useful?

    Pumped storage is good where available but geographically, it's pretty limited.

    4 votes

  9. Comment on Evacuation of US troops from Mideast base sends community groups scrambling to help in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Bahrain is the home of the Navy's 5th Fleet, making it a central hub for providing maritime security in the Middle East region, including protecting commercial shipping. The country is an island in the Persian Gulf that sits roughly 124 nautical miles away from the coast of Iran, which makes Bahrain well within range of Iranian drone and missile strikes.

    [...]

    On the opening day of the war, the base, known as Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bahrain, was struck multiple times. Posts on social media showed a ballistic missile and Iranian drones slamming into the base. Satellite imagery from the company Planet shows that at least seven buildings in and around the base were struck between Feb. 28 and March 6.

    In response to an NPR request, a Navy spokesman acknowledged that 1,500 sailors, their families and several hundred pets were relocated back to the U.S. from NSA Bahrain.

    Sailors have been arriving in Norfolk, Va., home to the world's biggest naval base, since at least the middle of March. Several groups that provide aid to military personnel say that the sailors arrived with very little. A call went out to community groups, asking for basic supplies like hygiene products.

    [...]

    "They literally told them, 'Get what you can get in the backpack. You've got to go,'" he said. "They came with no uniforms, nothing. The three we met first, they came with the clothes on their back, what they could fit in that backpack."

    [...]

    When troops move overseas, they don't keep a home in the United States. The military requires service members to designate a safe haven where they will be relocated to in an emergency. Some of the sailors have gone to stay with relatives, while others remain on bases in the United States. MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., and Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina have also been hubs for returning flights.

    On April 1, the Navy released updated guidance for sailors and families who were evacuated. The service has worked out how people can be reimbursed for living in hotel rooms, including families who were temporarily relocated to Italy and Germany before being transported back to the United States.

    8 votes

  11. Comment on Surf Social (from the makers of Flipboard) in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    That protocol does exist. It's an RSS or Atom feed. Looks like surf.social does import RSS feeds. I don't know if it will export them as well.

    That protocol does exist. It's an RSS or Atom feed.

    Looks like surf.social does import RSS feeds. I don't know if it will export them as well.

    4 votes

  12. Comment on Used electric vehicles are a bargain right now in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Across the U.S., people like Shepard are finding that used EVs are more attractively priced than ever — and are snapping the cars up as a result. It’s a welcome development in what has otherwise been a tough year for an industry that’s key to combatting climate change.

    With the oil shock created by the war in Iran, used EVs are likely to become even more attractive to shoppers. Nationally, gas prices have surged to over $4 per gallon on average; in California, the country’s EV capital, they’re nearing $6. Unlike new EVs, used versions have mostly reached priced parity with gas-powered cars, according to new data from Cox Automotive — making the preowned versions the cheapest way for people to ditch increasingly costly-to-fuel gas cars in the near term.

    [...]

    New EV sales dropped by 28% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, per Cox. That was primarily driven by the loss of federal tax credits under the megabill passed by Republicans in Congress last year.

    By contrast, used EV sales increased by 12% over the same period. The reason? Declining prices. The average cost of a used EV is now within about $1,300 of a comparable gas vehicle, Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, said during a March forecast call. ​“That affordability shift has clearly shown up in the data,” she said, ​“significantly expanding access for mainstream buyers.”

    In the U.S., new EVs still outsell used ones. That’s likely to change as the market matures, since the overall used car market is roughly three times as large as the new car market. Right now, EVs make up only about 2% of the used car market, but that share is growing, according to Cox data.

    [...]

    These latest data points aren’t coming out of left field, said Scott Case, CEO of Recurrent, a data-science firm specializing in collecting information on used EVs. His company tracked a 35% increase in used EV sales from 2024 to 2025, as well as a consistent downward trend in pricing, with 56% of used EVs selling for $30,000 or less as of January.

    [...]

    In particular, a lot of those used EVs are coming off leases made popular by a ​“leasing loophole” that allowed automakers and dealers to offer a full $7,500 federal tax credit, without the income qualification and manufacturer restrictions that applied to claiming the credit on direct sales.

    [...]

    And the latest vintages of used EVs offer an impressive value when compared with their gas-powered equivalents, Case said. Recurrent’s latest data indicates that a used EV is a year newer and has nearly 30,000 fewer miles than a similarly priced used gas car.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Nation's largest urban battery is being built in Daly City, California in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Developer Arevon has begun building a 1-gigawatt-hour storage project in Daly City, near the Cow Palace arena, where it will serve up clean energy at night.

    [...]

    Developer Arevon has begun construction of the Cormorant Energy Storage Project, which will occupy an 11-acre vacant lot just southwest of the Cow Palace in Daly City. The battery facility will be large by industry standards, with 250 megawatts of Tesla Megapack containers, capable of discharging for four hours straight, for 1 gigawatt-hour of total stored energy. Bigger batteries have been built, but when Cormorant comes online in about a year, it will be poised to be the country’s largest battery nestled within a major urban area.

    Arevon has contracted the battery for 15 years of use by MCE, one of California’s biggest community choice aggregators — entities that purchase electricity on behalf of local residents as an alternative to Wall Street–owned for-profit utilities. The state requires MCE to buy grid capacity commensurate with its members’ usage, and the Cormorant project will fulfill 10% of this annual requirement, known as resource adequacy in California bureaucratese.

    MCE has become a major force in the greater Bay Area: It now serves all of Marin and Napa counties, most of Contra Costa, and half of Solano. The aggregator can contract for power plants across California, but it looks for sites within or near its service territory when possible, said Jenna Tenney, MCE’s director of communications and community engagement.

    [...]

    The Cormorant battery provides something new: a dense source of on-demand power that can slip into the urban fabric without any local air pollution, and which absorbs the far-off solar generation at midday to discharge later at night. Arevon CEO Justin Johnson estimated that the battery, fitting on the site of a former drive-in movie theater, could cover the electricity needs of some 321,000 homes for four hours straight.

    “It couldn’t keep the whole city going, but it certainly, without a doubt, increases the reliability of the grid in that area in a substantial way,” he said.

    Arevon didn’t jump to the highest echelon of energy storage development from nothing. The firm has invested $11 billion in projects and owns 6 gigawatts of solar and battery installations operating across 18 states.

    [...]

    The company launched in 2021 as a spinout of Capital Dynamics, a private equity fund that amassed an early portfolio of energy storage assets. Arevon is owned by the California State Teachers’ Retirement Fund, Dutch pension fund APG, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Those firms invest for steady, long-term growth, and their patience lends itself to Arevon building and owning batteries for the long haul, instead of building to flip to other buyers.

    [...]

    Arevon focused on the Daly City location because electricity price volatility tends to be highest in proximity to major consumption, Johnson said. Places like that — whether metro areas or large industrial hubs — see the greatest swings from peak to off-peak hours, and having battery facilities to arbitrage between those times should push prices down in the long run. But building within a city comes with obvious trade-offs.

    “Siting any infrastructure, whether you’re putting in a Walmart or upgrading an intersection or doing anything in a high-density area, is tough … especially so for power plants or facilities like this,” he noted.

    [...]

    Such projects ​“reduce your lifespan a little bit” from the stress, Johnson said, but once built, the intrinsic difficulty becomes a sort of strategic moat. If a competitor wanted to open up next door to Cow Palace, well, they probably couldn’t find a viable space.

    [...]

    Arevon’s choice of battery, Tesla’s Megapack 2 XL, addressed the safety question. The containerized storage product is filled with the lithium-ferrous phosphate cells, a battery chemistry known to be significantly less fire-prone than earlier lithium-ion varieties. The older Moss Landing facility packed a huge amount of batteries into a single legacy structure, where they became fuel for an immense conflagration. The Megapack containers, in contrast, will be spread out across the site in a design that will prevent a fire from spreading beyond a single metal box. If one unit ever did catch fire, it would damage only a fraction of 1 percent of the plant’s capacity.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on US imports more from Taiwan than China for first time in decades in ~finance

  17. Comment on Curl will end its bug bounty program by the end of January due to excessive AI generated reports in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    Same author, two and a half months later:

    Same author, two and a half months later:

    The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.

    I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Infinite Jest extraction in ~books

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    What is Infinite Jest about? The setting is an alternate history America that is wacky and largely established for comedic and thematic purposes, the plot matters even less and barely exists across 52.5 hours/1,100 pages but consists mostly of groups of people living their lives at an elite tennis academy and a drug/alcohol rehab facility, the characters matter a lot and many are very deep but there are a billion of them and their stories are told temporally out of order in a way that leaves you (the reader) often not understanding them until, like, 45 hours/800 pages into the book. The vast majority of chapters are devoted to describing characters in little snippets of their lives in ways that have some thematic relevance but usually no story relevance.

    But Infinite Jest is also about is the rot of cynicism and the painful catharsis of earnestness and the trap of excessive entertainment potency and figuring out how to find meaning in giving your life to something.

    It’s a lot, it’s confusing, sometimes it’s dumb, sometimes it doesn’t always work, but it’s impossible to read Infinite Jest and not recognize the late David Foster Wallace as some kind of genius. A sub-genius couldn’t write this. And although I was bored throughout significant chunks of the book, and although I think there is a half-way decent case that Infinite Jest would be better if you cut down 30-60% of it, I also found it brilliantly insightful, and it ended up resonating with me in a way books rarely do.

    [...]

    So I’m going to try to extract the value I got from Infinite Jest by going over my understanding of its setting, plot, and themes to present them in the most condensed form possible to readers so they can hopefully get a significant portion of the value to be gleaned from the book without necessarily spending 52.5+ hours reading it.

    Needless to say, FULL SPOILERS FOR Infinite Jest AHEAD, but I’ll also note the caveat that this is a book where the plot doesn’t really matter.

    9 votes

  20. Comment on Boomer hate in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    “For all of human history” seems like an overreach. I’m doubtful that was true before the 60’s and it is probably limited to WEIRD countries at best.

    “For all of human history” seems like an overreach. I’m doubtful that was true before the 60’s and it is probably limited to WEIRD countries at best.

    7 votes