deepnotderp

> t also required just the right combination of natural resources (coal) and economic conditionsL deforestation

This argument is repeated often, but I don't think it's really true. Both Savery and Newcomen's engines were initially aimed at evacuating flooded metal mines and not coal mines.

It’s difficult to cmp diamond is the issue I’d assume

Yay for fracking!

Yay for natural gas!

New hardware could greatly reduce inference and training costs and solve that issue

Yes but one of the reasons that coal is being replaced by gas is because of the capex of the steam turbine

Oh my bad, you’re right

Re: Nat gas, agreed, it’s not solar though, storage is much more expensive

Thermal energy still needs to drive a turbine to generate electricity

Sure, but conventional DRAM endurance is 10^15 or more

$3/GJ is $108/MWH which any large scale fission buildout would easily beat for thermal energy costs

10^11 cycles is not “practically unlimited endurance”, that’s less than a second of use at 1 GHz

Thermal storage has very poor discharge rates unfortunately (usually slower than a day), as well as surprisingly high cost once you factor in inefficiencies and turbine cost

MCF has a bunch of challenges, eg no good pigtail connector, need for rotational alignment, inability to radix (MCF is great for point to point, less good if you want to fan out from one chip to multiple chips), etc

And then even after all that, it’s still 1-2 orders of magnitude lower density than waveguides

They do have higher energy density, it’s just a low power density

This is a lot of words to say “solar + battery lcoe is $70/MWH and gas is $40/MWH, but most places outside the U.S. don’t have access to tons of cheap gas so it’s more expensive there”

And no, they are wrong, gas is still currently cheaper ($40 is less than $70)

FEC latency is >> propagation delays at these distances, so that's probably the dominant factor in most cases

Hyperspectral camera?