seltzered_

And of course some credit that he was right on some technologies not making much sense like electric planes: https://bsky.app/profile/thierryaaron.bsky.social/post/3mwjx... referencing ch 5 pg 35 of 'sustainability without the hot air'

Comment · 1 month ago

What I'm trying to gesture at isnt engineering prowess though but better questions around how California changed over the past 100ish years and the issues around land-use change and relationship to water. See things like what Yasha Levine has done such as:

- Pistachio Wars film - https://pistachiowars.com which talks about the changes in water use and canal development

- the original article 'A Journey through Oligarch Valley' from 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20151115054847/https://www.nsfwc...

Comment · 1 month ago

When you read lines like "California’s extensive network of canals and aqueducts is the lifeblood of the state, providing clean water to populous cities and expansive farms that wouldn’t otherwise have it." you have to ask how we ended up with these canal systems, what the tradeoffs are in a landscape setup this way rather than one where water infiltrates the ground and stays hydrated, and who owns water rights in California.

Build Soil has some interesting threads on this:

- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3lmeddjd...

- https://bsky.app/profile/buildsoil.bsky.social/post/3mkzybkk...

(note: I'm not trying to totally bash the solar panel project nor some of the key figures involved who've done great work like Dustin Mulvaney, but do think we should think about how we ended up here)

Comment · 1 month ago

Look for professional or IPC training videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/b15MMzb_GWw )

Comment · 2 months ago

I encourage you to do a deeper dive into the sources of famine in India - specifically impacts of Churchill in WW2 just before the Green Revolution. See https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-... (based on https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018... ) along with this documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw . While there are drought induced famines, I still wonder what other approaches could be done (ranging from land-use changes, etc.)

Also ask yourself what the tradeoffs were in terms of biodiversity losses and agricultural diversity losses due to Green Revolution, and areas where it didnt work out like the attenpts of it on Balinese subak rice agriculture practices (the book 'Priests and Programmers' should have more info)

Comment · 2 months ago

That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate.

First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers").

Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3]

[1]: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023)

[3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...

Comment · 2 months ago

OpenBB is/was another effort attempting to be a more open Bloomberg Terminal alternative: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance .

Comment · 2 months ago

The original deleted blog post on the 'ai agent hacks gym' story was back from April 2026: https://web.archive.org/web/20260516025532/https://www.affin...

Comment · 2 months ago

Something to hold in mind are the issues with scaling out to new cities in terms of safety risks: https://junkoyoshidaparis.substack.com/p/rapid-scaling-turns...

Comment · 2 months ago

When the girls breakup prolly: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-15/uber-a...

Comment · 3 months ago

I recommend doing some reading about the inputs modern agriculture depends on (e.g. chemical fertilizer) then thinking about the issues they're associated with beyond an anthropocentic frame (e.g. ocean dead zones).

Comment · 4 months ago

HN supposedly currently runs via M5 Hosting according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750668 (comment from late 2025), though I think it ran on a single server over a decade ago.