ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Having LLMs create grand novel things and synthesize knowledge autonomously is still very rare.
I would argue that 2025 has been the year in which the entire world has been starting to make that happen. Many devs now have workflows where small novel things are created by LLMs. Google, OpenAI and the other large AI shops have been working on LLM-based AI researchers that synthesize knowledge this year.
Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.
To be fair, most vending machine operators do not allow suggestions from customers on what products to stock, let alone extensive ongoing and intentional adversarial psychological manipulation and deception.
If it had just made stocking decisions autonomously and based changes in strategy on what products were bought most, it wouldn't have any of the issues reported.
> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there.
This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.
Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.
Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).
> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.
That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).
2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.
3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.
Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.
> 1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels?
Mostly yes. Once you're at utility-scale, installation and maintainance should scale 1:1 with number of panels. Inverters and balancing systems should also scale 1:1, although you might be able to save a bit here if you're willing to "waste" power during peak insolation.
But think about it this way: If it was possible to reduce non-panel costs by a factor of 5 simply by building 5x larger solar plants, the operating companies would already be doing this. With non-panel costs around 65%, this would result in 65% * (1 - 1/5) = 52% savings and give them a huge advantage over the competition.
I agree that intra-day fluctuations will be solved by cheaper panels and cheaper batteries, especially once sodium-ion battery costs fall significantly. But I'm specifically talking about seasonal storage here.
> Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer.
I'm quite pessimistic about that. Chemical plants tend to be extremely capital-intensive and quickly become non-profitable if they're effectively idle during half of the year. Underground thermal storage would require huge infrastructure investments into distribution, since most places don't already have district heating.
Sorry, very busy today so I can't go into all details, but I still wanted to give you an answer.
> That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
A factor of 5 is certainly within the realms of physics, given the numbers I've seen floating around. Note that prices are changing rapidly and any old price may not be current: around these parts, they're already so cheap they're worth it as fencing material even if you don't bother to power anything with them.
> But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
This should have changed your opinion, because it shows how the material costs are not the most important factor: we can get up to a 3x cost reduction by improving automation of construction of utility-scale PV plants.
I think I've seen some HN startups with this as their pitch, I've definitely seen some IRL with this pitch.
> My main point is that that distance x is going to rapidly get towards just a few miles away from point of use very shortly.
That seems physically unlikely to me. Sure, burying and maintaining cables costs money, but other than that transferring energy in a very fundamental and solid state way is going to be much easier than packaging it up and transporting it with heavy machinery.
This is definitely a case where your argument only works if it is supported by the actual calculation.
The anti-duck-curve is actually really, really pronounced for east-west mounted bifacial panels.
The panels still don't generate any electricity at night of course, but other than that the output is an almost perfect inverse of the conventional equator-facing angled mounted panel output.
My next array is likely to be east-west vertical bifacials, as I need only a small amount of additional capacity in the summer, but could still do more in the winter.
We currently have:
- summer optimised array: almost flat, 15 degree, optimised for maximum power on sunny summer days, mostly runs our cooling
- winter/morning array. Points SSE, 65 degree incline. Gets great energy in the mornings, and on winter mornings. Performs surprisingly well in overcast conditions. Generates about the same power in midwinter and midsummer.
- winter/afternoon array. Same as the above, but SSW.
18kW total faceplate capacity, in reality we peak at around 5kW, but have that for about six hours of the day for 9 months of the year. Also means I can run three arrays on two MPPTs as the two tilted arrays are basically mutually exclusive as to when they make power.
The other reason for leaning towards vertical panels is cleaning. The flat panels accumulate a crust of crap (pollen, soot, dust) that cements on there fast, and requires vigorous scrubbing to remove. Kills 20% of the capacity unless I get up there with a broom every six weeks. The 65 degree ones I have not had to clean once, as stuff just slides off them.
That, and a pallet of bifacials is now cheaper than a pallet of monofacials.
The economics changed, it is now cheaper to put more panels East/West than having tracking ones as the tracking hardware is expensive. The tracking panels have the advantage to be put vertically in case of heavy hail.
Depends on what you mean by advantageous. Solar tracking setups are very expensive relative to a fixed panel one. They can produce more power per square meter via higher utilization but cost so much it makes more sense to just buy more panels if you have the space.
I meant advantageous in that the anti-duck-curve of these panels would only be superior compared to the duck curve of a fixed panel. But that it would be inferior compared to the (what I presume is) the very high peak of the regular-duck-curve of a traditional solar tracking panel, since the "tails" of the curve should be similar at sunrise/sunset. But I see now that solar tracking seems to have fallen out of favor due to the economics of how cheap panels are.
Absolutely but tracking is expensive relative to just throwing more panels at the problem.
But shading is also a factor. If you want to get unobstructed sun across the whole day, you need to be built on a nice curve of a hill? Or build just a straight line of panels?
1. Microsoft is not a "dotcom startup". We live in a different, much more consolidated tech world of companies that either balloon to become behemoths or are bought by existing behemoths.
2. Power and data centers can be used for other things than AI.
3. They might turn out to be wrong and not need the deal/power. For companies sitting on a shitload of cash that would be an inconvenience whereas not investing and then later having to beg for electricity amounts to losing the race.
Yes. Yes, it is a tragic event. Apart from it being simply morally utterly reprehensible, it is an extremely primitive and counter-productive way to fight against ideas and the messengers of those ideas.
Again, morally reprehensible and it doesn't fucking work. It only shows 'the other side is just as bad/worse', turns the messenger into a martyr, and galvanizes support.
> What is actually tragic is that spreading lies, as he did
Unlike many others, he invited anyone to the mic to prove him wrong. Hardly qualifies as lying. Anyone could have gotten to the mic and debate him. Sure, you may don't like his beliefs, but there is a huge difference between lying, and defending (even incorrect and unfounded) claims in public.
Even if he believed that himself, anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats. Read the audience. He knew what he was doing.
Let me document five very serious lies from him:
1. On Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble, Kirk repeatedly promoted the false claim that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy declared Floyd had died of an overdose.
2. Ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Kirk spread falsehoods about voter fraud, and immediately after Trump lost the 2020 election, Kirk promoted false and disproven claims of fraud in the election.
3. Kirk called the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches a "Democratic plot against Christianity".
4. In the 2020s, Kirk was a Christian nationalist who called the separation of Church and state in the United States a "fabrication".
5. Appearing at a Trump campaign rally in 2024, he said: "This is a Christian state. I'd like to see it stay that way."
There are innumerable more. For the record, the February 2023 Brookings Institution study found Kirk's podcast contained the second-highest proportion of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements among 36,603 episodes produced by 79 prominent political podcasters. [1]
Contrast it with the way in which truth is actually spread; it is by citing good-quality references.
> Even if he believed that himself, anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats. Read the audience. He knew what he was doing.
This is far fetched. People who have sent the death threats are lunatics. If the number of people who are sending death threats is our new standard for the quality and importance of debates, then we should simply stop the debates. There are always unhinged people around. Where does it leave us?
> Let me document five very serious lies from him:
Sure. Some are maybe lies, some are his opinions, some are misleading claims, and the rest are his own beliefs. Still, anyone could have went in front of the mic and debated him for it. In my opinion, someone is a liar when they have a platform to lie, and no way for the public to engage, debate, and correct them. While Kirk's beliefs are very far from my own (e.g., I do not believe that election was stolen), I still think that what he did is needed today: speaking your mind, and being open to be challenged in public.
It is bewildering how the Republican voters don't realize that the party cares exclusively about those who fund the party, not about those who vote for it. The votes are gained exactly on the basis of lies. If the party actually cared for its voters, it would send all the non-immigrant work-visa employees back home immediately if they don't have a PhD degree in their field of work.
The footage I have seen universally depicts a cheering, entertained crowd that expresses nothing I could interpret as hateful towards anyone.
> Kirk repeatedly promoted the false claim that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy declared Floyd had died of an overdose.
Two autopsies were performed, and both involved at least one medical examiner. One of them found that fentanyl and/or methamphetamine may have been a complicating factor. But this is understating the case. Floyd is known to have taken a very high dose of fentanyl (https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/george-floyd/evide...), which is commonly understood to be a very dangerous drug. The other autopsy, commissioned by Floyd's legal team, did not include a toxicology report.
> ... voter fraud ...
This is, of course, hotly contested. People on the other side of the aisle, from what I can tell, sincerely believe that the people "disproving" these claims are fabricating their evidence and/or ignoring supporting evidence.
Regardless, believing a falsehood to be true is not the same thing as lying.
> Kirk called the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches a "Democratic plot against Christianity". In the 2020s, Kirk was a Christian nationalist who called the separation of Church and state in the United States a "fabrication". Appearing at a Trump campaign rally in 2024, he said: "This is a Christian state. I'd like to see it stay that way."
This is the same thing repeated three times, and it is an opinion, not a claim. He was not saying anything about what the law or Constitution provides. He was describing what he considers to be the general order of the society around him.
Many political thinkers across the spectrum have disputed that the US implements real separation of church and state, irrespective of what the laws and Constitution say. There are many simple ways to make this argument.
For example, giving preferential tax treatment or legal recognition to married couples is a clear mingling of church and state; government didn't come up with the concept, existing religious traditions (including paganism; I am not agreeing with Kirk's opinion on Christianity here) did.
For another example, from the Constitution:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
It's hard to fathom, given the identities of the people involved, that "Creator" here refers to something other than the Christian God.
> There are innumerable more.
Again, the reliability of "fact-checking" institutions is in question. I have personally encountered examples of sites like Snopes and Politifact giving significantly different truth ratings to the same claim when it was made by different politicians. There are other sites out there dedicated to cataloguing such examples.
ChatGPT is only 3 years old. Having LLMs create grand novel things and synthesize knowledge autonomously is still very rare.
I would argue that 2025 has been the year in which the entire world has been starting to make that happen. Many devs now have workflows where small novel things are created by LLMs. Google, OpenAI and the other large AI shops have been working on LLM-based AI researchers that synthesize knowledge this year.
Your phrasing seems overly pessimistic and premature.
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