I read a great report by the Rocky Mountain Institute around 2000. They went through all the math of various hydrogen solutions, taking into account all the various efficiencies. It would be fun to see an update.

As I wrote, suppose you have a spare kWh of electric power. What do you do with it? There's lots of choices, including just "venting" it if it turns out none of the storage solutions are cheaper than just burning a cubic foot of natural gas. The good news is we seem to have lots of people trying various things. If we're open minded about which solutions work, and follow the data even when it doesn't support our favored solutions, we'll eventually find what works best.

Right. And that's the interesting question, what's the best way to store surplus solar/wind electricity? Batteries? Hydrogen (to be burned or to run a fuel cell)? Sold to other grids who need it and bought back when they have a surplus? As hot sand?

I wouldn't jump to the assumption that generating, storing, and burning hydrogen is obviously best. It does have the nice benefit that one might generate it on-site (you've got the high capacity tie to the grid just sitting there, right?) and you're using a very efficient turbine/generator, which apparently we already intended to buy.

Sure but means (a) you may get fewer loads done in a given evening and (b) you're more likely to be tying up a dryer someone else wants to use and (c) more likely to find someone put your clean dry undies in an untidy pile somewhere.

My oven is wifi-conected. In theory, when the timer goes off, I can turn the oven off. But I have to wander into the kitchen anyway to take the food out so I've always been a little puzzled why this is a win. Until the oven comes with robot arms, it's an incomplete solution.

OTOH, being able to check the state of my garage doors, irrigation, and pool gear is often handy. I wouldn't ditch the dedicated controls for a phone app but they're nice complements.

I can also imagine that for new construction, I might want to disassociate switches from outlets. It would be nice to change what each switch does if needed. For the most part everything wired when the house was built is great. When I add switches or outlets, it would be nice to be able to program things. I'm not going to renovate my entire house around this, mind you.

The biggest issue I see is technical obsolescence. The gizmos I bought 10 years ago are at end-of-life and I don't want to keep replacing all my outlets every decade or so. When standards settle down and interoperability is a thing, maybe I'll rethink it.

Which is actually the best argument for twice annual clock changes. That's a good compromise between everyone getting up at the same(ish) time relative to sunrise while also letting us use published and well-know schedules ("the store opens at 9 AM").

I used to think we should just leave the clocks alone and if you wanted more evening light, start your day earlier. But think of the confusion that causes. Every store, office, and human interaction would be in flux all the time. "Oh, I forgot, your office opens at 7 AM May through September and 8 AM the rest of the year; ours opens at 7 AM April through October, because we're further north than you."

I'm starting to think that changing clocks stinks but is less bad than the alternatives.

I agree. Bluetooth connectivity is the biggest headache tethering my phone. You'd think we'd know how to do this by now. Alas, no.

Google and the app vendors also handle the app GUI tech. That's hugely important. I find Google Maps much more usable than the map app built into my car.

To your point, however, I'd prefer GM spent their clever beans on improving the connection experience, building better physical controls (I love, love, love the physical controls in my car), and integrating a better screen.

There's actually more. Android Auto doesn't just show up on the rectangular screen in the middle of the dash. In my vehicle, the turn by turn nav also shows up in the middle of the (glass) instrument cluster and on a HUD. That's not all Google's doing, someone at the manufacturer put effort into that. All in all, the integrated experience is fantastic.

You misunderstand me. I think nuclear could be great. It's politically and economically challenging now but I expect in 100 years, we'll have a lot of nuke plants. Let's get started on that now.

While we're at that, if you wanted to have a positive impact sooner, you could convert a coal plant to natural gas. You wouldn't have even finished the first draft of the nuclear plant's environmental impact statement by the time the conversion would be done. In fact, by the time the nuke plan is on-line, it'll be time to retire the gas plant. Win-win!

Ah. I'm seeing it now. Yes, FP boundary conditions and weird interactions between word sizes and bitwise operations, yeah, those could bite you in the a$$. We've been trying to tightly bound the defined and undefined behaviors for years, and warn about undefined and thus undependable behavior to no avail.

Interesting. Except in a few cases (e.g. I worked on a storage system which experimented with hardware-accelerated compression and encryption), I don't think I've ever worked on a piece of code which hardware crypto or vectors. If they did, for the most part the hardware-specific stuff was in a library you could, in theory, swap out.

Either that or I was working on an embedded systems which was so completely tied to the CPU, memory, busses, and I/O that porting it to some other platform was essentially a re-write.

Sure, but it's not like we ask coal mines to indemnify people in their surroundings, or coal plants to make whole people who get doused in radioactive soot. Nor do we make solar panel farms compensate anyone for the mine tailings from rare earth mines.

In theory, yes, we should strive to internalize externalities. In practice, it's often quite difficult. Historically we haven't done so.

You anti-fracking scumbags are at fault for this too. Natural gas emits half the CO2 per Joule as coal, and is cheaper to boot. If only we could frack for natural gas everywhere, we'd cut CO2 emissions right now.

I'm curious: what sort of x86-isms did you typically encounter?

Most of the code I write these days is either scripts (Bash and Python) or pure C++. I can't think of the last time I wrote C++ which couldn't just compile for any CPU architecture I had handy.

Platform dependencies are another thing entirely. I'm writing some C++ code to run as a system service on Ubuntu, macOS, and another weird embedded Linux. Don't get me started on the difference between systemd and launchd, nor apt-vs-yum-vs-brew for installing dependencies. That's what gives me hissy fits.

Sorry, I don't think I'm following you. Are you saying that as a business owner, I want to own the labor which I need to produce goods? I guess so but you can't legally buy laborers anywhere, that's literal slavery. All a business owner can buy is some hours of your time.

Are you also saying as a business owner, I have to make sure I pay my workers enough so that they can buy my products (a la the common story about Henry Ford)? No, I don't think so. Very few if any businesses employ enough people to make their market. Not even Walmart or Amazon depend on their workers as customers. There's certainly overlap but it's well beyond what a manager could manage. No, the employee's private lives are their own and as an employer, none of my business.

(Note, I do not own or run a business. I work for a paycheck like most other people.)

Well, good news. The vast majority of sharing economy workers (think: Lyft and Uber divers, Door Dashers) do, in fact, use it as a side gig to augment their income from a conventional job. These are the people being offered a new gig: gather training data for AI models.

Some people, think free lance writers or graphic artists, use free lance work for full-time income. But not all of these, a lot work part time for any number of reasons. These are not the people TFA was talking about.

More good news: the vast majority of working people are working more or less full time jobs. Our economy is structured around full time jobs, not gig work. Gig work gets a lot of headlines because it's new, not because it dominates the job market.