You guys weren't very good, then.

Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country, and the country now has to serve.

What?

Silicon Valley could easily pay their moral debt by not evading taxes.

I feel better after sitting in a steam room two or three times a week. That's proof enough for me.

Good thread.

I've been going backwards to Afterstep and Window Maker theming. Maybe I'll get back to E in a few years.

Yep, beyond 30 minutes or so I'll just switch rooms and watch a hockey or baseball game. I'm at the "done that" phase now. Not much excites me in the computer space.

Thinkpad 765d

California pays other states to take its excess solar energy. Power for a project like this isn't the issue, actually building the system is the issue.

> California pays other states to take its excess solar energy

Intermittently. Essential services like water (with expensive fixed costs) aren’t a good fit for absorbing variable supply.

> Power for a project like this isn't the issue

California has the country’s most expensive power [1] in part due to policymakers constantly assuming it’s free.

[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

They wouldn't if you switched just Urban water use from natural sources to desalination. To do that you need to replace the ~5 million acre feet of water, ~6,167,400,000 m3, that goes into the Urban bucket which is all of the water used to keep people alive, clean, and all industrial uses of water. [0] That comes to ~ 12BkWh of energy needed to scale up batched reverse osmosis to take over just the life and job required water needs which is about 25% of the total solar power generated in all of 2025 via grid-scale solar farms. CA does export some during the day due to excess solar but is still a net importer of power.

[0] p2 of https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...

Those are the numbers I was looking for - that means that (ignoring build-out costs) total desalination for CA would be on the order of 10% of the 3 gorges dam yearly output (max).

Using a system that's currently in a lab scale only and ignoring other energy costs like moving the water to the plant, mixing the briny output back down to acceptable levels, and then pressurizing the system to replace the gravity fed design it currently uses.

For a rough estimate for replacing agricultural uses too ~6x that urban figure at least then weep at the amount of pumps you'd need to bring that water up and inland to the farm lands from the coast. At least for replacing urban use most of the population lives on/near the coast where the water would be produced.

Farm use is by far the biggest, but "taking" water from the inland empire and dragging it to LA is also a cost.

But all of this is firmly in the "we could do it if we really wanted/needed to" not "needs more energy than the sun will produce in its lifetime".

I could never get sleep to work, and got tired of rebooting 17 times a day.

OpenBSD might have "better" support for sleep and hibernate, but I didn't succeed in installing it on this laptop: I think it required me to connect an Ethernet cable, which I wasn't going to do.

Veering even more off-topic: I've just installed OpenSUSE Kalpa on this laptop. That's not regular OpenSUSE, by the way. Previously, each of the like, 5 problems I've encountered doing it, would've caused me to give up - but ChatGPT helped me fix all of them! I think this is going to become my daily driver for a while now.

And AI.

No. The optimum amount of AI in this world is zero.

No, all software grows until it gets email. Jamie told me that.

I’m having flashbacks to the email client built into the Opera browser back in the day.