> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
Yep, very much so. I was well aware that I didn't have a clue, and thought that I could make up for that with professional expert advice, elbow grease, a pretty good combination of tax advantages, and a willingness to learn.
The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.
Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.
You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.
hi ! giblfiz , I work in a startup which born specifically for solving the kind of situation you faced. It would be really a pleasure to get in touch and share experiences.
Mr R is right: "Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed ..." the problem behind: time/effort to implement that. Ping us whenever you want https://www.renewableenergy.place/ it would be really cool to have a talk.
btw, it was really challenging to find a way to contact you, lol (out of this way)
btw2, we are based in Argentina :). Let us meet Mr R!
Original author here,
If you look a little more carefully the thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping our way thru it bit by bit.
Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded)
This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.
I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons:
1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio
2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.
Hey, sorry to hear about the predicament, when business collides with insane regulations, it's a very frustrating thing to be caught in.
number 2, btc mining environmental impact, I generally disagree,but I can understand the argument, however ...
number 1, the crypto exposure aspect
a) what prevents your from selling the BTC the moment you mine them to pay for OPEX, and then invest what is leftover in tradfi?
b) While many on this site will violently and deeply disagree in spite of being proven wrong over and over and over again (the definition of insanity, etc...), I'd argue that being "over-exposed to BTC" over the last 15 years has not exactly been a bad thing if you can stomach the volatility.
And I'm very sorry to hear S'pore wasn't good to you, this is one of my very favourite place on Earth (in particular the food).
It's good that you repented and at least tried to do something good with the money, but it would have been even better to donate it to an environmental organization with better judgement than you have. Proof of work crypto mining was an inexcusably bad idea for humanity from day one.
As for (2), there are so many other ways to exploit that electricity. Mining Bitcoin isn’t the only way. But I agree, you should have considered batteries, and more flexible loads into your calculations as to how to be profitable. 3MWh is considerable for many usecases.
I'm the original author.
I'm not sure why you got down-voted for this, this was absolutely a "tax dodge". The polite term is "tax mitigation strategy", I'm also not sure why this is seen as an openly negative thing?
The government wants a type of thing done, they say "hey, we won't pay people directly to do it, but we will subsidize it thru tax incentives"
I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's good for the world, I will do it in return for tax incentives"
because there's not necessarily a demand for this site, or even a personal interest — imo this sort of incentive produces worse outcomes than taxing people and farming it out to the lowest bidder, at least the lowest bidder has a business and reputation to maintain (thin, but not nothing)
Idk, there's a certain double standard that I see semi-frequently. Direct subsidies and/or rebates to incentivize renewable energy? Good. Tax subsidies to do the exact same thing? Awful, terrible, tax avoiding scum.
Sometimes I wonder if any of the people who complain about this bought an electric car or roof solar with tax credits or rebates.
Because you could have just paid your taxes like the rest of us have to. Instead you made a big drama and are asking us to agree with you how unfair it all is that you have to pay taxes.
What a nonsense. This is the government itself proposing the subsidie to build up long term renewables, which have a much more important role to local communities. Author then writes about their important experiences, listing important lessons and insights for future endeavours, and you call it a ‘drama’.
Tell me about your intentions without telling me about your intentions.
I think paying taxes allows the government to be able to afford to do the things it is responsible for (health, security, prosperity, equality).
If an infrastructure project is only possible with government support (in this case subsidies), then let the government make it happen and let the population benefit from it. For example the Apollo program.
If a solar farm is not possible to do in the free market without subsidies, then DON'T DO IT until the market is right. (Anyway, what was the author's plan if he got deep into the project and instead of having a disappointment from connection fees, the new president cuts the subsides he needed? Subsidies are political and temporary, you cannot build a sustainable business on them.)
Pay your taxes, and contribute to building society. It's as simple as that.
Hi Gwern,
I'm the owner of 7goldfish, the developer in question, and a fan of yours via reputation and the occasional comment I run into on Reddit.
First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities)
Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it.
That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time.
I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted".
For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.
I think writing fiction with LLMs is fine. "based on a true story" or roman à clef fiction is also fine. I would have no objection to this if it were clearer that this was a "movie treatment". (As LLM fiction goes, this isn't even all that bad.)
However... Look at this HN page! Not a single person here realized (before my still-downvoted comment) that this was a 'movie treatment', or that the 'quotes...were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well'. They all are taking it as 100% gospel, and engaging with it in good faith, as if it were genuinely a 'technical post-mortem' (as it takes pains to present itself) instead of your fiction-writing hobby,
Just make it clearer that this is a fictional story.
> I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment
Yes. This is why ghost writers are supposed to be credited as such if they are contributing non-trivial content rather than simply serving as a amanuensis or an editor, and cinematic re-enactments are flagged as such if it wouldn't be obvious to a reasonable person (by reputable documentarians, anyway).
SOMEONE SHOULD KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF OUR PRECIOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE.
They could even keep in on the internet!
We could call it the "Internet Archive"
And with this amazing technology, there could even be a way we could go way back and look at things that were published before, right on the internet as well.
Seriously though, three out of four times when I see someone crying "but our precious cultural heritage" it's something that has already been taken care of by archive.org, or that it would be trivial to have them help out with, instead of trying to force the hand of some corporate giant.
Did you know that archive.org even has a special legal exemption to ignore copyright law for archiving software?
Relying on an underfunded nonprofit to protect information incompletely is never going to be as good as having access to the original information source. I could point to many reasons for this, but let me start with just one: The internet has been around as a mainstream entity for just 30 years. The newspaper has 155 years of archives. Those archives have not been put on a number of vintage newspaper archive sites, making this information impossible to access.
Have you ever dealt with newspaper archives? Morgues of old content? They are often complex to manage and digitize. The Internet Archive, being asked to manage the literal history of the internet, has a massive backlog. It would be significantly better if someone who actually was up close and had an organizational interest in managing it could do it instead, because that makes the lift far easier to deal with.
The Internet Archive is an important tool, but it is not the silver bullet you think it is. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It is the recovery option of last resort, and it puts a lot of pressure on the organization to treat them as a simple replacement for content that should just be online. Any researcher worth their salt will tell you that.
Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.
> Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.
Given their track record, I honestly imagine they just don’t care. See what they did with Gambling Times to get an idea of how they treat a publication with a deep archive.
Not sure where you got that number... Protocol described in the paper was:
>Groups 1, 2 and 3 consumed 5, 10 and 15 mL, respectively, of ACV (containing 5% of acetic acid) diluted in 250 mL of water daily, in the morning on an empty stomach, for 12 weeks.
