I have heard from a couple farmers that some venture energy corporation will pay a yearly fee to put panels on the farmland, which is probably the 20k/year he gets paid from a corporation like that. I doubt he's selling the power directly, nor was able to invest money for all those panels. He just get's a check every month. He also doesn't know the risks he's taking allowing that.
edit: I might be wrong on this, reading this on their site they have some significant donors.
"With additional funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Cielo Foundation, and donations from a myriad of individual donors and businesses in 2023"
I used to think this was a wonderful idea, with the greatest of intentions, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out it's inevitable that a hail storm hits or mother nature somehow will break/cracks those panels, allowing heavy metals to leach into the soil and make it unusable for farming in perpetuity. This actually happened to a guy I spoke with during lunch one day.
So seeing the actual reality over a longer timeframe of solar farms, and wind turbines (those huge blades made of not friendly chemicals last only 10 years, do you know how they are disposed of?), have greatly reduced any excitement I had for solar/wind as environmentally friendly longer term sustainable solutions. I guess it's sort of good to diversify but they most definitely aren't "earth friendly" as advertised. Fusion seem our only real hope.
not sure where you're getting 10 years for windd turbines from, but it's closer to 20. they also aren't nasty chemicals. it's fiberglass and epoxy and are disposed the same way pretty much everything is disposed of, putting them in a pit in the middle of nowhere.
I would actually consider epoxy pretty nasty. 10 years for actual use is pretty accurate, 20 years is extremely optimistic. They are just buried or piled up somewhere, not burned as far as I know.
That seems like a pretty biased source, how about these actual cases at the top of google search? We are just getting started perhaps 10 years into this, now imagine this after another 100 years? And of course maybe they can technically be "recycled" now but it's not actually happening in a significant way yet.
They typically contain copper, silver, lead, and tin, but those don't leach out of them at a significant rate, and of those four heavy metals, only lead is a real toxicity risk even if you digest the panels in acid instead of leaving them out in the rain. Another comment suggests that the dopants in the silicon are the relevant heavy metals, but those are present at parts-per-million levels, locked inside the silicon's diamond-structures crystalline lattice, and passivated with silicon dioxide, so that's not plausible either.
The most likely explanation is that this is a lie.
CdTe solar panels [0] do, but it's a bit of red herring because almost nobody is using those panels for large scale installations (they're mainly used where being "thin and light" is important. The common crystalline silicon panels [1] don't have any major toxic components.
Solar panels are giant photodiodes. Heavy metal doped silicon. a-Si something or SiGe or GaAs or InP or whatever pairs and trios of toxic metals. Generally more toxic more electronically open to trade therefore broader spectral response and better performance. You can't do, say, Al substrate PtFeCu semiconductor, that's not going to make sense.
They're not merely similar to a photodiode, but using giant photodiodes as batteries is literally the idea.
There are some versions based on toxic organic chemicals in place of toxic inorganic elements, few and far between, and I guess the technology will eventually move onto engineered nanoparticles later in this century after they've cracked fusion, but that hasn't happened yet.
> To complete the puzzle, we wanted to deterministically test the behavior of the database when interacting with the operating system and other components. To do that, we are partnering with Antithesis
Are there any open source DST projects, even just getting started? I don't even know how/where to start if I would want to do the same on a small app, but can't afford nor want to depend long term on a commercial license.
Maybe with:
1) Unicode escapes in strings.
2) Indentation support for multiline string literals, like in Rust, but even better.
3) Reading with "concrete syntax tree" (make the order of map elements, the comments, whitespaces, etc representable, so that one could write an EDN file with the same formatting as it was read, e.g. after patching it). Not sure if the spec changes are needed / will be helpful for that or better to just implement it in specific parsers.
Excellent ideas, especially having a parser keep order of parsed data.
I wonder if EDN reader/parser for different languages could be written once, then compiled through wasm to c (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602750) and linked in each language as c library.
Definitely would like to see EDN or slightly improved version as a modern and usable alternative to json/yaml (regardless of https://xkcd.com/927/).
Is there an example of what it looks like in practice? The Wikipedia link above doesn't have it, its citation http://edn-format.org/ seems like it doesn't exist anymore, and this github page doesn't show a sample either.
An excellent point about lisps. I've long thought that one of the core issues with lisps is that logic is tree based, where a large majority human brains are far more amenable to linear process. I suspect there's un-recognized cognitive overhead in the branching of trees versus linear with early return.
Thanks so much for this post and the other about provisioning. I'm going to try this exactly. Great suggestion about having caddy just use try_duration to minimize downtime.
> having V8 as a backend also means supporting WebAssembly Exceptions and Garbage Collection under the hood. Stay tuned for more news on this front soon
Looking forward to this and languages that can make use of wasm-gc.
Does wasm-gc allow sharing of host data/strings across different modules in the same runtime, or is it contained to only single module with repeated calls/invocations? The scenario I am considering would invoke several different modules in a pipeline, pass data between each step in an efficient manner.
edit: I might be wrong on this, reading this on their site they have some significant donors. "With additional funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Cielo Foundation, and donations from a myriad of individual donors and businesses in 2023"