Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu:
> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years.
That paper assumes that the worlds energy will keep increasing at the average rate from the last 50 years for 1000 years.
That’s a terrible assumption. First because the rate has been slowing (even before Covid), and second because the end result of that extrapolation is more energy than we could every hope to produce without building Dyson spheres around stars.
If you do similar calculations we’d cause severe problems harvesting that much energy from wind or geothermal as well.
I did not. And find mind boggling that we have the ability to virtually stop earth rotation in such a small timeframe with that little effort. I'll definitely read more about it.
And for good reason, it proves wrong the mainstream thinking that this is impossible. Quite a few countries already run the full year over 90% renewable[1] and we still neglect it with all kind of excuses.
If only they all listened to you! I don't have all the answers but a few of the ones I researched that are being built are needed to ensure people have heating through the winter in the next 3-7 years until reliable other solutions appear.
a lot of data there is pre-covid, would be interesting to see what’s happening today - especially in Europe, with the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war on energy markets.
"The first half of 2023 saw a collapse in EU fossil generation, leading to the lowest output on record. Wind and solar continued their growth, with solar generation increasing by 13% and wind by 5%. Hydro and nuclear are recovering from their historic lows in 2022, though their long term outlook is uncertain."
The section "Wind and solar are leading the renewables charge" has graphs for each EU country showing H1 TWh generation by either fossil or renewables.
> How does "func EatADonut() async {}" aka "eating a donut is an inherently async action" even make sense to people?
Of course it does, read it as "beware, something blocking down the road".
If you can EatADonout without blocking, please do, but want it or not that's a different implementation, one that doesn't block and the signature it's telling you so.
We're so used to sync and having hidden blocking operations. I wonder if in an alternate universe the first languages considered the blocking/async nature of operations and then some newer languages considered hiding this information into seemingly sync functions would produce similar but opposite outrage against it.
> want it or not that's a different implementation,
Implementation is the same. In both cases it's the same set of CPU instructions, but async/await languages create artifical division, forcing developer to think othervise.
So, let me explian my reasoning. Code starts with a developer's mental model of a problem and behavior of the system and then translating it into the code. The more straightforward this translation, the more readable the code. Code is a second degree map of problem domain so to speak ("real" world -> mental model -> code).
Like if you want to add two values, the simplest form of code would be "add(2,2)" which is pretty straightforward. If the code forces you to do some mental gymnastics (i.e. "2 2 addOnlyEvenNumbers") - that's less straightforward, less clear and less readable.
In the same vein, if you want to execute some function ("EatADonut" or "MakeHTTPCall") – you may care or not care about blocking and waiting for results. But it's your call. So it makes sense to give you two options to run this function. Go has simplest possible solution – "eatADonut()" vs "go eatADonut()". It doesn't matter what is a "default" here – it could be "eatADonut()" (go to background) vs "sync eatADount()". What matters that "eating a donut" is just a set of instructions to the CPU, and it's up to caller to decide how you want to execute it in terms of concurrency.
Now, "async/await" approach turned this ownership of "synchronicity" around. Now function is deciding how it should be called. Mental model of "actions" now needs to be translated into "actions being async or sync for the purpose of fitting into this language concept". Which is cognitively expensive for no added benefit.
Sure you can rationalize it, and get used to it as to any other absurd design, but it still adds unneeded complexity to the code, makes it less readable and less clear.
>In both cases it's the same set of CPU instructions
It's actually a very different set of CPU instructions. the function EatADonut is the same set, but "async" means the kernel needs to take time out of its execution to do some action as small as accessing an open thread, or as large as "gain access into a completely different piece of hardware" before putting that set of instructions onto that different thread. Not the program, the actual scheduling process between your program and the OS you are executing on. Then it needs a way to to get that result and sync it back onto whatever thread spawned it and access the result.
It is in fact a huge action, so marking it with Async is basically a very explicit warning.
>Which is cognitively expensive for no added benefit.
On the contrary, I can't even begin to imagine the amount of compiler optimizations it saves on as well to have that be explicit in code. I'm sure Go has to do all that on the fly while a colored language gets to allocate all those potential processes before the program runs. It's only no added benefit if you dont care about performance. But to be frank, you probably don't need more than a single thread if your problem isn't bounded by perormance. Parallel programming is all about getting something done faster after all.
Learn to value the taste of not excessively sweet food and drinks.
It makes me crazy that every drink and food needs to be sweetened even when their natural flavor is very good or even better (once you acquire the taste).
Coffee, fruits juice, cookies and so on, most people consume super sweet versions of those.
vs
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