kugelfish

With an energy crisis looming across Europe, some people were joking that those who follow the American Santa Claus traditions should rather be naughty than nice this year, because coal would be more valuable this winter than toys. Also this winter, the price per ton of carbon emissions exceeded €100 in the EU emission trading system for the first time - presumably triggered by a shift in electricity generation from gas to coal, which is more carbon intensive per MWh of electricity generated. Oil and gas prices have surged last year far beyond the levels which would have been for example the CO2 tax on fossil fuels rejected by Swiss voters in 2021. This might have provided an unintended stress test of what the social and economic impact would be if we were serious about decarbonisation and has spurred a level of attention and investment into "alternative energy" (now called renewable or green energy) not seen since the oil crises in the 1970ies. In order to keep the momentum...

Generative AI seems to have entered the mainstream hype cycle with the recent release of ChatGPT becoming the fastest growing website to reach more than 100 million users, generating a lot of speculation  about AI disrupting and redefining how we navigate and access knowledge and information. Having worked with but not on machine learning the last few years, I am myself amused, amazed and somewhat terrified by the impressive progress in what publicly available text and image generators are able to do now. At its current state, ChatGPT is essentially an entertainment platform in the form of an infuriatingly polite, well-read, hallucinating bullshitter. One should not ask it any question for which we don't already know the answer, but like a mechanical automation in a victorian era parlour, we can marvel at how well it performs some amazing tricks some times or laugh at how it spectacularly fails some other times. Unless there is an unexpected ceiling, another decades long " AI...

In some of the major European power grids, the penetration of variable renewable energy sources  (VRES) has reached a level where their variability can no longer be easily absorbed by the grid as minor noise in the daily fluctuations of supply and demand. Taking for example the German grid  (~ 60 GW load), the spot market prices now routinely "flat-line" at or below zero during nights and week-end on particularly blustery days. This forces wind farms to shut down (curtailment) during times when they would be at their most productive. Because the production potential of wind & solar is each highly synchronised across a relatively large geographic area, this trend will only increase as more wind and solar capacity is added to the same grid and profitably selling renewable energy "as-produced" will become increasingly difficulty. For the next stages of integration into the grid, wind & solar resources might have to be combined with  storage, moving away from de...

The organisation of Europe's power grid operators ( ENTSO-E ) is providing an open-data transparency platform with a lot of interesting data about the state of the  power grid in its various member countries. This data is among others also used to power websites like https://app.electricitymaps.com/map . In order to access the REST API, one needs to register a user account on the site and request API access via an email to the support help-desk following the instructions here . There is also a Python client for this API which also converts the raw XML data into Pandas dataframes. Pandas is a Swiss army knives for dataset manipulations and one of the reasons why Python is so popular among data scientists. The following code shows how to do simple ad-hoc analysis with the granular  time-series data returned by the API. The example shows a very over-simplistic back of the envelope estimate of the idealized storage that would be needed to align the variable solar and wind energ...

Wright's Law , a lesser known cousin of Moore's Law, states, that in most industries, unit-costs decrease by X percent for any doubling of the production volume. In addition, a growing amount of money and attention focused on a particular product tends to increase the opportunity for internal innovation to be successful, specially where there are high degrees of freedom and substitutability without consumers noticing a difference. Internal innovation tends to be focused on making existing products better or cheaper while external innovation focuses on what customers might actually need or want. Internal innovation is often incremental, low friction and often invisible, while external innovation is often disruptive and requires changes in customer behavior. While the cost of solar, wind or battery technologies has dropped significantly over the last decades, the current research pipeline shows plenty of potential for significant efficiency improvements. If I were a cleantech VC,...

Historically the service provided by electrical utilities has been that of 24/7 instant power, available at the flip of a switch. The keys to providing such a service are power sources which can produce electricity on demand at any time as well as a power grid with plenty of spare capacity for extreme circumstances. In the retail price of electricity, the cost of generation is often a small part (around 5-10 cents) and dwarfed by the cost of the delivery network as well as the cost of over-provisioning in order to ensure a high level of service availability. The decarbonization of the energy sector is putting pressure on this model from two sides. On one hand, we are replacing fossil fuel power plants which can produce electricity on more or less on demand with wind and solar plants which produce electricity intermittently based on the current availability of wind or sunlight. Wind and solar generators can be combined with sufficient storage into a hybrid power plant which can larg...

De-carbonization will require in particular a radical transformation of the energy and transportation sectors over the next few decades. Many people find this daunting or fear that it might be not even be possible in such a time-frame. Looking at the history of de-horsification, a similarly radical transformation of the transportation sector in the first half of the 20th century shows that such things are indeed possible, but can be tricky, disruptive and take a long time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the horse was undoubtedly the workhorse of urban transportation for both goods and people, while the new horseless carriages were expensive and unreliable playthings for crazy, rich people. Less than 50 years later the roles are reversed and most horses today likely travel more miles standing in a trailer pulled by a SUV than on their own feet. In 1900, horses were very common - nearly as common per capita as cars are today. New York City counted over 200'000 working horses ...

The recent pandemic has provided a lot of insights into how societies and governments around the world respond to the kind of collective crisis, where the potential harm faced by each member of the community does not primarily depend on their direct actions, but also on the actions of anybody around them. We can hope to draw some lessons from these insights for the the climate crisis, which presents similar challenges but over a much longer time and at global scale. On the bright side, lessons from the pandemic have shown that eventually most governments and communities have eventually responded quite decisively and to a level that might not have been expected.  One specific episode that happened in Switzerland around June 6th 2020, I found particularly insightful: the question of wearing masks in public transport. In the days leading up to June 6th, an estimated less than 5% of passengers in public were wearing masks. Despite the government having strongly recommended it and repea...

In the context of the climate crisis, I have been wondering why we have so far not been acting more decisively to prevent what could credibly turn into the largest civilisatory catastrophe in recent human history (at least in absolute terms).  The pandemic has provided an opportunity to observe the rapid unfolding of a wide range of collective and government crisis responses, that could help to identify some pattern. The  trolley problem  is a famous thought experiment to illustrate an ethical dilemma where the needs of the many might outweigh the needs of the few : a trolley is assumed to be barreling down the track towards a group of people that it would most likely hit while a bystander has the opportunity to move a switch, which will redirect the trolley on another track, where it will likely hit a single other person. While moral philosophers  have a more nuanced perspective on the moral equivalence of action vs. inaction, of doing vs. allowing ,  the laws ...

Liebe Lesys, Ich möchte auch auf Deutsch gerne inklusiv schreiben, ohne dass jeder Satz nach identitätspolitischem Kulturkampf schreit. Mein Vorzug wäre ein grammatisches Neutrum für Personenbezeichnungen, das nicht zu bürokratisch tönt ("Zielpersonen des staatlichen Bildungsauftrages") oder semantisch ungenau ist, wie substantivierte Partizipien ("Lernende" oder "zur Schule Gehende"). Dieser Vorschlag ( link ) des Germanistys  Thomas Kronschläger für eine neue Klasse von genderneutralen Personenbezeichnungen ist mir bisher am sympathischsten: Aus dem Stamm eines bestehenden Nomen und einer neuen Endung auf -y für Singular und -ys für Plural entsteht ein neues generisches Neutrum  (z.B "das Schüly", "die Schülys"). Diese neue Y-Form erinnert auch irgendwie an den Diminutiv im Schweizerdeutschen, den viele Deutsche scheinbar niedlich finden. Und dieser Jöh-Faktor könnte vielleicht auch der neutralen Y-Form im deutschsprachigen Raum zum ...

As part of the yearly performance review process, we are supposed to describe what we do and how we add value to the organisation. I am a software engineer by training and once prided myself on being a pretty decent programmer. At this point in my career, I am in a fairly senior position on the technical ladder at a large innovation driven tech company. This means that I now write a lot less code than most people in my team. The dual-ladder career system allows for formal career advancement of employees in technical roles without having to necessarily change into management roles - but still expects similar levels of strategic impact. So what do I actually do? When moving through levels of seniority, my focus has shifted from writing code to reviewing code, then from writing design documents to commenting on other people's designs. I still remember succinctly the advice of a more senior colleague, that the key to getting promoted to the next level would be by becoming comfo...

What I still miss the most after moving from G+ to Diaspora* for a my casual public social network posting is a well integrated mobile app for posting on the go. The main use-case for me is posting photos on the go, which I now mostly take on my cellphone and minimally process with Google Photos. One of the problems with the mobile app for Diaspora* (Dandelion in the case of Android) is that the size limit for photo uploads is quite small compared to the resolution of todays cellphone cameras. There is also not much point of uploading  high-resolution images for purely on-screen consumption to an infrastructure managed by volunteers on a shoestring budget. I also liked the ability to geo-tag the mobile posts by explicitly selecting a nearby landmark to obfuscate a bit the current location. For a few weeks now, I have been sharing my account with a  G+ archive bot  that is uploading recycled posts from the takeout archive (see here for the first part of the series ...

Photos exported from digital cameras often contain meta-data in Exif format (Exchangeable Image File Format). For images taken with cellphone cameras, this info typically also includes (GPS) location information of where the photo was taken. Inspired by this previous post on the mapping of GPS lat/lon coordinates from Google+ location data to a rough description of the location, we could also use the location encoded in the photo itself. We are using again the reverse geocoding service from OpenStreetMap to find the names of the country and locality in which the GPS coordinates are included in. For the purpose of public posting, reducing the accuracy of the GPS location to the granularity of the city town or village provides some increased confidentiality of where the picture was taken compared to the potentially meter/centimeter resolution accuracy of GPS data that generally allows to pinpoint the location down to a building and street address. Fractional numbers are repre...

I have recently been looking for an alternative social media platform and started using Diaspora* via the diasporing.ch pod. Not unlike the cryptocurrency community, the proponents of the various platforms in the Fediverse seem to rather uncritically advocate the distributed nature of these platforms as an inherently positive property in particular when it comes to privacy and data protection. I tend to agree with Yuval Harari who argues in  "Sapiens"    that empires or scaled, centralized forms of organization are one of Homo Sapiens' significant cultural accomplishments. A majority of humans through history have lived as part of some sort of empire. Empires can provide prosperity and ensure lasting peace and stability - like the Pax Romana or in my generation, the Pax Americana. We often have a love/hate relationship with empires - even many protesters who are busy burning American flags during the day, secretly hope that their children some day will get into Har...

<- Part VII: Conversion & Staging The last stage of the process is to finally export the converted posts to Diaspora* the chosen target system. As we want these post to appear slowly and close to their original post date anniversary, this process is going to be drawn out over at least one year. While we could do this by hand, it should ideally be done by some automated process. For this to work, we need some kind of server-type machine that is up and running and connected to the Internet frequently enough during a whole year. The resource requirements are quite small, except for storing the staged data which for some users could easily be in multiple gigabytes, mostly depending on the number posts with images. Today it is quite easy to get small & cheap virtual server instances from any cloud provider, for example the micro sized compute engine instances on Google Cloud should be part of the free tier even. I also still have a few of the small, low power Rasbper...