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I can tell you one area in renewables that's NOT winning. Offshore. In the industry, there was some talk about how GE is pulling out of the offshore wind turbine market. Sucks to be wind farms that were built using those GE turbines.


Offshore’s doing fairly well globally, but I’m not sure how much of an export market GE has, and in the short term ol’ minihands has wrecked it in the US. Again, however, he won’t last forever.


Also not winning:

‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’

The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/05/worlds-largest-solar...


That is not the largest solar plant (I’m guessing the article was written by our good friends the magic robots); there’s one with almost 10x the nameplate output in China, though likely more in reality, as concentrated solar thermal plants don’t work properly. It’s the largest concentrated solar thermal plant; it’s a dead-end technology (it looked plausible in the 90s when PV tech was expected to progress far less quickly than it actually did). You might as well claim that cars are dead on the basis that Wankel engines were a failure.


Do you understand the difference between solar thermal and photovoltaic?


You missed the point.

It doesn't matter if they used Plutonium solar panels. It was over hyped and made tons of promises and then massively underdelivered and now has to be decommissioned, at a huge cost to tax payers.


The point is that it’s as relevant to a conversation about photovoltaics as hydrogen is to a conversation about EVs.


Offshore is certainly winning in the UK and around the North Sea


And it's cheaper than coal in China and lets them put generation near the populated coast.

And linking the two the Chinese Mingyang Smart Energy just announced an up to $2 Billion investment in a wind turbine factory in the UK.


Terrible for the US, and it means that we will lose out on yet more of the new energy economy.


I feel like I've seen this in a Professor Layton game before. Just not laid out like this of course


Ever heard of webtoons? Its that one Korean web comic format that is just infinite scrolling until a chapter ends. I HATE that UI design so much that I really think whoever actually came up with it knows nothing about UI or UX design to begin with.

So in my opinion, I really do not think so.


The word you're looking for is "Gamification" and I honestly, I fucking hate it. The problem with Gamification in this context is that apps like Duolingo that uses Gamification to award you good boy points (daily streak) in the form of streak building mainly to build up "good habits". Unfortunately, the reality is that there is only so much what one app can do before it starts holding you back and become detrimental, but because of the gamification aspects of an app and how some people really really want their good boy points they don't want to abandon it and deep down, they probably don't want to. Now some people just end up thinking that one app is the one and be all solution and end up being "expert beginners" while in reality, they had to abandon it and do something deeper (like reading an actual book in another language) or else they'll never learn to being competent.

You can even take this further with reading books. Sure, you can get a star by reading a book for like an hour a day...if you're using Apple's iBook or whatever. That just means you're locked out of other books not on that platform or books you have in other unsupported formats or gasp physical books.


If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that gamification is addictive and traps people into the small catalog of gamified apps? While I agree that a tolerance to more "painful" material is useful for broadening your reach, it's still possible to do both. To value gamified apps for their tight feedback loops, while being conscious that there are other materials out there that may provide other benefits despite not being as gamified


> Why isn't diagram generation automated as part of the build process (UML or otherwise)?

I vaguely recall Visual Studio has this option where you can generate some sort of class diagram. It looked like shit the last time I used it (~2019) especially as your classes get more and more functions built into it. I also can't imagine how shitty it looks for codebases that have a significant coupling problem.

Furthermore, creating a UML diagram is a documentation process rather than something that should be automatically built in. I put it on the same level as writing a document in a word doc or something that's done as the project gets closer to being finished. Some places can live with it, a lot of places (actual software companies) probably do not as they move unreasonably fast (Agile) which does not even allow time for documentation or they just purposely neglect documentation.

> Why aren't code visualization tools more popular? The options out there seem outdated

Because they look like shit. I tried mermaid with markdown, I was not happy with the results, I tried plantUML back in 2019, I hated how it ended up looking, I hated how I have to install java for it, and I gave up on it pretty quickly.

The only code visualization tool I ever use is either draw.io or MS Visio. At lease there's a plugin for that for VS Code.

> Would you want to use these tools? What would be your ideal tool?

Markdown with vim option. It also must have an option to force a top-down flow approach and not freaking forcing it to be a left-right layout


>It looked like shit the last time I used it (~2019) especially as your classes get more and more functions built into it. I also can't imagine how shitty it looks for codebases that have a significant coupling problem.

That's the point, right? Visually representing the complexity of the system. I've used IntelliJ to do this before to show why modifying certain behavior was so slow and error-prone. In that case there were 3-4 classes with heavily overlapping functionality because, surprise, in the past there were multiple teams contributing to the same codebase that all did their own thing.


idk...some of the text is quite hard to read on certain colors (ie Sakura)


Welp, I guess my trip to Sakuracon is officially cancelled...again.


Their official website doesn't have any update yet. I suggest checking it after everyone has the official wording and duration of the announcement tomorrow.

http://sakuracon.org/


heaven forbid you miss a weekend of fun so that some of our fellow humans might live


Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't post like this here.

Note this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."


We can allow people to express sadness at loss.


Maybe I'm not the right audience for this as I came from a EE background, but I really do not see this as a good resource. I feel like the material from allaboutcircuits.com covers most of the material in this site up until chapter 11 or so and this site only has two volumes written out of 19 planned chapters.


> send little animals on to the insulators to cause short circuits

You don't even need to do that as it happens organically. At my company, we had a comms outage to a wind farm for several days (and the outage was wide enough where even surrounding wind farms outside of my company were affected) and just two days ago, the LEC (Frontier) discovered a bird build a nest in one of the junction boxes which links up to all the plants. All of this happened in a span of five days or so.


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