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Cake day: June 26th, 2025

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  • It absolutely is not. It is a commodity fuel that can be converted into heat energy when vaporized and ignited by a secondary energy source. You can pour it directly into a combustion engine and nothing will happen until you provide a spark. It can evaporate without being converted into a significant source of energy.

    Electricity is energy. It does not need a secondary source of energy to convert it into heat or light. Electricity arcs through the atmosphere it instantly and automatically converts to light and heat.

    That’s why they are produced, transported, and sold in such radically different ways.


  • Gas isn’t energy, it’s fuel. It’s a commodity with a global market. Producers have to physically store it. Refined gasoline has a shelf life and production is planned weeks to months in advance. If demand falls off their product depreciates and they have storage expenses. If a gas company cuts production below demand competitors can ramp up and eat that market share because consumers have options.

    But electricity tends to be a captured, monopolistic market. There’s no scalable physical storage. The supply is whatever they are producing locally right now and they have some say in that. There’s no tanker of Saudi electricity coming to relieve the market and you’re not going to drive your house to a filling station to top off your electricity.

    Liquid natural gas is similar, in that most people will just pay whatever is asked for what’s pumped into their homes, but less dramatic because it is a physical commodity that can be replaced or substituted.







  • They can turn off some generators and adjust the supply down for ideal revenue/profits, reduce staffing levels, and extend equipment life. There’s no reason for them to charge you $50 for something once you’ve told them you’ll pay $100 for it.

    You should listen to some of the recordings of the energy traders at Enron. They did this stuff all the time.









  • Narrow models trained on a task specific data set tend to be very good at their specialization. So protien folding, or material sciences have benefitted from machine learning, but we shouldn’t mistake that for being the same thing as chatGPT.

    One of the bigger problems we have with AI at the moment (in my very inexpert opionion) is that they seem to be trying to throw LLMs at every problem and swearing that it’ll achieve AGI soon.

    Meanwhile Alpha Fold is more closely related to stable diffusion than it is to ChatGPT.


  • I actually have some accidentally poisoned data out there. Many years ago I had a job that entailed doing red carpets. There were a lot of photos of me at small to mid-sized events with two of my business partners.

    Then for two years in a row my partners went to the MTV VMAs with someone else. The VMAs are MUCH bigger in terms of media footprint. That guy got tagged as me in the photos. So now a Google image search for me will at least be mixed, and often the other guy comes up first.

    So the idea is sound.