Funny enough, Miami is one of the few US cities that does have a pretty large rail system. There are several types of rail and it is fairly fast and effective. You can even take the Silver Meteor to NYC with an average speed of 51 mph. That's a better average speed than many European lines over a similar 1400 mile distance. Compare: Brussels-Athens 41mph avg, Stockholm-Paris 54mph avg, Amsterdam-Lisbon 47mph. The fastest EU route over that distance is probably Berlin-Madrid at 65mph, and the Amtrak is cheaper, has no changes, and is usually more comfortable than any of those.
If you want (relatively) high speed, you can take the Brightline to Orlando, 236 mi in 3.5h aka 67 mph average. That's on par with Brussels-Amsterdam (68mph), Amsterdam-Paris (80mph), but indeed far below the marquee EU/Chinese/Japanese HSR routes of 150+ mph average speed.
More generally: large parts of the eastern US had a developed railroad system (and often still do, for freight.) You can look up old maps and see how widespread they were. The economics mostly just didn't work out because as car ownership rose, the population density wasn't high enough to justify them over cars.
I think a "PR quality score" would go a long way here. Doesn't even have to be displayed to the user, you can just flag it as a low-quality PR under a certain threshold and have it go to a separate view for the maintainer. Have a prominent 1-click button to close it as low quality/spam with a default message about useless PRs. To go along with this you'd probably want a "report" button on comments/PRs to flag them as (spam/AI generated/useless change/etc.)
You could estimate quality with: number of PRs accepted before (only counting repos >2 years old), age of account, size of diff, number of PRs reported as spam.
Thank you for looking into this. It's a huge problem for maintainers these days... something needs to be done.
The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe.
Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.
You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.
It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage.
Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).
Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating.
So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies.
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If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever
I mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better in mild climates.
That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%.
Resistive heating is indeed almost 100% efficient, but combustion is only about 90% efficient and that's using modern technology to scrape almost everything we can, which has a cost in terms of the product upfront cost and maintenance. The reason it's not much higher is that we must vent the exhaust gases. If you were OK with the burned gas vapours in your home you could get close to 100%, but they're poisonous and so they must be vented to the atmosphere where they only cause global warming. Venting those gases means losing heat, so that's inefficient.
For the EVs in particular, because motion <=> electrical energy is almost the same either direction (a dynamo and an electric motor are almost identical) we get regenerative braking in most applications. This isn't anywhere close to 100% effective, and of course we net losses from resistance which gets much worse as speed increases - but it's not nothing.
The big win is that global warming problem. Electrifying consumption means fungibility. In my lifetime the UK went from mostly coal electricity, to no coal at all. But few cared because to the end users it's the same electricity regardless of how it was made, and most people probably didn't even notice. So if you move consumption to electricity then the generation problem is de-coupled and can be addressed separately.
Depends, industrial heat is a rather large category. The vast majority of industrial heat in e.g. food production or textiles needs modest temperatures that can easily be handled with heat pumps.
For the rest, there are many ways to heat electrically. Including resistive, plasma, arc, induction, etc. Mostly, gas based heating is convenient because it is rather simple technology that is easy to use and we know how to do it at scale. But there is a lot of wasted heat in industry. Mostly that just blows out the chimneys or is radiated to the universe.
Cooling is as big of a problem as heating is in industry. Cooling is the process of expending more energy in order to get rid of the already wasted energy you can't use. Very little of that energy is recovered. Though some places run e.g. district heating on this type of energy.
There are examples of steel producers that are using electric heat now. Still a bit niche. But it works. A lot of this stuff is inertia. Building and designing new factories from scratch is expensive and disruptive. Gas isn't expensive/wasteful enough to consider that for a lot of existing industries. However, new companies would be well advised to see if they can undercut the competition by going electric. Especially in places where gas now has to be imported in LNG form at great cost.
Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.
My Vaillant air to water heat pump is "effective" down to -28C, and has a resistive heater element as a backup in case the COP value flatlines (as in if COP is 1, it doesn't matter).
My cheap air to air heat pump in the summerhouse (Panasonic HZ25ZKE) is effective down to -25C and has a COP of 2.22 there. Even at -25C it still delivers twice as much heat energy as the electricity consumed.
While we very rarely have temperatures below -20C in Denmark, i have yet to experience a "drop" in performance from it. Granted, it becomes a lot noisier in very low temperatures, but it "does the job".
I'll add that this being an older house (1970s) we have "other issues" that causes heat loss, so we usually run the log burner for supplementary heat during those few days of -20C. The heat pump can keep the house warm, but you can feel the cold "pushing in" from walls and windows (dual pane).
Sadly the heat pump has also kinda voided all attempts to renovate for saving energy. Our yearly heat cost (heating and warm water) is around €750, and adding insulation would cost around €3500, for a potential saving of around 10-20%, so a total of 20-30 years to earn itself back again.
Almost no one lives in a location where heat pumps are never (or even usually) inappropriate. Yes, it might get to -20 F, but how often does that happen over a winter, never mind over a year?
My area doesn't get that cold, but the insulation is so good that last year we accidentally turned the heat off for a week without noticing despite it snowing outside; our "backup" was our own body heat plus the waste heat from our normal electricity consumption (which also isn't high).
I've seen a demo house in Canada that had a bucket standing in the middle of a room with -20 outside. The bucket had been there all winter and it never froze, a single, huge candle warmed the house. It was most impressive. I never did figure out how enough oxygen made it in to keep that candle burning!
But it really made me realize that even though I'm used to brick houses and stone everywhere that that is a terrible thing efficiency wise. A properly insulated wooden house can indeed be heated almost by body heat and waste heat alone. The big loss is windows so triple insulated and properly mounted windows are a must for such a setup.
Modern air-to-air heatpumps heat at over 100% efficiency even at those temperatures, they are very widely deplyoed in the Nordics for heating. And even where it is sometimes that cold, most of the year it is warmer than that. Still yes, you should have another source of heat just in case.
While I'm sure that it suits some people to connect "Electricity got more expensive" with "The primary generation sources changed" as a primitive post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that doesn't really work out.
> Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world
Note that marine shipping is extraordinarily fuel efficient (from a gCO2/(t*km) basis), so I doubt that it adds a lot on a per ton of fuel basis. We just ship a lot of fossil fuels.
This [1] graph looks to be in the right ballpark from what i remember in school 15 years ago, i didn't verify it in depth but +- an order of magnitude better than the next best method is roughly right
Even though petroleum product shipping accounts for almost 40% of shipping, the surprising efficiency of ocean transport still means that it's not that big an energy cost; a single-digit percentage of the energy content of the shipped oil/gasoline.
But even that is still worth saving - it's a few percent more benefit for electrification.
Marine transport is stupidly efficient and probably won’t influence those numbers much. For the same reasons it’s absolutely okay to eat avocados from overseas. I believe the processing of oil to gas is quite energy intense tho.
in cold weather an ice is not close to 30%, that's an achievable warm weather figure when everything's working efficiently. Many ice journeys are so short in cold weather that efficiency never peaks above 10%
Well, EVs also lose a lot of efficiency in cold weather as well. You'll also note that the 70% figure I gave for power plants is more or less a best case scenario for modern, well designed plants. A lot of currently existing power plants do much worse than 70%
True, system thermal efficiency for the UK's CCGT generation is about 50%. Obviously that's with a varying throttle (the UK goes from say 5GW of CCGT to 25GW of CCGT in an hour if the wind drops just as everybody wakes up) and you'd do better than 50% if you were baseload running 24/7 at peak performance - but that's not a realistic place for CCGT to be when nuclear fuel is basically free and the two new big sources (solar and wind) aren't even running on actual fuel anyway.
Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.
Yeah, in combined cycle plants you burn the natural gas first in a gas turbine first, use the waste heat from that to boil water and run steam turbine. Then condense the steam using your district heating circuit.
You can say this is 100% efficient as you make some electricity and the rest does house heating.
The thing is that your home's heatpump has an efficiency of 300%-500%. So even if your power plant and power delivery only has say 50% gas-to-electricity-at-home, you are still looking at 150%-250% gas-to-heat-your-house efficiency.
> Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).
Yes, but there are also future inefficient uses of renewables. E.g. when making iron, you heat the ore (iron oxides) with coke (refined sulfurless coal). The coke will provide extra heat and act as a reduction agent, separating the oxygen atoms from the iron oxides. Now you can do the same thing with hydrogen as the reduction agent to avoid producing CO2 and to avoid using fossil fuels. However, creating renewable hydrogen is atm only 30% efficient, storing and transporting it has losses. Even with possible improvements, that hydrogen will be a very inefficient and costly use of electricity, and at least half of it will always be wasted.
So in terms of total energy usage, making those kinds of industrial processes use hydrogen, we will have to at least double our electricity output. And a lot of that doubling will be wasted because of the inefficiency of electrolysis, as opposed to directly using coal or natural gas.
The interesting bit about using H2 in industrial processes is that, while inefficient, it's also the school book example of variable loads. Solar and wind produces power extremely cheap but intermittent, so in a grid the push down prices when they produce the most. Variable loads can, at least in theory, be run when prices are the cheapest.
Uh, can you provide any scientific papers that H2 can be used for Iron smelting?
CO2 is very stable, even at high temperatures. Its hard to strip O2 from it (except photosintesis). Now, H2 itself is very violatile gas. When burn, it creates water. Water is not stable high temperatures. It become vapor and when temperature rise it can even break bond between H2 and O.
No, not at all. Coke or hydrogen always only provide additional heat, they are never the main source of heat. The main heat source can either be coal or an electric arc furnace. The coke or hydrogen are just necessary for the chemical reaction, and providing some heat is a side-effect.
Sorry, in face of OP’s tone I allowed myself some sarcasm. Obviously there needs to be additional energy. You’d have some equilibrium with those reactions and OP didn’t make any argument why that can’t be controlled in favor of reducing Fe2O3.
It’s also borderline unbelievable OP never heard of hydrogen in future steelmaking, if they are at all invested in the topic. You’d need a special kind of ignorance to think people are hugely throwing money at this, when the basic chemistry is infeasible.
Well, actually, thermolysis for water occurs at 2200°C. Thermolysis of CO₂ starts at 1400°C, of CO at 3700°C. The melting point of iron is around 1500°C, similarly its oxides.
So water as a product is actually more stable than CO₂, and doesn't undergo thermolysis at the relevant temperatures for smelting iron. Whereas when going the CO₂ route, there is the risk of producing relevant amounts of CO, which is not as desirable and less efficient because it only absorbs half the oxygen.
Cost is a big question, but it will for sure be more expensive to use hydrogen. Back of the envelop calculation (250$/t coal price, need 1/3t of H_2 for the same effect, so H₂ may cost up to 750$/t, need 40kWh/kg for H₂ electrolysis at 100% efficiency) gives a breakeven electricity price of 1.875ct/kWh. While this happens from time to time due to overproduction, those prices will even out as soon as there is a market for that excess electricity through batteries, storage and electrolysis. Which means that cost-wise, the H₂ route will never be more effective than coal. To make it viable, coal use needs to be made more expensive through taxes and tariffs.
Nice link, thanks!
Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked.
Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at ~15,700TWh.
I'd guess that demand for Oil is so inflexible mostly due to its use in transportation? If that's the case, we should see this value drop as the adoption of EVs progresses, but clearly so far they haven't made a dent.
Edit: after clicking around a bit more, it seems that the EU energy use reduction might be mostly due to off-shoring energy intensive industries... ayayay. XD
Yes, the EU offshored almost all the important parts of their manufacturing, which definitely contributed. There is an interesting series of graphs on the subject from the same website: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring
Do not underestimate the impact of transitioning from incandescent to LED lighting. An average home could be consuming 1Kw for lighting alone at busy times.
Where heating is needed, and where heating is done by electricity, changing to LED lighting indoors don't make any difference whatsoever. Unless your main heating source is a heat pump. In my home there's a heat pump upstairs, but not downstairs. All the lights downstairs are now LED, but the only effect that has is monetary - LED lights are way more expensive, and contrary to claims, don't last longer either. But these days LED is the only option available when buying.
Heat pumps though.. they really save a lot of electricity. Very visible on my electricity bill.
Is this really a lot of people that use resistive heating?
Also at least it saves electricity during summer when you don't want to dump even more heat into the room.
As a side, from my experience LEDs last significantly longer than incadescant LEDs. Maybe it's something to do with the power grid fluctuating more in certain areas?
I haven't been able to find reliable LED lighting, except when compared to particularly low-quality incadecent lights. Cost-wise it's a no-brainer, LEDs are more expensive. They are, however, getting better. They used to be totally terrible, at least that's changing. However, they're still advertising "N hours", where the "N" counts only 3 or 4 hours (typically) per day, so (and get this) the calculation is something like this: "20000 hours = 833 days, if you use them 3 hours only, of those days". Whereas the incadecent light bulbs "1200 hours" is 1200 hours of actual use.
As for your question, living in a country where 100% of domestic power is electric (save the occasional wood heater which is more for decoration but can be useful in certain very cold areas during winter), yes there's indeed a ton of resistive heating. All the heating in my home is resistive, except for the heat pump in the living room. And the living room is upstairs. The house is very well insulated though, even for a house many decades old, so it's not that expensive to heat.
In the summer? Well, this far north it doesn't get that hot, and we don't actually need to use electric lighting at all during the better part of summer, unless the room is windowless. 24 hour daylight.
Just transitioning from coal to gas for electricity production has a big impact.
The graph is adjusted to compensate for the efficiency of the power plants, but it's an average and one they need to update every so often as plants get more efficient.
But we're phasing out the oldest and least efficient coal plants and replacing them with gas plants that are twice as efficient (33% vs 64%).
The graph under discussion assumes 40% as discussed here:
Overall renewables (including the "bad" ones like biogas, and the finite ones like hydro) are at around 27% of TFC in EU today (25.2% in 2024 and growing at around 1% per year). Not bad. But far from replacement.
Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU though, it's just that the rest is imported.
Nuclear fuel is around 2-3% of electricity cost, and there is too much worldwide supply for it to be of any concern, so it doesn't really matter where it comes from. For energy balance calculations it is accepted that nuclear energy is counted as produced where the reactor itself is.
Strategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun.
The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply.
Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blockade or embargo.
There is so much uranium in the ground (in the west too) that it doesn’t make sense to ”keep it” for yourself. Why would Russia wanna keep a supply for the next one million years instead of selling it and get money today? Same with all other countries with uranium.
Regarding known and exploited or rapidly exploitable deposits, we are very, very far from millions of years:
"As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply"
You're forgetting about the supply chain. Who manufactures all the solar panels and wind turbines? Honest question - are we increasing the risks of becoming energy dependent on China? Or does Europe have the ability to manufacture its own?
AFAIK all the raw materials (maybe not all top-notch, especially from the get go, but usable) and all the know-how exist in Europe (at worst currently working abroad), where many nations want to reindustrialize and gain autonomy.
In France numerous projects appear. Some may be too ambitious, some with a Chinese partner. In any case we will re-learn, and it will be less difficult than creating usable uranium without any adequate ore here!
Nuclear power resurgence is bullshit and it will always remain a drop in the bucket, especially for large countries. US has too much natural gas, China too much renewables, Russia well, it's of virtually no economic impact worldwide and whatever they might do is irrelevant (unless they nuke us).
Any country that starts a new nuclear power plant construction today won't finish it before electricity will be comprehensively solved by renewables. It pertains even to dictatorship where public opinion does not exist and there's no red tape (Belarus: 14 years from decision to first reactor start) let alone not in free countries. It puts them into 2040+. In EU let's say there will be certainly no fossil fuel electricity at all, maybe apart from few percents of natgas for prolonged quiet periods in winter, and whatever nuclear power remains will be easy to replace. China? go figure, they have a problem of removing coal generation and that's essentially same as nuclear from standpoint of its behaviour on the grid, and there is so much more coal, nuclear will be squashed simply as a byproduct of whatever solution (which will likely be solar+batteries) they come up with.
> The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. … and 7.8% for Europe.
Yes, the _!ONLY!_ thing is, this won’t move the needle at all on climate change.
Wind and solar for electric is the lowest of low hanging fruit.
No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.
Lithium ion batteries, or a solid state alternative aren’t it. Not without being some orders of magnitude more energy dense and lighter. And you still need to electrify those sectors to be able to charge the batteries.
Confident talk, but that's not at all the reality that I'm seeing.
Public transport is almost completely electric powered where I live (ferries still haven't changed to electric, but it's coming.)
Trucking is electrified, as in, the operators have realzed that they're cheaper to run, so they are changing over when possible. (Sidenote: with some of the heaviest loads worldwide)
Very many agricultural buildings in active use either have, or are installing solar. Their energy usage is so high, that any offset to it is "free" money. Many have installed batteries also, so if there is an interruption in power delivery, there isn't an immediate need to start up a generator.
Electric tractors are also something I've heard them want. Less maintenance means less time spent not being able to work.
Sure, fertilizer and animal husbandry have other emissions which aren't tackled by this, but why exclude improvement just because some other area isn't affected.
> No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.
That's weird. In europe trains, trucks, light trucks busses and cars are bascially solved with EVs. There are even some early beginnings for heavy construction and agriculture machinery but it doesn't seem to be mass market yet. Electric ferries also start to pop up for smaller distances.
The biggest issues seem to be ships and planes. Not sure there are any good solutions there.
Comments here are interesting. Of course it’s a copy, he was 12. For pretty much of all of human history, to make art you would first consume large amounts of it to develop taste and then make many copies to develop skill and style. The average modern-day artist (writer, painter, poet, etc) does this far less than ever before, to the point where we have forgotten that’s how learning works.
In fairness to the US system, it’s certainly better than the European system or pretty much all but a few around the world. Yes, there is corruption, inefficiency and the largest subsidies are often for huge corporations that obtained them by buying politicians, but! The US government still manages to fund the cutting edge in 2026 in countless fields, to fund real American manufacturing, if you want to get grants you have a real shot at real money regardless of who you are, etc. In China you’re not getting a dime without the right political opinions. In Europe you have to be part of a very specific academic-professional class. In the US you can be anyone.
The thing about China is that they’re more strategic with their money and have longer timelines and clear, achievable visions. If you read the Wikipedia page for Made in China 2025 you’ll get the wrong impression that their success is due to more recent pushes; the vision is far more universal and has existed for far longer. You don’t get to the forefront of advanced manufacturing from nothing in ten years. Look at the 5th and 6th Five-Year Plans, into the seventh… you see the groundwork laid for present day China. The US rarely does that sort of long term thinking or planning these days, and it’s not even about the political winds changing or short-termism as much as that we lack one unified vision. Without that unified vision you can’t plan long term and you also can’t correct glaring problems. For example, if we had a unified vision on manufacturing, an obvious issue would be the lack of an American JLCPCB. You could create one with a stick and carrot approach, tariff assembled PCBs, new rule that any imported assembled PCB has to prominently display “electronics made in China”, smart subsidies for US board houses that encourage scaling and cost reduction. But that level of cohesion and vision rarely happens in the US and so we get a chaotic hodgepodge.
$2900 seems pretty reasonable to me considering the size. Works out to $416/sqft, which is much cheaper than Bay Area real estate.
I never understood the draw of these huge monitors until I had to do CAD for work and now I understand. Giant monitor + SpaceMouse is a gamechanger. My current monitor is 36” and I could easily use more width.
The IRA wasn't a cure-all and Trump/the OBBBA didn't exactly kill it dead, either. 84% of IRA clean energy grants, or $96.7B, was protected from clawback by Trump [0.] The tax credits are largely intact. Many of the projects were already completed and fully funded.
Go through a list of IRA projects, though, and you'll see two things: 1) they weren't generally killed by Trump, and 2) the IRA still did not get the US competitive with China. Let's take the largest one, the Toyota plant in NC, which is operational, and impressive in that it makes the batteries from raw materials BUT it has an eye-watering cost for the capacity ($~14B for 30 GWh/yr vs. $>4B for 30GWh/yr at Hyundai's plant.) Compare that to a Chinese plant at $50-100M/GWh and you can see that despite huge subsidies at several levels - including a $35/kWh subsidy for domestic cell production - the US is far behind here.
Look at the others and you'll see similar stories. Ford-SK On just split up because the F-150 is too expensive, demand is soft, and SK On wants to do energy storage. If we could make the F-150 competitively, demand would be higher, but it's incredibly expensive relative to a Chinese EV.
The more promising story is in solar (panel manufacturing and installs) but again, not a cure-all under Biden or a catastrophe under Trump. The US solar industry just had its third largest quarter on record, and we can now make every part of a solar panel in the US in volume. Module production capacity is at 60 GW, up 37% from Dec 2024, and cell production is at 3.2 GW, up from 1.2 GW a year ago [1.] That's a much prettier picture (regarding manufacturing) than in the EU, where manufacturing capacity is far lower and not growing nearly as quickly, although the EU has a larger installed base of (mostly Chinese) panels.
Well said. The credit is with the model; you commissioned it but did not create it.
With AI art... there is no passion, there is no pain, there is no emotion, there is no sex, there is no feeling, there is no reason. When Blaze Foley sang If I Could Only Fly or Nina Simone sang Stars or Bardot sang Je t'aime or Morricone wrote Se telefonando or Vermeer painted Zicht op Delft or Orozco painted his Epic of American Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then saying, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
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To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
The sad thing, of course, is that to make the great you must make a hell of a lot of bad and a fair amount of simply good art. And then there are those who have no delusions of grandeur but just make art for the sake of it. AI art cheapens those things; it makes them a trivial undertaking. The architect who would have become great on the completion of his two hundred and seventh building can now generate the first two hundred and six with the push of a button. The woman making fliers for her dance club - each one no great work of art, but certainly made with care and love, sees now that her work is useless and stops. We all lose.
>You can even combine the visual understanding of Gemini with the actions generated by Opus to take it a step further, by having the latter generate instructions and the former generates JSON DSL to that gets executed.
Yes, huge +1 for this. I do this in a different field and it's quite impressive. At first it felt weird using different models together but they really do have certain strengths/weaknesses (in January 2026.)
Also, fascinating how quickly things are evolving around PCB design. It was only six months ago that "vibecoding" a PCB was far off (look how basic this was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542880) and now that may soon become possible!
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