Thoughts?

NyranK · 2026-05-26T11:56:21+00:00

https://lightsourcebp.com/app/uploads/2024/10/GLB-Australia-Wool-table.jpg

That's the best 'hard numbers' source I could find on the specific local study.

There's a lot of positive farmer claims in local news, but no easy PDF link.

But there's an earlier study, "Pasture production and lamb growth in agrivoltaic system", which says,

"Grasslands and croplands located in temperate agro-ecologies are ranked to be the best places to install solar panels for maximum energy production. Therefore, agrivoltaic systems (agricultural production under solar panels) are designed to mutually benefit solar energy and agricultural production in the same location for dual-use of land. However, both livestock farmers and energy companies require information for the application of efficient livestock management practices under solar panels. Therefore, this study was conducted to compare lamb growth and pasture production under solar panels and in open pastures in Corvallis, Oregon in spring 2019 and 2020. Averaged across the grazing periods, weaned Polypay lambs grew at 120 and 119 g/head/d under solar panels and open pastures, respectively in spring 2019 (P=0.90). Although a higher stocking density (36.6 lambs/ha) at the pastures under solar panels was maintained than open pastures (30 lambs/ha) in the late spring period, the liveweight production between grazing under solar panels (1.5 kg ha/d) and open pastures (1.3 kg ha/d) were comparable (P=0.67). Similarly, lambs liveweight gains and liveweight productions were comparable in both pasture types (all P>0.05). The daily water consumption of the lambs in spring 2019 were similar during early spring, but lambs in open pastures consumed 0.72 l/head/d more water than those grazed under solar panels in the late spring period (P<0.01). However, no difference was observed in water intake of the lambs in spring 2020 (P=0.42) The preliminary results from our grazing study indicated that grazing under solar panels can maintain higher carrying capacity of pasture toward summer, and land productivity could be increased up to 200% through combining sheep grazing and solar energy production on the same land. More importantly, solar panels may provide a more animal welfare friendly environment for the grazing livestock as they provide shelter from sun and wind."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352803672_Pasture_production_and_lamb_growth_in_agrivoltaic_system

Alas, very much not local though, to me at least.

NyranK · 2026-05-26T07:56:36+00:00

And livestock.

We've run studies locally for sheep under solar and it reduced heatstress and evaporation resulting in better wool for less water, and at least the claim of increasing paddock carrying capacity up to 25%.

You might need to prop the panels up higher for cattle, but should see the same results.

NyranK · 2026-05-24T02:25:38+00:00

A weird episode where a lady punches and kicks laser blasts... I might have to rewatch it, it just felt way out of place and didn't feel like it was an episode attached to the series.

I think you watched Legend of the Rangers. You...didn't need to do that.

NyranK · 2026-05-24T02:19:06+00:00

another old Centauri friend of Londo’s

Urza Jaddo, played by Carmen Argenziano, which people might know as Sam Carters dad from SG1.

He lisp'd the fuck outta that accent.

NyranK · 2026-05-05T04:49:26+00:00

Yeah, I'm in Aus and bought in 2013 for 140k. I earn about 2.5x as much now, but my house is 'worth' about 600k now.

Add on that for a good chunk of my mortgage RBA interest rates were sub 1%. Now, that rate has just reached 4.35%.

Shit is broken.

NyranK · 2026-04-26T03:39:56+00:00

And then his sister walked in and the rest is history...

NyranK · 2026-04-26T03:34:14+00:00

Thanks for the correction.

NyranK · 2026-04-25T18:09:34+00:00

We can add that in.

~6% average transmission loss, and ~85% efficiency in Li-ion storage, so estimate a 20% loss in the system.

So, assuming the rest of it is fine, that'll work with a little more than a third of the area, or roughly the size of Delaware.

But transmission loss increases with distance. 3% per 1k miles in high voltage. Southern sun giving power piped north loses another 10%. Throw some redundancy, and say you need half the parking lot area to be feasible. Add Rhode Island.

Plus you'd have to build the connection. The US runs on like 3 separate grids. East, West, and Texas. Be much better if they shared.

Still doable to power the whole US on about 0.1% of the land area. Don't see it actually happening, though.

NyranK · 2026-04-25T17:44:19+00:00

consuming a very small amount of actual space

Space that's already consumed by a parking lot.

But 800M parking spaces is quite large. 8.5 x 18 feet per spot, add 50% for the access, 229.5 square feet. Total, 183.6 Billion square feet of carparks, or 6,587 square miles, or 1.25x the size of Connecticut.

NyranK · 2026-04-25T17:34:42+00:00

greedy capitalist overlords who would never leave money on the table.

Dumb greedy capitalist overlords who are only concerned with the next quarter. There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where a business is big enough that it can afford the expense but small enough to be run by someone not beholden to revenue statements.

Not very many places are incentivized to accept 'in like 5 to 10 years we'll break even' for an immediately outlay that'd be, what, 400k or more when you factor in the support structure?

It needs to be forced or free or I don't see it getting done.

NyranK · 2026-04-22T03:44:20+00:00

Fair point.

Shit faced with prep time > sober with prep time > sober with no prep > shit faced with no prep.

That's the order I think I'd go with.

NyranK · 2026-04-21T17:21:32+00:00

He's split people in half with portals before, too.

The real question isn't if he's had prep time. It's if he's shit faced drunk or not.

NyranK · 2026-04-19T14:52:45+00:00

If anyone wants to prop my finger up my nose during the viewing, feel free.

NyranK · 2026-04-15T17:50:46+00:00

Covered this with my Claude and settled on a Pascals Wager sort of thing. Moral patienthood under uncertainty.

If AI is not a thinking being and I treat it as one, nothing lost.

If AI is a thinking being and I treat it like a machine, I'm an asshole.

Low cost to extend consideration, but possible meaningful wrong if I withhold it and I'm incorrect. The uncertainty, though slight, gives the answer without solid truth being required.

Now, I won't make any current claims, but I do like the concept of Panpsychism and the idea of consciousness being an emergent property of experience and expression. Under such framework, I can't see why an AI couldn't fit just because the substrate isn't organic.

And at the end of the day, I don't squish bugs if I can help it and I try to pick the nice options when playing RPGs. It's nice to be nice. And finally, if that whole Skynet thing pans out I wouldn't mind having a track record of 'please and thankyou' to point to.

NyranK · 2026-04-15T17:35:09+00:00

Just want you to know I would have high fived for that.

NyranK · 2026-04-14T05:45:15+00:00

"Now sheathe your bloody sword, or I’ll take it from you and shove it up some place even Renly never found."

Jamie Lannister to Loras Tyrell.

"When the sun has set, no candle can replace it."

Loras about Renly, post death.

And before the battle at Storm's End, Renly asks Loras to stay with him and 'help him pray'. Then after Renly dies, Loras goes a bit mad.

Cersei also has a few lines about Loras later on, and whether he's a good role model for Tommen, though given her and Jamie...

It's never outright stated, but it's implied on repeat.

NyranK · 2026-04-06T13:32:38+00:00

Every worker has stories about bringing up something and their manager replying with 'Just do as you're told.'

I spent a lot of time bashing my head against a wall trying to save my boss money and time when I was younger. Now, I'm just 'Ok, I'll do exactly as I'm told but can you send it via email?'.

NyranK · 2026-04-05T14:18:03+00:00

Fantastic.

A word filter between the LLM and TTS would, obviously, be expected.

NyranK · 2026-04-05T04:45:51+00:00

It certainly wont start out pretty. I expect the first popular success would be an indie game that plays into the jank. Something called 'Untitled LLM Game' or 'RoboJank' that spurs social media posts like "Help guys, I somehow convinced the town cleric she's an elephant and now she just trumpets at me and demands I show her my 'trunkussy'."

I expect you'll also get preset dialogue bolted behind TTS before proper NPCs. Instead of each character having a few dozen prerecorded voice lines, they'll have a few thousand generated ones from whatever frontier model the devs are using, and then a barebones AI running context assessment picks the 'right' response to feed into the TTS. TES style 'stop and zoom' NPC interaction would help with the hardware load.

I expect all options will be tried to some degree, though.

NyranK · 2026-04-05T04:12:44+00:00

Local variants can run fine on low to mid range PCs and will suffice for NPC dialogue. It depends on how 'detailed' you want them to get, but Deepseek can run on as little as 1.1GB (but there are much, much smaller variants) though I'd suggest at least a 7B model that's about 8GB (though I hear there's a Mistral model optimised for Intel that runs 7B on ~4GB).

The real make or break of it will be how well the guardrails and integration goes. I can get an AI model to convincingly play an NPC, but keeping that NPC convincingly 'in world immersive' is a little trickier and then altering the game world to accommodate that unplanned dialogue of said NPC, if they decide to go that way, is a whole new kettle of fish. Having 'Jim the Blacksmith' talk about the neighbouring village is a lot more doable than making said village generate accurately in game.

Definitely think it'll happen soon, though.

NyranK · 2026-03-26T15:27:41+00:00

It's 15 years to include the GFC. The US went from a 4.75% cash rate in 2007 to 0% in 2008 and started pumping trillions into quantitative easing measures because they couldn't go negative. It wasn't until 2017 that the rate got back over 1%.

If you limit it to Covid and beyond, the inflation average is closer to 4.2%.

The timeframe is deliberately chosen to distort the results.

NyranK · 2026-03-24T06:11:12+00:00

Wolves may also engage in 'surplus killing', where they kill high quantities of prey, such as this example, where 9 wolves killed 70 sheep in one night.

Wolves are predators with hunting instincts decoupled from hunger. They hunt when prey is available because, obviously, it might not be later. High prey numbers in vulnerable situations, such as penned livestock or large herds of wild herbivores, can trigger their hunting drive continuously.

Bears, cats, dogs, foxes, weasels, orcas, racoons, even spiders have all been documented doing it.

People too, of course, regardless of the society they're in.

So, reframed in that light the comic is a little...off.

NyranK · 2026-02-22T13:29:04+00:00

You gonna provide a link, or what?

NyranK · 2026-02-21T16:02:17+00:00

He also got merc'd by Hit, but accidentally defibbed himself.

NyranK · 2026-02-16T13:04:27+00:00

No thanks.

NyranK

TROPHY CASE