It was genuinely a surprise to see how much relative energy petrol cars use (and shame on me - I'm an electrical engineer). I mean I think I knew it intuitively, but this simple chart blew my mind.
When one gets in the weeds on EVs or ICE cars two things become shockingly clear: internal combustion is hilariously inefficient YET gasoline is hilariously energy dense. Most people's intuition is wrong on both of these points but then they cancel each other out.
Edit: another important point is that the "cost" to acquire gasoline is only the very end of the process. The energy has already been gathered, stored, and most of the processing is complete. Our cost (in money and energy) to "make" gasoline is really just gathering it. This is why the comparison to renewables is often a hard sell, it's just apples to oranges. Gasoline started on third base, renewables are batting from the plate. Some of the internal combustion enthusiasts are holding up e-fuels or synthetic fuels as the solution but then we have to pay for the entire energy gathering and processing pipeline and still be using a conversion method that's not at all efficient. It's the worst of both worlds.
It's inefficient but not hilariously so. Modern ICE are quite amazing technology.
Combined gas turbines (you know, the energy source that powers your electric car) are about 60% efficient for the really good ones, minus 5-7% transmission losses, minus 10-12% charging losses, minus 20% loss in cold climates, lands you at around 35-40% efficiency from fuel source to the wheel.
The Atkinson-cycle engine in the Toyota Prius gets around 40% give or take some losses in the drivetrain. Electric have plenty of upsides, but for some people with cheap gas+high electric costs+cold climate you would honestly be better driving a hybrid.
This is something that always gets lost in these conversations.
Whenever you do the real world calculation for what an electric cars CO2 profile looks like it turns out to be the same as a gasoline car unless your country is majority nuclear.
> Whenever you do the real world calculation for what an electric cars CO2 profile looks like it turns out to be the same as a gasoline car unless your country is majority nuclear.
Maybe today, but basically everywhere south of Canada solar is so high ROI that it's just a question of time before sunlight hours have electricity so much cheaper that the primary daytime parking locations become the favored (slow-)charging spots.
For you to prefer charging there your employer only has to charge you less during the day than your utility charges during the night, so the day/night rate arbitrage can easily pay for the metering hardware and installation (at the next opportunity to install without having to dig the parking lot up just for the chargers), with the rest being profit to incentivize the managers to install/offer this.
That means relatively dirty combustion near where people live. The population density around fossil fuel power plants tends to be pretty low in wealthy countries.
You can't pump hot water the same distance you can transmit electricity on HVDC towers.
Train locomotives have used diesel powered generators that then powers electric motors. Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs? Or better asked, what would be the most efficient use of gasoline?
> Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs?
Measured in terms of mass * distance, trains with steel wheels will beat anything with rubber pneumatic tires.
Part of the magic of hybrid trains is that you can have multiple generation units that can be turned on or off as needed.
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Efficiency is just one consideration for a power plant.
Historically, reliability has been more important than efficiency, especially for industrial applications like locomotives. In other words, locomotives are probably not as efficient as they could be. For instance, you could use a lower viscosity engine oil for lubrication, but that would reduce reliability as engines fail due to friction.
In the auto industry these are usually called a series hybrid and there have been a handful. The Chevy Volt (though it had the ability to directly connect the engine to the wheels at highway speeds), and the BMW i3 and i8, the Fisker Karma/Karma Revero. The new Ram Ramcharger truck and the second gen Ford Lightning will also be series hybrids.
It's a really good drivetrain that was unfortunately made untenable for a long time by a combination of regulation and market forces.
When it comes to the environment the most efficient use is to leave it in the ground.
Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades. They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.
Battery power would be better, because you can build even larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is too large, so far. That is changing.
"Maintenance costs of the lines may be increased by electrification, but many systems claim lower costs due to reduced wear-and-tear on the track from lighter rolling stock. There are some additional maintenance costs associated with the electrical equipment around the track, such as power sub-stations and the catenary wire itself, but, if there is sufficient traffic, the reduced track and especially the lower engine maintenance and running costs exceed the costs of this maintenance significantly."
We once dammed basically every river in the nation because it was in vogue at the time.
Maybe building overhead power lines for rail infrastructure should be the "hip" thing right now instead of AI. Maybe building oodles of solar power farms and batteries should be "hip"
We built electrical infrastructure to the most remote residences just because we could and because it was an investment in our people. We directly funded our massive and formerly world class rail network because we could, and because it would pay off. We built a world class road network half as a make-work project, and it still pays dividends. We purchased Alaska, with no obvious reason. We built a space program to have slightly better nuclear weapons, and it's part of the reason we were so dominant in computer chips for so long.
We have spent something like 40 trillion dollars over the past 25 years, and almost none of it on anything of real value. More than a little of that debt is just handouts to already rich people.
We can build new electric transmission lines and I'm so tired of things that we absolutely 100% can do if we just demand it be done being somehow treated as a problem. America can afford infrastructure.
That's a complicated question that unfortunately has quite a bit of "well it depends" in the answer. I worked in the auto industry for a long time - both doing engine development and EVs - so my opinions here are well-informed but not world expert.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a single constant speed and load. But most of the advancements in internal combustion engines over the last 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve timing and lift are probably the most underrated and overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid 30s.
So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope. In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more emissions and product features. You can get the full torque and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak load.
From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to use it in applications for which you just can't use full electrification. Planes are currently the best example of this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just doesn't get much.
In Japan, my country, this looks a bit different. A lot of electricity still comes from oil- and gas-fired plants. The mechanics differ (gas turbines vs. car engines), but in both cases we’re still relying on combustion. I suppose some countries have the same issue.
I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping.
I love writing software. I love that others are now getting to share this.
I think the issues here are valid. Equally there is lots of hard engineering work to reduce these issues. That's where I'm putting more energy.
My scale is decidedly non-Meta, but we're investing to make the whole team able to get their own PRs up. It's not been without it's bumps, but on the whole I think it's been transformative for everyone.
This was before the bot could competently code things. Software development is now a very different beast, and yes while there have been some very stupid and irresponsible uses of this new technology, many others are integrating it effectively into their workflows.
The fact that it can, and often does, get things working, sometimes even well, is evidence enough. It can't do some things, it can easily do others, and knowing which is which is very important nowadays.
Hard disagree. Software engineering was never about writing code. It's not a completely different beast, not really. It's just way cheaper to write code now. And anyone who has been doing this for a long time already knows, more code usually = more problems
Don't ignore the context here. These are people hired to develop software for a company. They have an obligation to do so efficiently, with sufficient quality, and while balancing the company's short term and longer term business needs.
I think it's great that software development has been opened up by LLMs. Everyone should at least try it, IMO.
But your company's source isn't your personal playground and you shouldn't treat it as such.
I agree that a company’s codebase isn’t a playground and I know+feel those obligations.
My reaction is more to the broader tone of some of these discussions. In my experience engineering cultures can become quite dogmatic or obstructive, and that can block improvements just as much as the opposite problem.
At our definitely-non-Meta-scale, we’ve been experimenting with letting more of the team get their own PRs up with LLM help. Overall it’s been pretty transformative. Interestingly, people tend to work on QoL and polish improvements that many SWE workflows often don’t prioritise or have time for.
There are outliers of course, but we learn, revert, and move on. If the outcome somewhere like Meta is PMs building nonsense, that feels more like a deeper systemic issue than something inherent to opening up the codebase.
There's a reason engineers tend to be dogmatic about things. It doesn't just come from nowhere. Is it misguided sometimes? Yes. But far more often than not, there are very good reasons why those with experience seem "dogmatic and obstructive".
This post confuses me a little. With my tests I try not to "reach inside" systems unless it's quite a specific integration test. Especially databases. In this case I feel like we're just... testing known PostgreSQL behavior?
Or to put another way; as others have observed, this could be solved with atomic updates and in some case SERIALIZABLE. These are right tools for balance operations - and if they’re used I’m not sure they need testing in this manner?
Fair concern about reaching inside systems - it's not something to do lightly. The hooks are designed to be minimal: production code never calls them, they only activate in tests. But the core point is narrower than the thread might suggest - the article isn't about whether to use atomic updates vs locks vs SERIALIZABLE. It's about when your code has operations that could race, how do you prove your handling actually works?
> Here's a thought. Lets all arbitrarily agree AGI is here.
A slightly different angle on this - perhaps AGI doesn't matter (or perhaps not in the ways that we think).
LLMs have changed a lot in software in the last 1-2 years (indeed, the last 1-2 months); I don't think it's a wild extrapolation to see that'll come to many domains very soon.
Although there is the consistent trap of tools that assign threads/workers based on the number of cores (e.g unit testing or bundling tools). This means the efficiency cores get dragged in and can absolutely tank the process.
This was particularly pronounced on the M1 due to the 50/50 split. We reduced the number of workers on our test suite based on the CPU type and it sped up considerably.
It used to be Factorio for me (I live in Australia, so long flights happen a lot). The problem with Factorio the flight isn't long enough! and the game bleeds into 100+ hours post-flight.
DF gets all the news (rightfully so, it's an epic game that I've dumped a ton of hours into) but if you haven't already, consider checking out Songs of Syx. It's like DF but multiplied by 100. You can have tens of thousands of citizens, doing most of the things they do in Dwarf Fortress, and a lot more, including waging huge wars against the neighbors. The limits of DF kinda made me sad, actually, that you are limited to so few Dwarves (and don't say it's because you want to know the story of all of them, because after 30 or so you lose track of who is who anyways, so might as well up the limit from 100 to 50K, or more? ;) Songs of Syx has also routinely been getting massive updates since 2020 and I have a feeling the code is a bit cleaner so the solo dev can add features faster (unlike DF's code base which is, according to one of the new devs a nightmare to work with). It's a game that is never talked about but deserves a whole lot more love from gamers.
I don't mean to cast shade on DF, I really do love it, and am happy for its existence, I just think that DF fans should also look into Songs of Syx.
The defining difference for me are the generated stories in DF, which often are a lot of random trash but still give a feeling of a deeper meaning.
I’ve definitely experienced a subjective regression with Opus 4.5 the last few days. Feels like I was back to the frustrations from a year ago. Keen to see if 4.6 has reversed this.
> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later.
This is true... Equally I've seen it dive into a rabbit hole, make some changes that probably aren't the right direction... and then keep digging.
This is way more likely with Sonnet, Opus seems to be better at avoiding it. Sonnet would happily modify every file in the codebase trying to get a type error to go away. If I prompt "wait, are you off track?" it can usually course correct. Again, Opus seems way better at that part too.
Admittedly this has improved a lot lately overall.
I don't understand why anyone finds it interesting that a machine, or chatbot, never tires or gets demoralized. You have to anthromorphize the LLM before you can even think of those possibilities. A tractor never tires or gets demoralized either, because it can't. Chatbots don't "dive into a rabbit hole ... and then keep digging" because they have superhuman tenacity, they do it because that's what software does. If I ask my laptop to compute the millionth Fibonacci number it doesn't sigh and complain, and I don't think it shows any special qualities unless I compare it to a person given the same job.
You're a machine. You're literally a wet, analog device converting some forms of energy into other forms just like any other machine as you work, rest, type out HN comments, etc. There is nothing special about the carbon atoms in your body -- there's no metadata attached to them marking them out as belonging to a Living Person. Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention.
So, since you're just a machine, any text you generate should be uninteresting to me -- correct?
Alternatively, could it be that a sufficiently complex and intricate machine can be interesting to observe in its own right?
If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties.
>Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention
Evolution doesn't "teach" anything. It's just an emergent property of the fact that life reproduces (and sometimes doesn't). If you're going to have this radically reductionist view of humanity, you can't also treat evolution as having any kind of agency.
"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties."
Wrong level of abstraction. And not the definition of machine.
I might feel awe or amazement at what human-made machines can do -- the reason I got into programming. But I don't attribute human qualities to computers or software, a category error. No computer ever looked at me as interesting or tenacious.
Yes + Appears it's a rigid structure w/ the engine pushing from the back? At 0.1g I suspect even with advanced composites only a few km would be possible.
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