mastodon
4.6.6
Howdy!
There's a video going around on my Mastodon about solar power and batteries. It's a good one.
But one thing I felt that should've been mentioned is all the non-electrical batteries ("physical batteries") that exist.
These things are so cool and ingenious. And there's no shortage of fun ones. Have extra electricity? Push a train full of rocks up a hill (need electricity? Let it go back down)! How about heating sand? Or floating concrete spheres?
So fun and cool!
My client, Mr. Grinch, would like to see, your honor, that Mr Ravensctoft be duly punished for his excessive and baseless accusations that my client has "a brain full of spiders" or that he "has garlic in his soul".
My client felt he had to go into hiding as a direct result of the slanderous, spiteful, and unnecessary "jingle" and we seek the just and fair compensation for the damage done.
When I hear leadership and Execs talk about AI "freeing us from toil", I'm reminded how innovation and automation have already freed me from toil.
AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are already enjoying AMAZING work-life balance, free from toil (due to their proximity to frontier models).
Anywho, here's a blog post: https://joshcannon.me/2025/12/26/toil.html
As someone who was born tenacious, I have a lot of respect for the Grand Canyon and the stream that carved it.
Maybe in several hundreds years my unyielding stubbornness will earn me the title of "The Grand Cannon"
Beware of processes that don't scale and beware of making yourself irreplaceable.
Imagine having to service 54% more customers while maintaining a bottlenecked SINGLE point of service.
Since 1950, world births have increased 1.54x, while "Mr. Claus" has struggled to keep up with demand.
Don't just prepare for failure, prepare for success as well.