Unlurker

Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet (pv-magazine-usa.com)

Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country? e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?

Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner) Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun. However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant. So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^ With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available) But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter. ^ but not others! Eg if you're willing to discuss tradeoffs you might find dozens of gw available most of the time https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/out-of-thin-air ^^ patio11 has a good podcast about this https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-ai-energy-bottleneck-with-tim-fist/ Disclaimer: my employer apparently sponsored that episode

Distributed. New transmission lines have big nimby issues, and many existing corridors are already getting overloaded. There are recurring attempts to reform the permitting process (in the last Congress it was called EPRA/energy permitting reform act), but… we’ll see. Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.

technically or politically?

We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities. Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation. Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.

High voltage transmission lines are really quite efficient, and concentrating generation is usually the right choice. That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.

The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy. I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

Am I dumb or does that sentence "Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet" make no sense grammatically?

The source report “How cheap is battery storage?“ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-battery-storage/ In short: Cheaper batteries plus already cheap solar means that solar is now a cheap source of “anytime electricity”.

Falling battery prices make storing solar electricity for later use economically viable. This means we can use electricity from solar anytime around the clock. Even accounting for the cost of batteries, it's still competitive with other sources of electricity.

If they were going for maximum confusion, why not write, “Solar battery costs plummet analysis findings back anytime electricity availability”? Subject (((((Solar battery) costs) plummet) analysis) findings) Verb [back] Object (anytime (electricity availability)) Garden path sentence structure trap creation relies on initial word parse error encouragement. Brain pattern recognition system default subject-verb-object order preference exploitation causes early stop interpretation failure. Solar battery costs plummet phrase acting as complex noun modifier group creates false sentence finish illusion. Real subject findings arrival delay forces mental backtrack restart necessity. Noun adjunct modifier stack length excess impacts processing speed negatively. Back word function switch from direction noun to support verb finalizes reader confusion state. We write to be understood. Short sentences and simple words make the truth easy to see.

Its still really confusing. A better title would be "When solar power from batteries are available, costs plummet" Or since power has no provenience, "When batteries are available, electricity prices fall"

"Falling battery costs make electricity from solar viable day and night"

I assume the intended meaning is “reduced battery costs make around-the-clock solar-generated electricity possible”. I don't think it's possible to predict how technical changes in electricity production and storage impact prices.

Why would you think that? Solar and wind are both far cheaper than fossil fuels even ignoring the problems caused by coal and methane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Fuel cost for gas/coal can be rounded to $2/MWH - so then you need to amortize the cost of the plant over all the energy produced and you get to roughly 2x fuel cost for nat gas plants and 3x - 5x for coal ones. See page 10 here for sensitivity to fuel costs though; https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-2025-levelized-cost-of-energyplus-report-pr/

Has any production battery become cheaper than LEAC ACID for computer UPS ? I have not seen new cheaper UPS getting launched.

Some of the power stations from Ecoflow/Anker/Bluetti are competitive in terms of price and capacity while still having a fast enough switchover for UPS purposes. They tend to have features that may not be necessary for a UPS (eg solar or DC input), while lacking some features that are more common on UPS (eg companion app to turn your computer off when UPS gets low, although you might be able to rig your own solution)

Lead Acid as far as I know is about $500 per KWh of usable space due to their depth of discharge being limited to about 50% and then they last about 3 to 5 years if they kept within their 500 cycles at most. Whereas a LiPho battery will last 10-15 years, 6000 cycles and costs about £120 a KWh. So I have no idea how UPS based on lead acid is ending up cheaper, its not based on the battery tech cheapness.

Sen. WHITEHOUSE: We are moving to file a bipartisan Section 230 repeal (bsky.app)

Just a few lawsuits after section 230 repeal will cause vastly more moderation and the disappearance of many or most comment sections. This isn't going to lead to a free speech valhalla. I think I'm implicitly assuming that laws are equally applied, which is increasingly untrue.

> will cause vastly more moderation and the disappearance of many or most comment sections We really don’t know this.

I have a question. Section 230 basically says companies are allowed to moderate without being defined as publishers and losing liability protection. Could X just basically stop moderating all together? The one (many?) conflicts here is that they legally have to moderate some things (CSAM) and there would be conflict in terms of moderating adult content. Basically is the law consistent enough to adopt a hands off strategy to maintain liability protection? Or would you be forced to go the other direction.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

X could do just about anything. It’s actually hard to know what the current state of liability is these days, now that platforms have integrated algorithmic decision-making regarding what to show you. In Anderson v TikTok, the appeals court decided that since the little girl did not specifically search for the videos she watched, TikTok’s algorithm made what amounted to an editorial decision to show her the videos she watched and thus Section 230 did not give them any protection. TikTok ultimately chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court and thus this is the current state of the law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Other courts may decide differently. The general idea is that whenever algorithms are deciding what you see Section 230 is not in play - but the First Amendment might be. The Supreme Court hinted that this is how they view things, BTW. If this is how it is, then Section 230 is essentially a dead law already and losing it only affects old fashioned blogs and forums.

>If this is how it is, then Section 230 is essentially a dead law already and losing it only affects old fashioned blogs and forums. But blogs and forums should be able to exist.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

SSE sucks for transporting LLM tokens (zknill.io)

> A better approach: Pub/Sub Citation Needed. More importantly, benchmarks needed. Cannot claim something X is better approach than Y without benchmarks, it is an idea but needs to be be proven to be better. Until then, this is post is nothing more than yet another opinion.

What is SSE?

> the model has to re-run the generation, and the client has to start receiving tokens from scratch again. I don't understand. The payload can be designed to have sequence number. In case of reconnect, send the last known sequence number. Sounds like a application level protocol problem and not transport. Am I missing something? The pub/sub mentioned in the article essentially does the same thing.

so sad to hear that about Streaming SIMD Extensions

Pub/sub via WebSockets seems like the simplest solution. You'll need to change your LLM serving architecture around a little bit to use a pub/sub system that a microservice can grab the output from (to send to the client) but it's not rocket science. It's yet another system that needs some DRAM though. The good news is that you can auto-expire the queued up responses pretty fast :shrug: No idea if it's worth it, though. Someone with access to the statistics surrounding dropped connections/repeated prompts at a big LLM service provider would need to do some math.

I don’t get it. Client generates UUID for prompt, PUTs the prompt with this UUID on server. Server caches the generated output for reasonable time, so that subsequent PUTs get 200 instead of 201. Transport protocol failures then do not matter. If response isn’t 4x, just retry.

Yep, came here expecting to read an interesting take on why SSE sucks or a better alternative, but this just reads like "skill issue." A term I very much dislike but seems appropriate here.

The way the current architecture works—as far as I know—is your assumed "server caches the generated output" step doesn't exist. What you get in your output is streamed directly from the LLM to your client. Which is, in theory, the most efficient way to do it. That's why LLM outputs that get cut off mid-stream require the end user click the "retry" button and not the, "re-send me that last output" button (which doesn't exist). I would imagine that a simpler approach would be to simply make the last prompt idempotent... Which would require caching on their servers; something that supposedly isn't happening right now. That way, if the user re-sends the last prompt the server just responds with the same exact output it just generated. Except LLMs often make mistakes and hallucinate things... So re-sending the last prompt and hoping for a better output isn't an uncommon thing. Soooo... Back to my suggested workaround in my other comment: Pub/sub over WebSockets :D

I tried Gleam for Advent of Code (blog.tymscar.com)

I've looked at Gleam before but it didn't seem to have any mechanism for dynamic dispatch like interfaces or type classes. Did it change in the meantime?

Ruined by ligatures. Use them in your own private coding time, not when trying to communicate with others. It obfuscates rather than clarifies.

I actually agree. I don’t even use them in my private code. I will look into removing them from my blog!

For a quick fix: `font-variant-ligatures: none;` on body or similar.

fortunately the blog title police stepped in as soon as possible https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45426996

My general opinion regarding title editing by moderators is that they almost never make the title better (this is kind of subjective), but having the same title on HN as the article/blog has some advantages like easier to remember, easier to search and so on. Also you can just pretend that it was the original submitter who modified the title, and flag the submission as it doesn't follow HN's guidelines. edit: also I agree with the linked comment. It can be viewed as a total random and faceless micromoderation. And an other really gross thing is that they lie in your name on the internet, they modify the post dates and the submission titles, and keep your account like if it was you who submitted it.

Gleam is a great language. It didn't click for me when I was trying it out, but I'm glad to see more people enjoying it. And I wonder if Gleam + Lustre could become the new Elm.

I recently used Gleam + Lustre for a small app that I normally would have built with Elm + PostgREST. It went very well, and I'm now planning to use it for a larger rewrite (of a rails app).

As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit. I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.

Yeah I'm not a front end dev but I do kind of keep track of what's going on in that space. From what I saw it seemed Elm was all but dead. Maybe that's not true, but that was the impression from the outside looking in.

> all the conflict with the creator Just so no one misunderstands this. The creator (Evan) didn't get into, or start, any drama himself that I ever noticed. I'd argue he's a very chill and nice dude. I've been on the edges of the community for probably a decade now (lurker), and all of the drama came from other people who simply didn't like the BDFL and slow releases strategy.

Which conflicts? Gleam seems to be released often?

The elm drama

Gleam is a beautiful language, and what I wish Elixir would become (re:typing). For those that don't know its also built upon OTP, the erlang vm that makes concurrency and queues a trivial problem in my opinion. Absolutely wonderful ecosystem. I've been wanting to make Gleam my primary language, but I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021. But I am hopeful that Gleam has slid just under the closing door and LLMs will get up to speed on it fast.

the Erlang vm is called BEAM, not OTP. sadly, Gleam's implementation of OTP is not at the same level as Elixir's or Erlang.

It’s really good. But it needs generics. This is a huge downside. It’s a typed and clean functional programming language but it arbitrarily followed golangs early philosophy of no generics. Ironically golang is one of the most hated languages among many fp advocates. By the developers own action of adding generics ultimately the golang team admits they were wrong or that generics are better. If gleam gets popular I think much of the same will occur. There’s simply too much repeated code without generics. I tried writing a parser combinator in gleam and it wasn’t pretty.

Go touted it's lack of features as simplicity. And it is: on the language writing side. Go is an incomplete language masquerading as a simple one.

That’s the worse is better philosophy which maybe doesn’t matter as much anymore especially with AI

Why does it need generics? There's a great blog post about how you can replace a lot of trait behaviour with just functions. Maybe something like that can be done for generics

Perhaps this is a silly question but how do you do functional with no generics? Arent they pretty much required for map/reduce/filter?

There are multiple levels of possible generics at play here: the container type and the element type. You can have a map/reduce/filter that operate on any element type (generic elements) while still being specialized to linked lists. On the other hand, you might prefer a generic map that can operate on any container type and any element type, so that you can use the same map method and the same function to map over arrays of numbers, sets of numbers, lists of numbers, trees of numbers, or even functions of numbers! Haskell allows both sorts of generics. In Haskell parlance they call this higher-kinded polymorphism and the generic version of map they call fmap (as a method of the class Functor).

One thing im wondering with the LLM age we seem to be entering: is there value in picking up a language like this if theres not going to be a corpus of training data for an LLM to learn from? Id like to invest the time to learn Gleam, but I treat a language as a tool, or a means to an end. I feel like more and more I'm reaching for the tool to get the job done most easily, which are languages that LLMs seem to gel with.

claude is really good at elixir. IME, It's really really good with a few "unofficial" tweaks to the language/frameworks, but this could be my bias. the LLM cutoff was a fear of mine, but i think it's actually the opposite. we know that as few as 250 documents can "poison" an LLM, i suspect that (for now) a small language with very higg quality examples can "poison" LLMs for the better.

I feel that was more true 1-2 years ago. These days I find Claude Code write almost as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) Elixir code as JavaScript code and there must be less Elixir code in the training data.

in my daily experience Claude Code writes better Elixir code than JS (React). Surely this has to do with the quality of the training material

I personally find it much more painful to generate valid Rust code that compiles and does what I want than e.g. valid python code that runs and does what I want.

i think it's pretty clear that some of "the things you expect to make an LLM good at a language" (like strong typing) are not actually the case. other things like "don't indirect your code by jumping to something unexpected" might be more important.

LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted (old.reddit.com)

Who the fuck still watches content on an effing TV in 2025?

I'm not giving up my CRT.

We need a Framework-style company making TVs. Get the OLED panels from whoever makes them wholesale, spend on a beautiful enclosure / design, add just enough software to calibrate the image and switch between HDMI inputs with HDMI-CEC. Sell a premium soundbar as an add-on instead of including speakers in the base device. I think a brand like Sonos could make a killing in this market selling a premium dumb tv to high end customers. Look at how much markup Samsung adds to their standard LCD panel for a decent enclosure - it’s like $600-$1000 markup to get the Frame tv, which has a mid panel, JUST because the enclosure is actually nice/inoffensive.

>and switch between HDMI inputs with HDMI-CEC. And please include DisplayPort inputs.

Until somebody releases a dumb TV, you just can't connect your tv to the Internet.

Doesn't matter when the neighbor has a smart TV as well, tethering all the bad stuff to yours, whether you like it or not.

We need a "Right to Be Left Alone" law.

Every home is required to have a telescreen.

Actually large LCDs (>65") were pretty uncommon in 2010 but if you ever watched a 1080p DLP television I would be surprised if you didn't notice when looking at them side by side. There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions. There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.

Problem is I am not looking at TVs side by side. I'm watching a movie or a show, and the enjoyment I get at the correct viewing distance is unlikely to be significantly more on a 50" or smaller TV.

Yes. It’s profile points. You earn one per upvote on your content. Just like here on HN

Excuse you, it's nothing like that. These fake internet points mean something real and tangible. Those fake internet points are just made up nonsense. (Heavy sarcasm)

actually, when you share a reddit link, HN automatically converts it to old.reddit

And yet we cannot have dark mode, which would be a simple CSS tweak. But I’m thankful for the other little things.

Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

This may sound strange but here is how I define my flow. 1. Switch off your computer. 2. Go to a nice Park. 3. Open notebook and pen, and write prompts that are 6-8 lines long on what task you want to achieve, use phone to google specific libraries. 4. Come back to your PC, type those prompts in with Plan mode and ask for exact code changes claude is going to make. 5. Review and push PR. 6. Wait for your job to be automated.

I find all AI code to be lower quality than humans who care about quality. This might be ok, I think the assumpt with AI is that we don't need to look at code so that it looks beautiful because AI will look at it .

I want to say a lot of mean things, because an extremely shitty, useless, clearly Claude-generated test suite passed the team PR review this week, tests were useless, so useless the code they were linked to (can't say if the code itself was Ai-written though) had a race condition, that, if triggered and used correctly, could probably rewrite the last entry of any of the firewall we manage (DENY ALL is the one I'm afraid about). But I can't even shit on Claude AI, because I used it to rewrite part of the tests, and analyse the solution to fix the race condition (and how to test it). It's a good tool, but in the last few weeks I've been more and more mad about it. Anyway. I use it to generate a shell. No logic inside, just data models, and functions prototypes. That help with my inability to start something new. Then I use it to write easy functions. Helpers I know I'll need. Then I try to tie everything together. I never hesitate to stop Claude and write specific stuff myself, add a new prototype/function, or delete code. I restart the context often (Opus is less bad about it, but still). Then I ask it about easy refactoring or library that would simplify the code. Ask for multiple solutions each time.

That's a fun idea. How do you get the transcript into Claude Code (or whatever you use)? What transcription service do you use?

I use Handy with Claude code. Nice to just have a key combo to transcribe into whatever has focus. https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you? (louplummer.lol)

They broke my ribs when I had a cardiac arrest, doing vigorous CPR. Would not be posting this now if it wasn’t for them. I was basically alive when the air ambulance landed, but wouldn’t have been otherwise

Reading all the other comments really puts a smile to my face (as cliche as that sounds).

I could write all day about the times people helped me that I know about, and there's others I suspect, and surely others I never suspected. One that comes to mind was when I was on my own as a teen, and fortunately had a community college co-op student internship. My coworkers looked out for me in various ways, both professionally and personally, as if it was just ordinary for them. I also found some similar above-and-beyond goodness by people at Brown University. So that's what I knew in adulthood, until later disillusionment. I still try to promote the way that I know exists, and I recognize a lot of other people who live that, or are ready to switch to it.

In general, I've found that people, even strangers, kind of look out for you. I've only had occasion to need this in America, but every time strangers have helped. What I found fascinating was that even late in the night, on a dark highway, a young woman would stop to assist. What a safe society. Two of those occasions are when I crashed on my skateboard, and when I crashed my car. Both times, a young woman stopped to help me[0]. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to say when people haven't been kind to me. A girl on a train gave me the book she finished reading. A homeless guy helped me push a car[2]. I left my car open once with everything inside and a passing woman closed it for me and left a note. But also the society built here assists competently when individuals cannot. After a motorcycle accident in the city, the ambulance was there to pick me up apparently (I wouldn't know, I have amnesia) within minutes. We've always stopped to help when we can and have many times (a few in SF here[2]) but it is gratifying that others are also like that. The other thing I like is that people don't mind asking for help. I was at the Safeway up in Diamond Heights, all in my motorcycle gear (which some can find intimidating) and this old lady asked for help with her car boot. Why on Earth would I know? But it turned out to be a quick fix and while I sorted the latch out, this other elderly couple talked to me about the husband's Ducati which he used to have. In fact, I have come to think about this non-kin pro-sociality as being some sort of sociocultural superpower among the societies that can practice it. It seems to me that the most successful societies practised this. Even in the age of empire, it seems some societies were more capable of pro-social outcomes. British imperialism was a brutal thing in many places and especially earlier in its time, but compared to intra-tribal violence among indigenous peoples it seems almost civilized. The bare minimum rise to civilization seems to have been to replace terminal fatal violence with non-terminal subjugation (which seems to have been a hard thing to achieve). The Maori left only a hundred or so Moriori alive, and ate and killed the rest. By comparison, the British had the Maori in parliament. Similarly, the father of the Charlie Kirk shooter encouraged him to give himself up: placing his kin at the mercy of his non-kin society. I think this kind of non-kin pro-sociality is where the magic is in a successful society. But producing that is hard. As an example, no matter how much a young woman would want to help a man waving her down on the side of the road, she should not do so in Somalia. American society (and many others) has solved, for the most part, the problem of stranger trust. That enables this kind of cooperation, which enables large-scale coordination, which helps a society prosper. This reminds me of what A Splendid Exchange says about the Qu'ran having rules on commerce and law: thereby allowing the Islamic world to prosper because any Muslim of the time could meet another Muslim of the time and know they lived by the same law (enforced by God, one presumes). This allowed stranger-trust across the seas. Overall, quite fascinating. These societal innovations are devices that last for some period of time and provide a massive boost to those societies. Certainly whatever Dutch system existed to enforce joint-stock capital, a secondary market, and derivatives allowed them to coordinate to be the power they were at the time[3]. I wonder what the next such device will be. The default of humanity seems to be to cooperate[4], so the hard part here is finding the device that fights exploitation of pro-sociality. 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-08-14/Fearless_American_Women 1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Motorcycle_Accident 2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-20/Car_Breakdowns_in_SF 3: Though the flip side is the zielverkopers - people who turned labor into a tradable commodity but using what is in practice debt bondage 4: In some sense, all living beings are formed from cooperation

I'm continuously delighted by the whole open source software ecosystem. I'm using nixOS with KDE and this setup has made me feel incredibly powerful and excited about computers once again. I'm very grateful to the thousands of open source contributors that have made this possible.

I was backpacking in Australia in 2008. I talked to a girl when I was driving up the east coast und she gave me her brother’s numbers and said to call him when I was visiting Perth (west coast). I did, he invited me to live at his house for six weeks for free. After that, I was invited by a German to live at her house in Melbourne for another two month. I was so short with my money and that both were incredibly kind to me.

I live in a neighborhood where every street has a cul-de-sac. Outside our neighborhood is a busy road. About 6 months ago our 100lb Great Dane escaped out the front door while we were bringing in groceries. My wife and I chased her around the neighborhood trying to get her back. We lost sight of her and she eventually ended up in the middle of that busy road. A young college aged kid saw her in the road stopped his car and chased her back into our neighborhood. We cornered her and I grabbed her collar. The guy headed back to his car after the dog was caught. I should have got the guys name. I was so angry at the dog I didn’t really know what to say to the him but I am still so thankful. It could have been a very sad day for our family without his help.

This is my earliest memory. When I was two, and did not yet know how to swim, I was visiting with family who had a place right on the river Thames near Henley. I was running around with my seven cousins, but I was the youngest and at some point found myself alone. I wandered out onto the towpath beside the river, where they had a small jetty. Earlier an older cousin had been out in the canoe and it looked easy enough. I put one foot in and realised my error immediately, toppling into the water. I remember clearly the water bubbles going by and thinking 'Oh dear, my mum is going to be so angry about this.' I came back up and saw a couple now running up along the path -- they had seen me go in. I don't remember anything else. I'm told the man fished me out and then there was a great kerfuffle as I was hung upside and coughed a bit. My cousins got a massive earful from my mother, who was furious with the eldest in particular for losing track of me. My father taught me to swim. The man was thanked profusely, but we don't know his name. I hope he had a wonderful life and I'm grateful for mine.

I met a Tesla engineer on Reddit a few years ago. We got talking, he referred me to Tesla, and I ended up getting an offer for what was basically my dream role. He was a complete stranger and incredibly kind, supportive, and helpful throughout the process. Still grateful for that. Small acts like that restore a bit of faith in humanity. It also reminded me of a Steve Jobs quote: “Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.” - SJ

A surprising number of people are even afraid of succeeding

Eating at nice restaurant with my entire family. When we finished the meal the waiter came out with a dessert and said that someone across the restaurant paid for our entire meal. I was shocked, I looked around and I think I might know who it was, but they were already gone. That was probably a $150-$200 dollar check. I'm still shocked to this day.

A few years ago, I was in the drive through of a Starbucks on the east side of Seattle. A very shiny Porsche 911 was in front of me, and I was kind of rolling my eyes. Who needs to drive a Porsche to Starbucks? Douchebag. Whoever it was paid for my order. Kind of a record-scratch moment, just completely changed my mood and was a good reminder to not be negative for no reason.

My chain had slipped off the rear sprocket, wedged itself between the gear and the frame. I forgot my toolkit and I was unable to free it. I was miles out of town so a walk back was going to take hours. A guy on a motorcycle rode by, looked at me and turned around. He got off his bike, got his tools, and freed the chain in seconds. I was profoundly grateful. Years later, I happened across a cyclist in a similar situation. I helped him and I told him I was simply paying back the first guy who had helped me. It felt really good.

I find that cyclists often help cyclists. ‘Help the next guy’ being a phrase I’ve heard a few times. A $5 tube is so small a cost. Not having one can make a minor inconvenience into an utter shambles if you have to call home go a lift from 50km away at 6am.

I'm something of a cyclist and I drive on a lot of roads where there are cyclists all the time. I keep meaning to make sure my car is stocked with some helpful bike tools or a spare tube or something. I need to get on that.

A few tubes, CO2 or a pump and some tyre levers. You’ll be a super hero.

I high-centered my car on a drift coming out of the Taco Bell drive thru - not a minute passed before ten or so people appeared out of nowhere and pushed me over and out. Literally, the moment before there hadn’t been anything around but me and that Taco Bell.

We had a blizzard that dumped 3 feet of snow in a weekend, my car got stuck, and about 6 people came out of their warm cozy houses to help push it. On a separate occasion, years later someone driving by stopped their car to help when they saw me stuck on the side of the road. We grew up very poor, and I can't count the number of times someone helped us through a difficult situation - there are plenty of times we were on our own and there wasn't any help, but also times when someone noticed and helped. The help was always so appreciated- it lessened the suffering considerably compared to the times when we were on our own with whatever problem.

I live in Minnesota and do not own a snowblower. Probably my mistake, but I always joke that I get most of my exercise in the winter. Snow is really heavy for those without context. A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress. Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him. I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most. A recent lesser snowfall for context: https://imgur.com/a/1un20s7

Just be wary as you get older. The number of old men who die from heart attacks while shoveling snow is nonzero

> Snow is really heavy after a nar nar day in pow pow cuttin freshies up to your nippy nips, you'll change that assessment! (my email address was once inadvertently put on a mailing list for the planning of a bachelor party ski weekend, people I did not know or have any connection to, and that's the way they talked. i enjoyed it so much i didn't confess till they demanded to know why i hadn't RSVPed yet)

Plot twist: He just wanted an excuse to try out his new snowblower.

can you blame him? guy has a Bobcat!

There’s more of this than you might expect. First time I got to turn on my new Toro I went the entire way around the block.

The other side of the equation is my now dead toro had me covered in gas, frozen fingers, and plenty of swearing, with an itching desire to light it ablaze in the middle of the yard. Tis the cycle of snow blower ownership.

I'm wondering if altruism is in decline, in this selfish age of social media. I sometimes even get the feeling that altruism is seen as a weakness these days.

People seem to be more helpful to strangers in smaller communities, where there are fewer other people who could render aid, and where the consequences are perhaps more dire. In a big city, meh, there's always someone else who could do it.

I love going out of my way to help people, but hate when people help me or give me gifts. I don’t know how to experience “pure” gratitude that isn’t overwhelmed by guilt. I should probably talk to somebody about that…

Allowing people to give to you is a way of giving to them.

Took a few months off of work and decided to bicycle through the Philippines. One day was a very hard mountain stage, driving from Bacolod to San Carlos, on Negros island. Arrived at the top completely exhausted, layed on the roadside in an attempt to recover. Suddenly a car stopped and a young couple of locals handed me a sandwich and wished me luck. I'll never forget them

If a hill climb has you lying down at the top, that’s got to be a good hill.