> When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense.
That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.
This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.
Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.
This slow buildout will logically limit nuclear power to a minor role in the UK. By the time we could possibly build out large amounts of nuclear it seems likely we will already have built out large amounts of cheap wind power. With some battery storage and solar this can cover us for 90-95% of the year. For the remainder we will need dispatchable backup power. That will be gas and maybe at some point green hydrogen or its derivatives.
I suspect we will always keep around a little nuclear to maintain expertise for strategic national security reasons but it is hard to see nuclear power making sense in an energy market dominated by intermittent renewables like the UK.
That off requires committing to a $65/month plan for 36 months instead of paying $25/month with someone like Visible for an equivalent plan. So really you're paying $1836 for that iPhone 16.
There’s no free lunch here, cheap plans are noticeably worse in various ways, but like cable companies carriers don’t want to give you a good plan without bundling phone upgrades.
Visible’s $25/month plan mentions unlimited Hotspot for example, but good luck finding they always cap you at 5 Mbits on their website. Suddenly it makes more sense why someone might bump up to their $45/month plan for 3x the Hotspot speed. Even then 15Mbps isn’t that bad, but it’s a long way from 5G could provide.
There are definitely folks who need that hotspot speed but many who don’t. I’m on WiFi most of the time nowadays so switched to MobileX and spend about $5 a month on my mobile plan.
The West coast is much more similar though. Paris is at a latitude between Seattle and Vancouver while San Francisco is a little south of Lisbon. Both have pretty comparable climates.
Firecracker runs a full Linux guest within KVM while TinyKVM runs just a single process within KVM and handles syscalls on the host by validating permissions then calling the host kernel syscall.
This minimises memory usage and lets us track file descriptors which lets us very quickly reset the guest process (under 100us for deno.)
TinyKVM is probably most similar to gVisor in KVM platform mode. TinyKVM implements a smaller number of sys calls and is focussed on making resets as fast as possible.
Running sys calls on the host means there is approximately 1µs overhead per syscall from exiting and entering KVM so I'm not sure how well that would work for GUI applications.
And we currently only have very rudimentary support for threads, enough for a server program with ancillary threads to boot up but the expectation is currently that the call into TinyKVM only runs a single thread and we fork multiple copies of the VM to handle requests in parallel.
> Running sys calls on the host means there is approximately 1µs overhead per syscall from exiting and entering KVM so I'm not sure how well that would work for GUI applications.
That made me rather curious how many syscalls a complex GUI application might issue. I wanted to see how many syscalls were happening across my entire system. Thanks to StackOverflow I have a snippet that seems correct[1]:
> perf stat -e raw_syscalls:sys_enter -a -I 1000 sleep 5
Using this, it seems that most programs (as you would probably guess) don't execute a whole lot of syscalls when they're idle. However, starting a complex GUI program definitely causes a pretty massive flurry of syscalls. Starting winecfg without an already-existing wineserver spews a lot of syscalls, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000. If we assume that each syscall takes on average around 2µs including the overhead and that they're all serial, I guess that would add up to about 1 second spent on syscalls. That's probably making way too many assumptions, but it does make me feel like it's not completely infeasible to run GUI applications inside of a sandbox like this, though it may very not be compelling when the overhead is factored in.
And of course, just because it could be done does not mean it should, anyway. Even if this is a good idea, I doubt it makes any sense for TinyKVM to be attempting to do it. What TinyKVM does do is already very interesting and probably a lot more practical anyways. It'd probably be better to fork off or build an entire purpose-built sandbox for GUI software, realistically.
Still, pretty interesting stuff to think about.
> And we currently only have very rudimentary support for threads, enough for a server program with ancillary threads to boot up but the expectation is currently that the call into TinyKVM only runs a single thread and we fork multiple copies of the VM to handle requests in parallel.
BTW, I think this design is really cool. This is something I have wanted to exist for a while, even though I don't practically need it.
I'm pretty hopeful that the combination of per-request isolation and the new snapshot functionality we're currently working on will be a big step forward for those running server-side JS at scale.
Having each request start from the exact same program state should make reproducing and fixing production issues easier. In a way it combines the predictability of the CGI programming model with the speed of a warmed modern JIT runtime.
> my React sentiments at the time seemed to be relatively common: React felt like a breath of fresh air.
This was exactly how I felt. I building a Backbone app around the time React was released. It was only around 2600 lines of JS at the time but event handling and state management already felt like a tangled mess.
Porting it to React was a huge improvement even at that scale and really paid off over the next 5 years of development.
Home solar makes perfect sense in Australia - a market with similar Labour costs to California - because they do it for 1/3rd of the cost.
It makes no sense in California when the subsidies alone are higher than the total costs for utility scale solar.
That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.
This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.
Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.
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