Sure a bunch of businesses opportunistically up-charge, some I'm sure are predatory, and there are obviously efficiencies to improve, but overall scam it is not.

There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options, but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction of data centers globally.

And on heat pumps - it’s sad to reflect that even if we replaced all heating, it’s still only a couple % of the total rejected heat. There are few easy wins in this game, just many different ways we need to chip away at it.

I’m not sure of Smil’s politics but to be fair, there’s nothing in that quote that is inherently misleading. I can see through how others could spin it, and I’ll be more careful knowing the term has some politics behind it now. To me his argument in the article is that it’s not practical to expect a transition in a 25-year timescale, not that it’s impossible or not worth working on.

Heat pumps are a good example where the practice has been a lot harder than we might hope. Sure COP > 4 for heating is great, but the units are very expensive today, and in most of the US and Europe with sub-zero winter temps operate with much worse efficiencies, making them significantly more expensive to operate. I’m sure with effort those issues will improve, and major policy shifts can help mitigate some of the costs. But especially without a strong will today those changes are practically too far off for the 2050 target.

As far as I can tell, your link argues that if we overcome all the practical challenges (politics, resources, financing, technical innovation) and go all-electric for global energy, we only need ~1/3 as much input energy potential as we use today for the same useful work. That’s useful, but the hard part lies in those practical challenges. And the primary sources of global human energy use are a long way away from that goal.

So should we strive to get there? Sure. Should we be tactical about how? Yes. And the link seems to argue that as well. But is it reasonable to hit our 2050 goals based on the current global fossil fuel usage? Not really. So I’m really missing how this refutes Smil’s article, and why “primary energy” is such a stupid thing.

Want to make a quick change or fix? The agent will likely figure out a way to do it in minutes rather the than hours it would take me to do so.

Want to get a good understanding of the architecture and code layout? Working with an agent for search and summary cuts my time down by an order of magnitude.

So while agree there’s a lot more “what the heck is this ugly pile of if else statements doing?” And “why are there three modules handling transforms?”, there is a corresponding drop in cost to adding features and paying down tech debt. Finding the right balance is a bit different in the agentic coding world, but it’s a different mindset and set of practices to develop.

Autonomous vehicles can and do take into account surface conditions, there’s not really any reason not to. There are pretty good generative models of the physics of vehicles with different surface conditions, and I imagine part of the data collection they are doing is to help build statistical of vehicle performance based on sensed conditions.

Absolutely driving is cultural (all things people do are cultural) but given 10’s of millions of miles driven by Waymo, clearly it has managed the cultural factor in the places they have been deployed. Modern autonomous driving is about how people drive far more than the rules of the road, even on the highly regulated streets of western countries. Absolutely the constraints of driving in Chennai are different, but what is fundamentally different? What leads to an impossible leap in processing power to operate there?

Careful skepticism of new treatments is always warranted, but even if it only helps 5% of patients with OSA in absolute terms that’s a huge population impact.

It does seem to me that push vs pull are slightly more standardized in usage, which might be what the author is getting at. But even then depending on what level of abstraction in the system you are concerned with the concepts can flip.