The Basel project caused earthquakes because it used a single, vertical well to pump high-pressure water into dense granite all at once, which accidentally over-pressurized and lubricated a major existing fault line. In St. Gallen, the earthquake happened when drillers unexpectedly hit a high-pressure methane gas pocket. The rapid injection of heavy drilling mud used to control the gas kick built up intense, localized pressure that triggered a nearby fault.

Fervo's modern method avoids these issues by using horizontal drilling to distribute fluid pressure gently across miles of rock rather than spiking it in one spot. They also use advanced fiber-optic cables for real-time micro-seismic monitoring, allowing them to sense tiny rock movements and adjust fluid rates instantly before a felt earthquake can ever develop.

Fast forward 4 and a half years. I figured that if models like Claude and GPT Astra could solve a milennium prize problem about fluid dynamics then they could help me fix the broken model and iterate on it until my vision was realized. On Friday, I threw down $200 for a Claude Max subscription, and this is the result of a single weekend's work on top of where I had left off.

What it is now, in technical terms: a hydrostatic primitive-equation atmosphere on that hex grid (the TRiSK scheme MPAS uses), 27 levels, about 41,000 cells at 110 km, with grey radiation, moist convection, a boundary layer, sea ice, a land surface with snow, a two-layer ocean and real topography. Every kernel runs on the GPU; on my MacBook Pro (M1 Max) it does about 70 simulated hours a minute from a six-year spin-up, hence the 50 MB first load. You can color the globe by twenty-odd fields, animate wind or currents, draw isobars, or view it from space under the model's own sun. The URL captures the view, so links open specific places.

Caveats: an educational model, not a validated one. It runs about four degrees colder than Earth and I'm still tuning it, the ocean is crude and shallow, and it needs WebGPU (Chrome, Edge, Safari 26) for best performance. It's currently tuned for my specific machine specs but I suspect it will run well on most desktop-class Apple Silicon machines from the past 5 years.

Source and design notes: https://github.com/jlhawn/geodesic

Edit: If it runs really well on your machine, something well above 100 simulated hours per minute (displayed on the top-left of the page), let me know your machine specs! You should also try to reload the page with `?N=128` in the query params and it will re-grid to an even higher resolution. But it will take a few simulated days to settle down after the initial shock from the changed resolution. If you end up tyring this, check out the Temperature overlay at 10 hPa height and you should see Gravity Waves [1] rippling through the top of the atmosphere!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793545

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_noise

I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?

Has there been anything like this published in the past 20 years but for compressible fluids? I have wanted to make a simple atmospheric model for years but have been unable to because of the complexity and probably my lack of complete understanding.

Maybe he should spend his time trying to work with these politicians to design something that is more fair? Like making it actually act as a tax on unrealized gains over $1B (so that it takes cost basis into consideration) OR make it so that if you need to sell some assets to pay the tax, you can writeoff the wealth tax you paid from your regular/capital-gains income so that you aren't taxed twice? There's a lot of actually useful stuff he could write about in this policy area instead of blogging about the financial equivalence between stocks and flows.

That is seriously really impressive. I looked at the 3D model and didn't even thing to LOOK INSIDE the building before reading this.

Here's [1] the 3D model with `show_cutaway` enabled.

[1] https://modelrift.com/models/pantheon-benchmark-antigravity-...

edit: doing some more of my own research, it sounds like the bottleneck in doing it sequentially is in shifting weights around in memory, so while it uses more compute it doesn't oversubscribe compute resources because the bottleneck is not in supply of compute but in supply and speed of memory. The GPU has a massive supply of compute but sequential decoding only demands a relatively small amount of it. Time is primarily spent waiting on loading values from vram.

They would probably say this is because it's not a "battery capacity test" but a "charge performance test"

But I agree, when they eventually do have VTT perform a capacity test, how can we be sure that it's the same cell from the charge performance test?