Tom Harvey

Recent photo shoot of Sam Altman and Jony Ive. In black and white. Jonny is behind Sam’s shoulder, head tilted looking at you like he’s presenting his loving nephew to you (for whatever ends)

All interesting conversations about future of AI and problems with iPhones aside … I feel like this photo hasn’t been mocked nearly enough. Just me?

2 people with significant press teams reviewing their media output. And this?!

Shifty - A new series by Adam Curtis coming to BBC iPlayer in June 2025 Shifty shows, in a new and imaginative way, how over the past 40 years in Britain extreme money and hyper-individualism came together in an unspoken alliance

Ooh, Adam Curtis is back.

"...life in Britain today has become strange - a hazy dream-like flux in which no one can predict what is coming next. While distrust in politicians keeps growing. And the political class seem to have lost control."

GitHub - ADGEfficiency/energy-py: Reinforcement learning for energy systems Reinforcement learning for energy systems. Contribute to ADGEfficiency/energy-py development by creating an account on GitHub.

PyPSA; there goes my weekend! I’ve been looking for an excuse to dig into that.

Would usually head to github.com/ADGEfficienc... for battery modelling specifics.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced that his country will submit a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly calling for "urgent action to stop the massacre of civilians in Gaza and ensure the entry of humanitarian aid into the Strip."
#gaza #palestine #israel #aid #blockade

Can’t think of a topic less parochial than global climate. Thanks for calling it out; he has given a lot of his wealth to his PR team.

Swoon! What a great project! Don’t suppose you’ve open sourced the code?

Much ado about the role of renewable energy (RE) in the Spanish blackout. The investigation into the effective cause is still ongoing, but many pointed to the fact that RE has no ‘inertia’. Is that true? The answer is: yes, but ... 🧵

Replies to criticisms of my posts on ChatGPT & the environment And a little manifesto of how I think about climate change

“Everything is additive” - What did you take from the comments against “every Wh counts” in here andymasley.substack.com/p/replies-to...

I keep reading that AI has driven huge DC growth; which is driving gas resurgence.

I’d expect to see an inflection point in the growth; either now-ish or in the near forecast. And I don’t see that in either total power or in gas.

CA is the wrong state to see that? What’s happening.

Can you link the source of this? Would love to see more of the context.

What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Very small compared to most of the other stuff you do.

Turns out individual actions aren’t the real problem; systemic change is needed to solve climate change … again.

But make it “AI”

Some great⚡️analysis here from @hannahritchie.bsky.social which I’ve massively oversimplified for an intro.

🔌💡

www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-foo...

I’m skeptical about the $3 billion valuation of a VSCode fork that relies on an AI API service it doesn’t own.

Maker of AI ‘vibe coding’ app Cursor hits $9bn valuation Anysphere closes $900mn funding round from investors including Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz

Only $3bn? Those are rookie numbers. www.ft.com/content/a7b3... 🤣

10kloc: LGTM ✅🚢

Transcript of the show: “I watched a new cut of Adam Curtis's forthcoming series of films, which I don't think people actually know is forthcoming, but it is. It's coming to iPlayer in early June, I think, and it's called Shifty and it's about the 80s. It's a sort of social history, so it's totally different from what we did before. It's really interesting. Kind of like how we all shifted in a sort of consciousness, shifted to this completely individualistic thing. He's very good at making you realize how things felt when they were happening and your memories are false.” From The Rest Is Entertainment: How Liz Hurley Slid Into Billy Ray Cyrus’s DMs, 29 Apr 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-rest-is-entertainment/id1718287198?i=1000705296835&r=113 This material may be protected by copyright.

I was listening to @trientertainment.bsky.social … and then “something unexpected happened” when Marina Hyde revealed a new Adam Curtis film called Shifty due out in June!

Podcast went out 6 days ago but I can’t find any more about it. I did learn that there is a DJ called Adam Shifty tho.

On the role of inertia in the Iberian blackout The discussion on LinkedIn… | Lion Hirth | 55 comments On the role of inertia in the Iberian blackout The discussion on LinkedIn quickly turned into fingerpointing and accusation. Can't we all agree on a few basic facts? 1) Synchronous machines prov...

I enjoyed this summary from @lionhirth.bsky.social on the inertia topic. www.linkedin.com/posts/lionhi...

I thought it was remarkably fast! 👏

Getting the cities (mostly) back online before night fall was a huge win in so many ways.

When/if we learn more about the causes it’ll become clear how it came back online. But it’s my understanding that there was black start required.

Main upside of the outage for me - excuse to get deeply nerdy!

12:35 and the grid demand collapses (blackout) to 10GW Fails to meet the usual demand peak of 34GW at 21:00 Currently back at 19GW of expected 27GW at 22:35 (70%)

Rapid (your views may vary) recovery of the Spanish grid. For those on #energysky who are following our news.

10hr after the blackout. At 70% of predicted load. Detail in the alt text.

Long way to go to meet tomorrow’s peak.

Src: (in Spanish and behind paywall) elpais.com/espana/2025-...

Probably shouldn’t have made snarky comments about the Texas grid this morning… Of all days… When I live in Spain. 🌚 #energysky

You mean “Inertia” within the context of spinning turbines?

Very much looking forward to a long read about multiple cascading system failures. 😀

And, yes, as uncool as it is to say so - it’s been a good recovery job so far. Compare to Heathrow being offline for almost a full day.

Back online in my apartment on central València. Will likely take a while to get the whole country up but I’m surprised I got back online so fast after such a widespread outage.

Fully agree but “what should happen” and “makes more sense” aren’t such clear concepts to ERCOT 😀

But more seriously, there are still supply chain, planning and grid capacity issues with dropping gas turbine generators near your DC

Yesterday’s grid mix in spain. Predominantly solar (12GW) with a bit (4GW) of each of hydro, wind and nuclear.

Today’s grid mix, with only solar and wind generating any meaningful amount. But still way less than yesterday. Solar is down to 5GW and wind is only 2.75GW. And that’s all the whole country gets today. Blackout time.

I would be remiss not to live post from #spain to #energysky today; here’s the grid mix now (massive blackout across the country) vs yesterday. Courtesy of @electricitymaps.com

Looks like the gas and nuclear have *vanished*.

But solar is ~half of what is was yesterday. And it’s plenty ☀️ today

Sure, but then those industrial processes need to happen where there is generation and grid capacity. When there isn’t enough grid capacity, and we want to smelt, this is one way to transport the power to the process.

And, yes, as a stop gap. Capacity can be added but the wait time for that work to be completed often runs into a decades long time scale. So it’s a stop gap that has legs to be a legitimate business and a solution that allows progress in the meantime

I think I wrongly implied “no power grids”. If I was being clearer, it would be “not enough power grid capacity”. A big problem in a lot of parts of the grid in many countries.

The DSL/Fibre analogy is a great one.

If the infra (power grids) aren’t there yet - use what you have.

Can’t help but think of this old quote.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_...

New way to improve accuracy of electricity price forecasts Researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) have developed a new filtering technique to improve electricity price forecasts by refining historical price data before applying predictive models.

New way to improve accuracy of electricity price forecasts #energysky -- via pv magazine global: www.pv-magazine.com/...

Well I think I've fully come around to the idea that LLMs are computers. So I wrote about that. I guess this is my most bombastic blog post www.phillipcarter.dev/posts/llms-c...