Daniel McQuillen

This state’s power prices are plummeting as it nears 100% renewables South Australia is proving to the world that relying largely on wind and solar energy with battery back-up is incredibly cheap, with electricity prices tumbling by 30 per cent in a year and sometimes ...

It was less than 10 years ago that this was considered impossible. And from what I read there wasn't much dissent. Everyone accepted this was the reality. Time to update some assumptions.

Ultimately my hope is the project is simple and straightforward enough that one dev can keep the whole thing in their head. I’m my own best use case as my working memory is appallingly average.

I’ve started two “advanced” validators for domains I’m interested in (e.g. building science) but my guess is there are other types of validators that could be useful.

The idea is to make it easy for users to validate data, especially when those validations need special tools or logic, like simulations engines or other libraries.

Illustration of Validibot robot using magnifying glass to look at documents.

Released my Validibot project today on GitHub. Still very much a work in progress but trying from this point to work out in the open. If you’re interested in data validation I’d love to hear what you think…

github.com/danielmcquil...

Coming soon : FMU Support | SimpleValidations Blog FMUs are like the gumball dispensers of the simulation world. Compact little containers with complexity hidden behind a simple interface. Terrible analogy? Possibly. But either way here's how we'....

Coming soon to SimpleValidations: FMU support.

FMI = the rules, like: coin goes in, gumball rolls out if the gods are pleased.
FMU = the actual gumball machine simulator that follows those rules.

www.simplevalidations.com/blog/coming-...

PHOTOS: Austria is turning drab power lines into giant metal animals — and they are fully functional It’s part of an effort to increase public acceptance of expanding electrification.

If these come to AU and we get a vote, 100% Tassie devil, preferably mid-snarl.

www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/aus...

Meet Your Data Validation Assistant | SimpleValidations SimpleValidations lets you build robust data validation workflows with schema checks, simulations, and credentialing.

I'm building a data validation service for things like EnergyPlus and Modelica files.

www.simplevalidations.com

Models + Patterns Models + Patterns is an e-Learning platform for energy-efficiency professionals.

I'm building an e-Learning site for energy-efficiency peeps.

modelsandpatterns.org

When everybody's down, nobody is you want a take about the AWS outage? fine, here's a take

Classic. "Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter what your app architecture is. If AWS falls over, you are going to be affected NO MATTER WHAT ... I don’t care what the uptime of your haunted palace of Kubernetes is."

newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/when-every...

Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances ...

Put on Vangelis’s soundtrack for Blade Runner and then read Michael Levin’s TAME framework paper : pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... … I’m serious.

Learning about the latest positive thinking from the Sustainability Summit / Future of Building Materials Summit at the Melbourne Build Expo today.

American institutions don't crumble. But they can be destroyed.

The Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer On AI, Creativity, and Craft

"Creative puzzle-solving is left to the machines, and we become mere operators disassociated from our craft." hojberg.xyz/the-programm...

bare metal (the emacs essay) The following submission to Jeremy Friesen’s ‘elevator pitch’-themed Emacs blog carnival is taken from my rather long manuscript in progress (‘the present work’), tent…

Broccoli. Muscle ups. Emacs. All things I want to have in my life but they just keep receding into the distance. Waxbanks writes "You cannot rule without fire." waxbanks.wordpress.com/2025/08/01/b...

GNU Octave Meets JupyterLite: Compute Anywhere, Anytime! We are thrilled to announce the newest member of our JupyterLite kernel ecosystem: Xeus-Octave. Xeus-Octave allows you to run GNU Octave…

JupyterLite team gives you MatLab scripts via GNU Octave...in your browser! "Xeus-Octave allows you to run GNU Octave code directly on your browser. GNU Octave is a free and open-source Scientific Programming Language that can be used to run Matlab scripts. " blog.jupyter.org/gnu-octave-m...

Why are they even looking for more???

This is another 475 million tonnes of CO2 !!!

"there’s no room for new fields to be opened. When you’re in a hole, you have to stop digging.” - Dr. Greg Muttitt, @iisd.org

#ClimateEmergency

YouTube video by USA TODAY Full Mehdi Hasan speech at No Kings protest calls Trump out, says immigrants 'love this country'

Full Mehdi Hasan speech at No Kings protest calls Trump out, says immigrants 'love this country'.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHtI...

Pritzker: Throughout history we've learned that tyranny doesn't arrive with dramatic proclamations. Most times it comes quietly wrapped in the language of law and order, with fingers pointed at someone who doesn't look like you, promising safety while demanding that we sacrifice our neighbors.

Fuck you Marc

Too late dipshit. You said it, you meant it, we saw it, we know.

You’re only apologizing because your employees and customers started calling you out for it.

All very early stage as I validate ( intended! 🫣 ) the idea.

Looking for use cases for the MVP. Contact me if you see value in this kind of service for you or your team. Real life pain stories wanted, please share your woe. Very keen to hear how something like this might make things easier.

Validations can be simple and schema-based (JSON Schema, Relax NG, etc. ) or more advanced and involve things like simulations (EnergyPlus, FMI-based sims) or involve libraries that are a pain for users to install and use directly for infrequent tasks.

Meet Your Data Validation Assistant | SimpleValidations SimpleValidations lets you build robust data validation workflows with schema checks, simulations, and credentialing.

I'm developing a new web application that helps orgs create automated, API-based data validations for their community of users.

www.simplevalidations.com

@michaelburchert.bsky.social Saw this on LinkedIn today and thought you might find interesting given your work ...

Submission site: www.editorialmanager.com/enb/default2...

Carbon credits are failing to help with climate change — here’s why The idea that emissions can be offset through projects that claim to avoid releases or to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is fatally flawed.

There is a reason "offsetting" does not exist in the vast majority of cases of avoidable harm to human safety: it would be laughed off as physically absurd and outright fraudulent.

Somehow, in the single most catastrophic physical threat facing our species, it became accepted as normal

Mark Litwintschik wrangles GIS data on U.S. solar farms step-by-step.

tech.marksblogg.com/american-sol...

You Have Been LaTeXpOsEd: A Systematic Analysis of Information Leakage in Preprint Archives Using Large Language Models The widespread use of preprint repositories such as arXiv has accelerated the communication of scientific results but also introduced overlooked security risks. Beyond PDFs, these platforms provide un...

Scientists: be careful with your preprint submissions. "In the absence of sanitization, submissions may disclose sensitive information that adversaries can harvest using open-source intelligence." arxiv.org/abs/2510.03761

Saying the climate is too complex for tipping points is like saying your body is too complex to die. Complexity doesn’t prevent collapse…..it just gives you more ways to reach it.

All-Natural Geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?

Dave Deek asks "Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?"... to which I would add "despite our declining attention spans."

Marc Benioff says Trump should send National Guard to San Francisco Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that President Trump should deploy the National Guard to San Francisco to combat crime: “We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it.”

Been meaning to move my projects from Heroku to Fly.io or Render.com and I just got a big burst of energy for next week.

www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/m...