Austin Vernon

What is the absolute minimum performance we need to counter China?

Ships need cheap batteries instead of high performance ones.

Humanoid robots powered by artificial intelligence could build regular houses in one day using traditional construction techniques.

Nuclear power could level up by producing high value products.

There are fundamental reasons nuclear power struggles with cost.

AI can revolutionize K-12, but how many actually want it?

How hard is it to fuel a war across a vast ocean?

One poorly designed class of ships does not obsolete aircraft carriers.

Asymmetric advantages disappear when the gloves come off.

New competitors hope to challenge fossil fuel's dominance.

The US is rapidly compensating for the short range of its fighter aircraft.

Stephen Malina and I co-wrote this post to praise flexible and distributed technologies.

New designs that can utilize cheaper battery chemistries will alleviate scaling problems.

Nuclear power survived a dark period in the 1980s by increasing output from existing power plants, can it build on that success to grow again?

An explanation of a Matt Ygelesias tweet.

Politics and physics add many constraints.

What technology does geothermal need to be competitive?

The benefits of different smart grid technologies vary widely.

Atoms are more important than bits when killing people.

The solar supply chain is pushing complexity to giant factories.

Declining launch costs enable new classes of weapons.

Trucks, vans, and other high mileage vehicles promise to impact oil demand more than EVs.

Precision Guided Munitions drive modern war and somehow Russia forgot to build enough.

What is the correct goal and what can be done quickly?

Inertia and new technology make it hard and undesirable to root out.

Technical and economic barriers prevent nuclear from growing.

E-Bike technology is amazing. How will it improve, and how will we use it?

Grid operators must balance the grid at the millisecond level, the daily level, and during peak events.

What technology does geothermal need to be competitive?

Volatility flows up from our energy technologies.

Solar and wind are cheap, but hard to permit.

Alpha isn't what you think.

The electrify everything push is unimaginative central planning.

A new breed of companies emulates aerospace's golden age.

Crop price deflation will no longer rule.

The technology exists to save us, if we let it.

Software is actually a management technology.

Tunnels are getting cheap and that makes a big difference.

Solar's dominance is not assured, but the path is clear.

A Python script that parses data and calculates solar + storage economics.

Why geothermal isn't ubiquitous and how it might get that way.

America finally owns Deming, and a manufacturing renaissance may follow

Raise your ambitions, and dumb it down.

A conservative method using traditional macroeconomic thinking.

Learn how to read the Bitcoin Whitepaper without googling every other word. Pt. 2

Encrypt messages, decrypt messages, and sign messages.

Learn how to read the Bitcoin Whitepaper without googling every other word. Pt. 1

Learn how to use hash functions with Python.

Learn how to publish on the uncensorable web.

I host this blog on IPFS, this is what I learned about the censorship-proof protocol.