That was rough.

I remember hearing that some may even have LTE to fallback to.

You could put solar on both?

I’ve done lots of tech projects within the retail energy industry in Texas - this is the right answer.

To expand a little bit:

Retail energy providers (REPs), like NRG, ClearSky, Just Energy, etc. make their money by forecasting the amount of energy that will be needed as far in advance as possible and purchasing that amount from power generators like CenterPoint and marking it up a few cents. The farther out, the cheaper they can get it. I’ve helped build forecasting engines for a few that ingest historical usage data from meters (all meters in Texas are smart meters), weather data, and others to use machine learning to forecast how much individuals will need and aggregate it together to help the energy traders make better informed trade decisions farther out.

If they mess up or an unforeseen event happens and they don’t have enough energy bought for that time segment (forgot the term for a window of time they use), they have to go to the spot market which is where the prices fluctuate and can be many many multitudes higher than the rate the customers are contracted to pay.

In a storm scenario or a freeze, it can be thousands of times more expensive because demand is so high and supply is so limited. This is when REPs go bankrupt if they don’t have the cash on hand.

There are also insurance plans that the REPs pay for that cover very specific conditions for different types of events or outages that can kick in to cover the huge costs they would otherwise incur on their own buying electricity at that spot rate. I’ve known a few that were only able to stay operating because someone a few years prior had bought an insurance policy that covered said weather event.

Griddy died because of the ice storm in Texas a few years ago and the huge costs people incurred. I actually met with their CIO the year prior as part of a technology assessment of their stack. Nice guy.

Edit: also you can largely thank Enron and Rick Perry for deregulating Texas’ energy - which directly led to the terrible “performance” of the Texas grid during the winter storm Uri in 2021. Same for Enron in the constant blackouts in California in the early 2000’s.

I think I’d still rather type out internationalization even if it doesn’t fit on a slide lol.

I thought the same until the barbarians came @me with O11y and one of my coworkers asked where the f they got “oh eleveny” from.

I just thought 8 = netes.

They’re shorthand for long words you don’t want to type. You keep the first and last letter and replace the rest of the word with the number of characters you removed.

Kubernetes ➡️ K8s Observability ➡️ O11y

🤷🏼‍♂️

Rolling onto a client that uses “O11y” for observability almost gave me permanent damage.

I’m sure it’s annoying but if it’s people like me, they’re fascinated by watching construction happen. Probably even things you think are simple to do seem interesting from the outside. 😬

Hwat?

Fucking ouch to read.

Just a head’s up this was generated with AI. The real pic is him still pale, no beard, and his eyes are different.

He’s still an alien looking pos.

For sure. I meant that I’d enjoy it enough that I’d be willing to do it by hand, with a smile on my face. ☺️

But yeah just a few lines of python and a txt file could do it.

Damn you’re unionized IT? Where are you general located?

Oh I would gladly do this manually - just have a spreadsheet pulled up of donated keys on half the screen and the revoke page in the other. Just going line by line, cross-checking, and yanking if I need to.

Would totally do it for my Friday night. Especially if I knew they’d know what happened and why.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment but the Ilyushin Il-76 is made by Ilyushin, not Boeing. Let’s not cross the streams incorrectly.

Lmfao what? I can’t wait to watch this play out…

You don’t sayyyyy

Okay yeah that’s true. I should have been cognizant that not being economically viable / efficient enough does not mean it’s impossible/I don’t believe it’s real. Definitely works.

Carbon capture 🥀