I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped to say, and I thought it was important to get out, so I do think this was worth it. And it all went well: none of this is complaining about the comments I got there.

Coming back a few times to check notifications, however, it's been very good at baiting me: Tweets that are confidently wrong in cases where I have relevant and uncommon knowledge. The pull to dive in and share what I know is very strong! Then this bleeds over to the far broader case where people are wrong, and you have a large potential time sink.

If it were just the time sink, I'd stop resisting. I spend some time on HN and Reddit, and to the extent that Twitter could substitute for that by showing me things I was more interested in, that wouldn't be an issue. The real problem is the culture.

When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work. Sure, programming has sped up massively with Claude Code etc, and models like Astra seem posed to make similar changes to work with spreadsheets and other common business tools, but what about work that doesn't include computers at all?

The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do. Leaning into the way the world has become very scifi, we could call this "teleoperating" people. Many things that are hard for robots are very easy for people, there are strong economic reasons that push towards teleoperation, and this bypasses many legal and social limitations on what AI can do. We should expect this to lead to large and rapid changes in the physical world.

We should end net metering, including for existing solar installations, and compensate people with a one-time subsidy for battery purchase. I'm going to give an argument from grid efficiency, which I expect to be the main consideration for most people, though the benefit that makes me enthusiastic about this change is actually increasing societal resilience.

Net metering is a common form of solar subsidy where you only pay for your "net" usage: the difference between how much you consume and how much you produce. At first glance this doesn't even seem like a subsidy: if you take 800 kWh and put back 800 kWh, then did you really use any? But it's not like a bank account: the kWh you put back are usually much less useful than the kWh you used.

Say I started a solar farm, putting out a lot of panels somewhere out in the less populated part of the state (MA), and sold the power to the grid. Averaging over the year, the electricity market might pay me $0.05/kWh. On the other hand, when the panels on my house send power back to the grid I get $0.32/kWh. [1] There are several factors that pull these apart, but I think the most illuminating one is how the value of electricity varies over time.

The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered" thinking around bans.

In fact, one specific place where I'd like to see this thinking applied is adjacent to this rule: babywearing carriers on planes. When our babies were little, carriers were massively helpful in flying. The baby likes it, and your arms are free. But for takeoff and landing, the FAA requires you to take your baby out of the carrier and hold them in your arms.

David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be great, and seems like the obvious way for it to work: when the grid goes down the panels can charge the car when it's sunny, and the car can power the house when it's not. Unfortunately as far as I can tell the only way I could do this today is with a Cybertruck, and other systems are a long way off.

The basic problem is that while several manufacturers support having the car power your house when the grid is down ("V2H"), they generally treat it as a separate discharging-only mode. For example, the GM V2H Bundle documentation says "During a power outage, the GM Energy Home Hub safely disconnects your home from the local power grid and enables backup power to flow from the GM Energy Inverter throughout your home" and "Once power is restored, your GM EV will automatically end the discharge session and begin charging" without any mention of recharging the car when the grid is down.

Like most houses with solar, our house is capable of generating a lot of power, and it's basically useless [1] in a disaster. If the grid is down, the panels shut down automatically. This is a lot of value lost, since in a long-term disaster, electricity would be incredibly valuable (air cleaning, gas boiler or a tiny bit of resistive heat, sump pump, cooking, refrigeration, tools). When we installed a second round of solar in 2024 we considered either a battery backup or "best effort when the sun is shining" power. They priced out at many thousands of dollars and we decided it wasn't worth it, but recently three things have changed my mind: