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The first price point for usable solar technology that I can find is from the year 1956. At that time, the cost of just one watt of solar photovoltaic capacity was $1,865 (adjusted for inflation and in 2019 prices).10 One watt isn’t much. Today, one single solar panel of the type homeowners put on their roofs produces around 320 watts of power.11 This means that at the price of 1956, one of today’s solar modules would cost $596,800.12

Our World In Data explaining why renewable energy prices have dropped dramatically, showing how solar and wind technologies have become cheaper than fossil fuels within just 15 years.

A research paper examines how technology learning curves vary over time, challenging the traditional constant learning rate model. via construction-physics.com

Article grey market of peptides and underground pharmaceutical communities.

Tyler Cowen's Friday assorted links cover topics ranging from adaptive political economy to the resurgence of folk deities in Taiwan. via The source of this content is Marginal REVOLUTION.

Venkatesh Rao reviews the novel "There Is No Antimemetics Division," exploring a world of self-censoring ideas and the organization that contains them. via Ribbonfarm

Recipes that provide a "wow factor" for minimal effort is the topic of a recent question posted on MetaFilter.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is sending usable engineering data back to Earth, indicating its systems are healthy after the team devised a workaround for a problem in the flight data system. via The source of this content is the NASA Voyager blog.

Harvard is hosting a database with interesting biological measurements ranging from the duration of an eye blink to the mass of a fruit fly. via kottke.org

Simon Willison summarizes Andrej Karpathy's review of Meta's Llama 3, noting the increase in training tokens and tokenizer size but also the disappointingly small context length.

via @simonw

Wired's Steven Levy details how eight Google employees invented the "transformer" concept, leading to a recent tech breakthrough. via kottke.org

Alison Roman's recipe features a simple, flavorful dressing and roasted vegetables. via The source of this content is Alison Roman's website.