Ten years later, brand new
A giant airborne wind turbine from China crosses the feed, a kite on cables, and the top comment declares it garbage because Google already tried and abandoned the idea. He rejects the whole reasoning pattern: 'they tried it, it failed, it's useless' ignores that wind gets stronger with altitude, that turbine towers keep growing for exactly that reason, and that a floating turbine skips the tower entirely. The thesis: a technology that failed ten years ago is a new technology today.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 34:37 (contra el cinismo del ya-se-intentó)
- ↳ video diary @ 35:31 (diez años atrás es totalmente nueva)
The object is striking on its own: a giant airborne wind turbine, shared from China, hanging in the sky like something from a cleaner future ▸ 32:55, splitting the comments between futurist and eyesore ▸ 33:10. Mechanically it’s a kite: tethered by cables, floating, generating ▸ 33:56. And the pedigree includes a famous corpse: he recalls from his aircraft research that Google bought a company dedicated to exactly this ▸ 33:47 and eventually walked away, the approach inefficient, high-altitude wind too unpredictable to harness ▸ 34:10.
Which is all the top comment needs: this thing is useless ▸ 34:33. His objection is to the reasoning shape, not the engineering: “no me gusta esa visión de simplemente decir, ah, ya lo intentaron, no funcionó, eso no sirve”, against the better posture of being glad someone is trying and learning ▸ 34:37.
el fracaso caduca más rápido que la física →
The physics hasn’t changed and still favors the dreamers: wind strengthens with altitude, which is why turbine towers keep getting built taller ▸ 35:02, and towers have a height where construction becomes absurd; float the turbine instead and the efficiency gain comes without the building ▸ 35:11. What has changed is everything around the physics, materials, controls, the whole stack, and that’s the generalizable thesis he lands: technology keeps arriving, so “una cosa que estaba 10 años atrás hoy en día es totalmente nueva” ▸ 35:31.
A failed attempt dates the attempt, not the idea. Google quitting in one decade is weak evidence about what a different team, different materials, and a different grid economy can do in the next, and the commenters treating a corporate retreat as a law of nature are doing exactly what the anti-vibe-coding memers do: quoting an expired verdict with total confidence…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open