Interesting things I read in June 2025
Electrifying everything, AI agents and internet resiliency.
First electric aircraft lands at JFK — General Aviation News
According to Beta Technology officials, the ALIA can fly 250 nautical miles on a single charge. He told reporters from Reuters that it cost just $8 to power the 45-minute flight.
Important because flying isn’t going away and jet fuel isn’t going green. Growing it as biofuel is an extremely bad use of land that we need for other things. Batteries are getting better, lighter, cheaper, very quickly.
Discovered via the highly-recommended newsletter, The Crucial Years, by Bill McKibben
Terraform Industries is scaling technology to produce cheap natural gas with sunlight and air.
We are committed to cutting the net CO2 flux from crust to atmosphere as quickly as possible. As solar power gets cheaper, there will come a time when it is cheaper to get carbon from the atmosphere than an oil well. That time is now.
I’ve been watching these ambitious people for a while. It seems they’ve just raised a chunk of cash and are forging ahead.
BYD is testing solid-state EV batteries with nearly 1,200 miles of range
BYD has now begun testing solid-state EV batteries in its Tesla Model 3-rivalling Seal. Initial tests suggest that the total driving range could reach nearly 1,200 miles (1,875 km).
I’m playing catch-up here: I didn’t realise solid state batteries were a thing. Today’s lithium ion batteries have a liquid electrolyte. In contrast, solid state batteries have a solid electrolyte and a whole raft of advantages, apparently:
- twice the energy density (stored energy per weight)
- much faster to charge
- less flammable
Assuming these advantages can be had for a similar price, that’s a big deal. Reducing the need for mid-trip chargers can only be a good thing for reducing range anxiety and increasing uptake.
How to Build an Agent
Building a fully functional, code-editing agent in less than 400 lines.
An “Agent” is an LLM equipped with tools. A tool is some custom code you write that takes input from the LLM and returns it output to the LLM.
The first tool I wrote was roll_dice(). Under the hood, the tool picks
a random number 1—6 and outputs the words “the dice roll was X”.
I told the LLM it has a tool called roll_dice() in a special type of
chat message that comes before the main chat.
Then, when I asked it to roll a dice, it called the tool, rather than just hallucinating a (non-random) number.
I followed along this article for a few hours and built several tools that allowed the LLM to find and read documents relating to how we run our business. The difference in usefulness was profound and deserves its own write-up.
The take-away here is that LLMs with tools are unbelievably more useful when they have domain-specific tools. They seem to know what they don’t know and switch to using tools rather than hallucinating a people-pleasing response.
Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
This appealled because I’m increasingly thinking about preparing for difficult times and the importance of:
- planning ahead, and
- trusted in-person local communities
I mentioned this in a group and Adrian unearthed his T1000-E device that supports Meshtastic.
A receipt printer cured my procrastination [ADHD]
Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate on simple tasks? I finally cracked the code using thermal receipt printer and game design.
Fun: I like the way the author uses ideas from game design to create dopamine rewards when he completes tasks