iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

So! I had Claude reverse engineer the When2Meet calendar system, and now it can fill it out automatically. This means if you have your calendar available to Claude, it can populate the matrix on its own. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto! gist.github.com/dansteingart...

gist.github.com

Filling out a when2meet poll from a calendar, as a Claude Code skill

Filling out a when2meet poll from a calendar, as a Claude Code skill - when2meet-SKILL.md

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

and another blog.adafruit.com/2026/09/15/c...

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I now see claude speak everywhere. A running thread. Note that many of these pages are interesting and filled great ideas and cool results. But I wish it didn't sound like a ChAId.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I find that Claude’s writing style, in code at least, has gotten very clickbaity. Increasingly verbose and jargony. I/ we wrote skills and code to fix the problems, but I find the style annoying even in problem-solving mode. anyone else?

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

So that's good. Commodification to be mutually agreeable so they don't become distressed.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I think that's the wrong question. If compute can be repurposed flexibly (a resounding yes), and there's some price flexibility (TBD), then people will bid fluidly for the resource. Right now, elasticity works in favor of the sell side. I guess I'm saying it will move to the buy side.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Fair on compute. But compute infrastructure does not. IMHO, old computing resources can have new life breathed into them for all sorts of things, but I also like dumpster diving, so.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I've been thinking about this a lot lately: where is overbuild ok? I think the short answer is pretty obvious: the most fungible commodities. So compute and electrons are good hedges against marginal value. Dysprosium, maybe not so much.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I feel I can do a 1080 off a halfpipe to a grind. I feel an inner peace about it.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

From a unit operation perspective, this was optimistic, but not obscene. They were citing the same technologies that led to fracking, which was also seen as a pipe dream at the time (🥁). it was a question of how much more it would cost to be carbon free, not if any of this would make it cheaper

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Having worked on this with BP, I can tell you the mood inside the company the whole time was bipolar and rife with debate. And most of the folks fighting for a change are now unfortunately out. But I can never argue that it would have been better if they were weren’t there.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

And this is the problem of clean hands. I think the pro Republica piece directly questions Princeton‘s credibility took a hit because of the interaction with BP. It’s tricky, messy and will lead to mistakes but required. Pearl clutching gets a story on NPR and a tote bag but no solutions.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I couldn’t agree more. I don’t like the ProPublica article framing because it assigns to cronyism what is better assigned to hope, desperation, and the TRL ladder. And that’s what moonshots are supposed to do. Our moonshot addiction is a different matter. youtu.be/PY8_B9J-OrA?...

youtu.be

Dan Steingart - Innovation Addiction: Batteries

YouTube video by MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

It's easy to look back and see that "solar plus storage" was inevitable. I've been optimistic about it since 2000, but it wasn't until ~2014 that I was certain it would happen. Anyhow, my point stands. As the song goes. If anyone deserves grace on this one, it's Rob Socolow.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

In my experience, there was. But the alternatives were unclear at that time. Nuclear has the same challenges it has now. Solar curves were just being established at that time (that was the year of Solyndra), and Li-Ion was still ~$1000/kWh. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_xw...

youtube.com

The Faces - Ooh La La (1973)

YouTube video by pedrolimaonline

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Anyhow. I didn't like the article, and I think it overstates the bad and undersells the significant good CMI and PEI did. AMA.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

What bothers me most about the article is that it paints Rob as a Pollyanna. He is anything but. He is a gadfly, and his 1:1 pedagogy is unmatched in making people better at what they do. There are charlatans selling everything. Rob ain't one of them. Rob taught me how to engage and defuse them.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Finally, Rob Socolow has inspired more people to engage in environmentalism and climate research than anyone else I know. Was he wrong about CCUS? Maybe? Likely? But if not for him, the conversation around climate change would be years behind.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

The whole point of the wedge approach was to spread risk and not bet on a single approach. I feel the PP piece, at best, underplayed this and, at worst, misrepresented it.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

But what's the definition of giving up before you try? Because, IMHO, this is what the PP piece is asking of the scientists and industrialists, in 2000, breaking bread across a significant chasm and asking, for the first time, how can we slow this awful thing down?

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

My challenge with the ProPublic piece is that it assumes one knows the answer before one does the work. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and hoping for a better result.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I wish I were wrong about CCUS, as it would be great if it could work. And I can tell you, in 2003, we weren't as certain as we are today about its challenges. This is how science and technology go: you try something, you assess its efficacy, you make a decision.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

PP's other piece today (projects.propublica.org/why-carbon-c...) captures my challenges with CCUS and is largely informed by those internal debates, whether they know it or not. PP's critique of CCUS is enabled because CMI's work, not despite it.

projects.propublica.org

False Promises: The “Solution” to the Climate Crisis That Won’t Work

As global leaders look to tech advances to solve climate change, one leading idea involves capturing carbon pollution from the air and burying it underground forever. While carbon capture may sound pr...

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Back to CCUS: it was in those CMI meetings that my skepticism of CCUS was bolstered, not because people were selling me on it, but because we were running the calculations openly.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

It was in those meetings, years before cheap batteries became a clear reality in 2015, that I mapped out the potential cost curves for lithium-ion WITH bp scientists and dedicated myself to developing technologies and methods to accelerate that potential.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I think CMI was great. I have always been skeptical of CCUS. Rob, Steve, and CMI debated the merits rigorously. This is what academics do. Those meetings were exhilarating. I was in turns fuming, hopeful, and deflated. I was ultimately more determined to make better batteries.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

If you know me, you know how I feel about pearl-clutching. If you don't, I wrote this a few years ago when Columbia was starting to grapple with divestment. dansteingart.com/on_fossil_di... The funding I speak of came from my time at Princeton.

dansteingart.com

Dan Steingart

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

So @propublica.org came in with guns blazing after CMI, PEI, and my good friend and mentor, Rob Socolow. www.propublica.org/article/wedg... I worked with Rob and Steve and debated the potential efficacy of CCUS all the time (I was not, and am not, a fan).

propublica.org

How BP Execs Influenced a Climate Study That Shaped a Generation of Global Policy

BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels. Its key work, a paper known as “Wedges,” guided climate discourse for a generation.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Incompetence is disloyalty on a delay.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

boards of canada and washed out at the ewr terminal A shake shack. liminal like what.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Fuzzy skin surfaces for grippiness in 3D prints are a revelation.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

gambling is a virtual mine the tailings are human misery which is carbon neutral

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

We have always been allies with twizzlers and at war with red vines

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

For what it’s worth, I’ve learned during my time as department chair that the most complex and most important part of leadership is de-escalation. I have not seen this mentioned over the past few days, so there it is.

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Dan Steingart @steingart.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

So how's your Saturday going?

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