I’d normally agree, but the sheer necessity of desalination in the next couple of decades might actually make a dent in this issue, as the downstream effects might actually affect some profit margins. The real issue is scaling, as most of the “revolutionary” desalination headlines are generally only slightly more efficient, but often have issues staying operational for long periods of time. This might have a bit of an edge on those (being completely passive, and already trying to work on the issue of salt buildup clogging the system), but I got the feeling from reading the article that they hadn’t figured out whether or not they could scale it beyond (essentially) a basic water collection service for very small communities, at least not yet.
That if you know how to code, you understand how computers work and understand really complicated math concepts.