ag315

What on earth do you mean by 1kw of fuel rod? Your quantifications make no sense and cite no sources. You're going to need to be more specific than "read the latest reports"; this report (https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Technical-P...) from 2021 for example makes it very clear that copper is not a trivial concern for renewables at all. If you have serious evidence for your unclear and uncited claims of "how much is actually needed", then go right ahead. none of your other numbers are cited either; your assumption of 1kg for lithium battery looks like you just made it up on the spot the way you did with your bizarre earlier falsehood about how much copper a nuclear reactor consumes--and a transition to a renewable-centric energy system will require significant battery storage capacity, so it's not a question that can just be dismissed.

A fuel rod assembly with 500kg of uranium produces about 200,000,000 kwH over its lifetime (https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...), which comes out to 400k kw per kilogram of uranium, or 400 kw per gram. The amount of rare earths in each solar panel may be relatively low, but it also uses a significant amount of silicon, which as a metalloid has to be mined. Beyond that, none of this even addresses the differences in intensity of production; because nuclear produces its lifetime energy much more quickly than a solar panel does, the relative density of solar that you need in order to provide a comparable level of power over time is considerably unbalanced.

"Again. Compare for me the volume of the tailings pit of a typical open pit uranium mine like Husab with the volume of every solar panel ever produced. A few hundred grams of metal encased in glass for an entire lifetime of energy is not 'significant waste'." I'm at a loss for how to explain to you that this a fallacy on your part. I'm talking about waste production, and you're trying to compare apples to oranges by bringing up uranium mines instead of comparing waste production of the different methods. That you're so intent on repeating this obvious fallacy suggests to me that it's the best you can do. I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but the anti-rational fanaticism of green energy cultists is going to push the world off a cliff.

Solar panels aren't made of lithium, but they are made of a wide variety of other things that have to be mined (which, again, uses up space and has to be taken into consideration), and the batteries which will be necessary to make them a viable part of the total transition to renewables will require massive amounts of it--lithium mining is expected to double in the next few years, and renewables are a major driver of that.

Nuclear reactors use less copper overall than renewable energy sources. (https://help.leonardo-energy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360010919...) Uranium, by the way, is also recycleable--most fissile material can be reused, and the amount of waste produced is tiny.

And yes, the total amount of waste produced by nuclear energy is miniscule, and could fit in a much smaller amount of space than is taken up by solar panel waste, which is well over a quarter of a million metric tons. Both are small compared to, say, coal ash, but solar disposal does have significant costs and can and does produce significant waste.

And one last thing--you're hypersensitive and pathetic. I started this discussion agreeing with your main point and trying to observe something straightforwardly relevant and you've been having a tantrum in response the entire time. Log off.

"No longer needed once the panel is produced" The land used for the mining isn't land that we're just getting back--given the costs of making it useful again for anything else, space used for a lithium mine is in almost all cases essentially going to be gone for good. This is of course true for other mines as well, but your notion that lithium is an exception is a curious one.

"All of which except silver outmass minerals of similar rarity and mining impact in the solar panel (and that is quickly changing)" Nuclear reactors require relatively small inputs of these metals compared to the metals used in solar panels, and the huge capital invested in making solar panels less resource-intensive could also be applied to nuclear, if we wanted to do so.

"Even then it's questionable because most of the nuclear reactor cannot be recycled, but the solar panel legally must have recycling prepaid in many jurisdictions." But again, reactors are small compared to the millions of panels that are necessary to be the equivalent of one plant, and furthermore plenty of those materials can be and are recycled, especially in France (the entire history of the American nuclear energy program have created less waste than solar panels have in just a couple decades). And, again, innovations that make solar panels more recyclable (which we absolutely need because right now they mostly just produce massive amounts of toxic waste) could also be invested in nuclear recycling. I did get a good chuckle out of your vague "many jurisdictions" though.

Strategic installation of solar panels certainly helps maximize efficiency, and is in general a great idea, especially in some areas. But to your point about the space taken up by uranium and coal mines, that's only a fair comparison if you also calculate the mines needed for things like lithium, copper, etc. that would all go into a solar-oriented power grid.

Happy to discuss the numbers of your numbers-based argument, but you didn't cite your sources.

1370/sq km is at the atmospheric level. The amount that actually reaches the surface is significantly less.

While I'm less optimistic than you on solar power, you're absolutely right about ethanol, which is easily one of the worst and most inefficient power sources we could have possibly chosen to invest in. It's a significant indictment of the US political system that so much money was shoveled into it.

Correct--while the sun sends an enormous amount of free energy our way, it's maddeningly diffuse and requires enormous investments of energy and materials to capture it in a usable and reliable form. The Wynn in Vegas has a 160 acre solar farm in some of the sunniest land in the country and it provides...almost enough energy to power a single large hotel.

None of this is to say that solar power is bad, just that we should have measured expectations.

I agree with your perspective on this, but my hope is that it won't have a major negative externality at the end of the day--drum machines and drum software have really solid for well over a decade now, but plenty of people still learn the drums, learn them well, and find opportunities to play them.

This is a really excellent point, both in general and vis a vis the conflict in Ukraine. Something I see happening often is that some people are quick to confuse expertise-as-credential with expertise-as-substance, or to assume that anyone who has above average knowledge of some relevant subject area that relates to some aspect of the war is immune to emotionally biased interpretations.

I think it's an oversimplification to argue that the mind as a whole is like a closet, but I do think memory specifically works a bit in this way--hence the well-established utility of memory palace methods. Giordano Bruno's memory garden idea is something I've been working on, but it does take time to put in place.

I don't believe AGI needs to have actual consciousness in order to functionally be AGI, and I personally am not of the view that we will ever make a conscious computer. That said, intentionality could certainly impact the way it operates, so it's something I think is worth keeping in mind for trying to predict its behavior.

I agree with you that it could be dangerous, but I neither said nor implied at any point that I disagree with that--I don't think the original comment was implying that either. LLM could absolutely be dangerous depending on the capabilities that we give it, but I think that's separate from questions of intentionality or whether or not it is actually AGI as we normally think of it.

In most cases there are vastly more synapses than there are neurons, and beyond that the neurons and synapses are not highly rudimentary pieces but are themselves extremely complex.

It's certainly true that nervous systems do quite a bit more than language processing, but AGI would presumably also have to do quite a bit more than just language processing if we want it to be truly general.

My response to that would be to point out that these LLM models, complex and intricate as they are, are nowhere near as complex as, for example, the nervous system of a grasshopper. The nervous systems of grasshoppers, as far as we know, do not produce anything like what we're looking for in artificial general intelligence, despite being an order of magnitude more complicated than an LLM codebase. Nor is it likely that they suddenly will one day.

I don't disagree that we should have tight safety controls on AI and in fact I'm open to seriously considering the possibility that we should stop pursuing AI almost entirely (not that enforcing such a thing is likely). But that's not really what my comment was about; LLMs may well present significant dangers, but that's different from asking whether or not they have minds or can produce intentionality.

This is spot on in my opinion and I wish more people would keep it in mind--it may well be that large language models can eventually become functionally very much like AGI in terms of what they can output, but they are not systems that have anything like a mind or intentionality because they are not designed to have them, and cannot just form it spontaneously out of their current structure.

I can believe that they've been tracking it for awhile, but it is unlikely that they can easily shoot it down. We probably literally don't have the technical capacity to do so reliably at this time.

Your analogy doesn't work and I suspect it's because you may fundamentally misunderstand what qualia actually are--this isn't about gaps; this relates much more to the logical impossibility of reducing qualia to something that can be understood through quantitative methods. You dropped the key in the dark and are looking for it under a beam of light three feet away by trying to claim that any any amount of neuroscience could answer a question of this nature.

That said, much like the problem of induction, its insolubility is not necessarily of much practical importance day-to-day. We know that certain wavelengths will be recognized by people with normal visual faculties as "red"; whether the way they experience that qualia is different or not is not of much practical importance. It's more of a reminder of the limits of our empirical knowledge.

The quantifiable characteristics of the light spectrum are the same--the experience of the qualia are not necessarily the same. This is common with taste and smell; it could easily be the same story with the experience of color.

Qualia are one of the more interesting subjects in the study of mind because they're inextricable from our perceptions and our experience of everything, but they can't be reduced or quantified in any meaningful way.

(If anyone is tempted to respond to this with anything from Daniel Dennett, please consider citing a serious philosopher instead.)

The question you're responding to is (although of little if any practical importance) a more philosophical one than can be answered by cortex differentiation, which cannot tell us much at all about the experience of qualia.

I don't think you can get good at doing calculations without practicing the calculations, but reading books that discuss the higher-level aspects of math and the philosophical underpinnings can help you look at it in a different way that may inspire more interest as well as an easier time grasping the difficult parts.

Any updates on Havana syndrome and chronic Lyme's while we're at it?

It's not just lithium that's the problem; copper is also a major component, and we don't have nearly enough of that either.

A full transition to electric vehicles is not viable with current technologies. If we can make a big leap in solid state battery technology then that could make all the difference, but the viability of those is being continuously postponed.

I've played both piano and guitar for many years now, and the distinction I'd make is that piano is easier to start out on than guitar, but harder to get good at--in the long run the difficulty of mastery is probably about the same on both, but they have different learning curves.

By 2030? Lol. Lmao, even. 2050 if we're lucky--we're still not even close to developing a reactor that can produce meaningful amounts of power for a sustained period. It'll take decades more to get to that point, and once all the technical limitations have been crossed and we figure out how to get enough tritium, the actual hard work begins of getting it online and integrated with our current system. Fusion is distant future technology.

Cool technical achievement, but it has essentially no implications for economically or politically significant energy generation anytime soon.

No, bobajeff is correct. The vast majority of language acquisition occurs through input and exposure to the language via reading and listening. Trying to speak when you have no grasp yet of the grammar and vocabulary is not an efficient use of time, plus you don't have a good grasp of the sounds early on. You're better off gaining comprehension before you try to start speaking--if you actually look at the experiences of someone like Benny Lewis, who is well known for his "speak early and often" approach, you'll note that it was only effective for him with languages he already had a decent background with, or that were reasonably close to English.