foxyv

The problem is that environmental regulations kind of act like a double edge sword with regards to hybrid conversions. They prevent Jim Bob from selling his environmental disaster kit, but they also prevent Bob Jim from selling his Hybrid drivetrain conversion without expensive approvals. This is why most people do BEV conversions. The kits are available because they are zero emissions and don't fall afoul of the environmental regulations.

Welcome to the Kafkaesque world of automated enforcement.

"The Trial" by Franz Kafka is a novel written in 1914 and 1915. It follows Josef K., a bank clerk who is arrested and prosecuted by a mysterious, unreachable authority. Neither he nor the reader ever learns what crime he has committed. As Josef navigates an absurd legal system filled with bizarre encounters and inexplicable procedures, his case consumes his life while remaining perpetually unresolved. The novel, never completed by Kafka, was published posthumously in 1925.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7849

The answer is: It's complicated

https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/5-big-myths-abou...

Ecologically, wildfires are necessary for some biomes. However, not all of them. Many are needlessly destructive due to climate change and over logging of forests.

This is honestly kind of accurate accidentally. The Luddites were a movement trying to stop the exploitation of labor to work in dangerous factories which was destroying the health of large groups of people for the sole benefit of factory owners. The underlying problem isn't the AI, or the factories. It's the anti-social actions of rich sociopaths.

A lack of trust in corporations and the ultra-wealthy who own these models is only natural. Especially considering the use of AI has so far been less than ethical. (Targeting decisions for air strikes, surveillance, blatant IP theft, fraud, etc...)

I'm not sure that is entirely accurate. I wasn't able to verify any of your claims with a casual Google search. Do you have sources?

I think the biggest advantage rails have is that they are electrified and are accessible by rail based maintenance vehicles. Panels have gotten so inexpensive that the major cost is usually the mounting, installation, and electrical access. Some of that is mitigated by installing on railways. You can automate the installation process and connect into the tram lines.

If you save a child from malaria but they die in a civil war a few years later you have saved one life (Temporarily) but had very little impact on the death rate. Using changes in death rates to gauge the actual number of "lives saved" from preventable illness is going to be fraught with confounding factors.

USAID certainly had a massive impact in mitigating death from starvation and illness. They also did a great deal in spreading goodwill for the USA among nations that would otherwise have only seen us as only a shadowy menace thousands of miles away.

I am using miracle in the sense of: "So astounding as to suggest a miracle; phenomenal."

It isn't magic, it's just math.

LLMs are essentially a text prediction engine. This can be used for basic reasoning tasks, however the LLM doesn't have much in the way of actual knowledge. However, it can use knowledge that exists to predict text better. For instance, if you plug a bunch of scientific articles into it, it will be really good at answering questions about the subject of those articles.

The problem is that context windows are very short. 200k-1M tokens or so. This means that the model needs to focus down on very specific information if possible. This is what makes tool using, reasoning, and agentic AI very powerful. The model can find the most relevant information it needs within its limited context and generate relevant answers to questions. The LLM pulls from web searches, documentation, long term memories in graph databases, and database queries to answer the questions using real information.

Raw dog Chat LLMs are pretty worthless. But run an agent with tool invocation and they get scary good. It's amazing how much reasoning is packed into the English language. Provide your model with enough information and it can pull some miracles out of thin air. It's not the "Replace humans" level yet, but you can automate a lot of stuff you wouldn't expect to be able to automate.

Imagine if OnlyFans was a subscription service to see your favorite personalities do electrical engineering and software development! Oooh lah lah!

If so, that's pretty on-brand.

I think that this is doable. Similar to having a new employee shadow a more experienced one and observe, you could implement a sort of program where AI shadows experienced employees and asks questions when they do something it doesn't understand.

But this is difficult to implement since AI doesn't have a body to follow someone around and it would take immense amounts of compute to do so using telemetry and cameras. You would literally be spying on employees 24x7 for weeks at a time with the express goal of replacing them someday.

I think most of them were losses by attrition. Where they don't replace lost employees. That's usually the preferred method of downsizing if you can get away with it.

There are two kinds of knowledge. There is explicit knowledge which can be codified easily in markdown files or a wiki. Then there is tacit knowledge which is mostly encoded in the experience of an organization's individuals. Explicit knowledge is like the tip of a giant institutional knowledge iceberg.

Meanwhile I can't build a carport for my driveway because of the "Character of the Neighborhood"

In America it is a little different. Unfortunately California is still using 48% natural gas at this point. But they are moving in the right direction. Most states are continuing this trend. Driving in Texas you see wide load trucks hauling wind turbine parts almost every day.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

I am not aware of a "System" line item on the accounting for cost. Do you mean the capital put forward to construct the system? That is included in LCOE.

That is not entirely correct. Typically you will see LCOE for Solar grouped with the LCOE of Solar and energy storage.

EG: > Solar photovoltaic $1,327 $1,333–2,743 $31–146 12–30% > Solar PV with storage $1,748 $2,044 $53–81 20–31%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Typically power is priced by Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) where you amortize the total cost of ownership across the total power generated to get a per kwh cost which is what most grid operators care about. After all, large scale investors and governments don't care if a plant costs a billion dollars if it produces 20 billion in electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

What you are talking about is the Payback Period (PP) or Return on Investment (ROI) which is more important to homeowners adding a solar plant to their homes.

Both of these types of measure take into account both capital and operating expenses.

I think you've missed that all generators have upfront cost.

Why do you say this?

Solar/wind is the cheapest form of power generation by far. You just can't beat it because they don't have any fuel costs. Gas peaker plants will always make sense until we have enough grid scale batteries. They will hold on for now until the price of natural gas hits rock bottom. But with the current advances in low cost battery technology I see them becoming less and less necessary. They would probably already be dead if hydrofracturing hadn't propped up the cost of gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

I'm not sure if it was intentional, but roaring is an interesting word to use here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties

People underestimate how much hormones change their brains. We all think "I have free will!" Then the progesterone comes in and is like "The heck you do! Time to eat that cake!"

The year of the linux Desktop was the friends we made along the way... fixing our Linux desktop.

The person was sent home before the Ebola diagnosis. He would still have been sent home under this new protocol.

The USA, similar to other nations, is extremely well equipped to treat Ebola patients once they have been diagnosed. Doctors just don't expect it because it is so rare.

Prices have been a little weird lately. After a quick check on Newegg I'm seeing prices:

16GB of RAM - $250

Low-Mid GPU - $700

1TB SSD - $250

Local government is so messed up. No you can't have that unattached mother in law house because it doesn't "Match the Character of the City", but Jeff Bezos can build his 6000 acre datacenter in your water restricted city and they will re-zone and bend over backwards. Meanwhile your water has turned brown and your power keeps cutting out because the city infrastructure is 60 years old and has been maintained with barely functional fixes.

I would feel a whole heck of a lot better about AI if we were making progress towards a society where people who work for a living won't die in poverty when there are no more jobs for them.

If you cannot be replaced, you are un-promotable. Your entire career becomes tied to a single point of failure. Then, when they replace that piece of software with a new product you have no experience elsewhere.