sarchertech

but its a little rich to hear from westerners, who emit more CO2 per person, that the Chinese

1. Most western countries don’t emit more per capita than China.

2. I’m not saying what Xi should or shouldn’t do. I’m telling that what he is doing indicates that he doesn’t believe climate change is an existential threat.

Xi could theoretically reduce GDP and associated emissions with the stroke of a pen

He showed he was willing to do that during Covid. If he was really convinced climate change was a problem he could clearly do more than he is.

It’s not a prisoners dilemma issue with Xi like it is with most countries. He controls 1/3 of global emissions. He is probably the only person on the planet who can personally reduce future temperatures.

Sure they are building solar infrastructure. But they’re also still increasing co2 emissions. If you are the autocratic leader with almost total control of 1/3 of the worlds co2, and you believe that climate change is an existential threat, you wouldn’t be increasing co2 emissions. Xi could reduce co2 emissions with the stroke of a pen.

So he obviously doesn’t think it’s that much of a threat.

It is just barely out of the top 10%. 27 out of 207. If you remove counties ahead of with tiny populations like Palau with 40k people, Iceland with 400k, and Greenland with 50k, it is in the top 10%.

Since they produce 1/3 of the co2, 1/3 of the reduction the world needs, needs to come from them. And they are still increasing their emissions. This is not the action of an autocratic leader who believes in climate change.

I took Mandarin in college. I don’t hate China. I don’t think the US is a good country to emulate with respect to climate change mitigation.

But if you believe climate change is real, and you have authoritarian control over 1/3 of the entire world’s co2 emissions, you wouldn’t be increasing your green house gas emissions, and you wouldn’t have a co2 emission per capita higher than almost all of the developed world.

No those include maritime shipping.

This report from Eurostat is where I got my EU numbers.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5711595/KS-D...

Maritime is around 37% if you only include domestic and intra-EU shipping.

Your report include all shipping that passes through any EU country’s EEZ. So if a ship coming from Africa headed to the US passes by the Azores. A portion of the tonne-kilometers of that ships voyage will show up in your report.

If you do the same thing with the US, the percent of maritime freight movement would also skyrocket.

I said large developed countries.

No one cares if Iceland emits more co2 per capita. They have < 400k people.

This isn’t about fairness, this is about whether the actions of the leaders of China care about impacting climate change.

With respect to performance that’s true. But I’ve probably spent thousands of hours in my career on performance issues caused by small SQL changes.

And LLM chaos is unimaginably worse. A single white space can result in a program that has zero overlap with the original.

The rest of that is true but the US moves a much higher percentage of its freight by rail than almost any large developed country.

Just in comparison to Europe “46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway."

This is in ton-miles, so it’s the metric most directly relevant to emissions.

The non-determinism is theoretical solvable. Chaos (prompt instability) isn’t. When you change a single word in the input, you get a completely different output. Because of this LLMs will never be compilers.

Determinism is the wrong thing to worry about. As you say an LLM could theoretically be deterministic.

Chaos (prompt instability) is the problem that isn’t solvable if you want to treat an LLM like a compiler by doing something like checking in the prompts and rebuilding the code each time.

In general if you change a single line of source code, a compiler will not produce a completely different program. If you change a single word in a prompt, you will get output that likely doesn’t match a single line of the original output.

Chaos is what leads to unpredictability, and there’s no solution to this on the horizon.

There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada

None of those countries have more than 50 million people. Most of them have fewer than 10 million. None of them are going to move the needle on climate change.

The US is clearly not a country to emulate when it comes to co2 emissions. I don’t think China is any more “evil” than the US when it comes to climate change.

But their actions are clearly no the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

ahead of every large developed country

Because those are the only ones that can move the needle on climate change.

China produces 1/3 of the world’s CO2. They already produce more per capita than all other large developed countries except Australia, the US, and Russia. And their rate of growth is higher than all of those countries except Russia.

There’s no way to force them to do anything, but this is not that action of a nation that “believes in climate change”.

In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing.

That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.

A lot of that cheap junk is clothing and food, which now both make up a much lower percentage of total income than they did 100 years ago.

What is the time period for you numbers?

China emits 3x more co2 than the US and last year their rate of increase was 2.5x that of the US.

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

This guy on instagram does a good job of highlighting this (and other unsafe roadside hazards).

https://www.instagram.com/theguardrailguy?igsh=ZXAxM2h2ZXFub...

From his bio, he lost his daughter to a guardrail crash and started exposing improperly installed guardrails.

In terms of PPP, China spends about 60% of what the US does. And looking at the trend over the last 15 years, that number will overtake the US fairly soon.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1990 its not clear to me why US spending on military continues to grow. It's not fear of attack; there is no threat to the US itself. It has to be a desire to project power and influence.

The exact same thing is true for China. They can’t be afraid of attack. They have the 3rd largest nuclear arsenal and the 2nd or 3rd most powerful military in the world. Yet they keep growing their military.

The dismantling of USAid (or more accurately the manner of the dismantling) has destroyed 75 years of goodwill. Coupled with punitive tarifs (which are paid for by US consumers) they make the US an unreliable trade partner.

We have an idiot in the White House. Even when I (very rarely) agree with him on things like tariffs are useful for preventing foreign state sponsored companies from wiping out important domestic industries, he implements them in the most inept way possible.

Does anyone think we need a Mythos level model to plan a road trip

Yes. The latest OpenAI and Anthropic models are terrible at planning roadtrips.

This is something I try to use them for frequently. They constantly get things completely wrong.

I’d say that about half of the stops they suggest fail to follow whatever filters I’ve asked for.

Why can’t you do that in the open? Normally I don’t think people have a moral obligation to open source, but if you’re using AI to reimplement an existing open source library I think you do.

That’s a stretch for the topic at hand. You can say hey the US does this probably morally equivalent thing, but when people are talking about subsidizing domestic companies so they can outcompete foreign companies in foreign markets, this isn’t what they’re talking about.

Sure the US benefits by giving arms to Ukraine, or having bases in other countries.

But that has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is market dominance for some industry.

Boeing DOD contracts

This is probably the closest comparison to what China is doing. But it’s still not the same thing because the US buys equipment from Boeing, they don’t just give them direct subsidies.

The equivalent would be if China awarded Bambu a contract to provide 3d printers to schools.

To the extent that the US pursues policies that help defense companies. They don’t do it in order to help those companies compete in foreign markets. They do it because they want those companies not to go out of business for national security reasons, or because they want those companies to provide domestic jobs.

The US does other shady things, but spending massive amounts to help domestic companies outcompete foreign companies in foreign markets isn’t one of them.

It’s more like comparing a Honda to an F-350.

If all you want to do is drive the kids to school, you want the Honda, but that doesn’t make the 2 products equivalent.

But if all you’re doing is printing toys for the kids an A1 mini would have been less than half the price of the P1S. The enclosure is mostly a waste if you’re only printing PLA. You’re going to end up venting anyway. Core XY is a little faster than a bedslinger, but if you’re doing a lot of multi color prints, the material change time will dominate, so you won’t see much practical difference.

both do a variety of materials.

The p1s does not regulate the chamber temperature, so the variety of materials you can get good results either is much more limited.

They’re not remotely equivalent though. That’s like saying that a raspberry pi and 16” monitor are equivalent to a MacBook Pro because that’s the cheapest 16” monitor Apple sells.

China spends close to 10x what the US does on agriculture subsidies.

US Arms exports bring in around $13 billion a year. The military industrial complex is a domestic jobs program that sells the vast majority of what it makes domestically. The US is clearly not spending a trillion dollars a year subsidizing defense in order to make their products more competitive in other markets.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/arms_exports/

The US dollar being the global reserve currency makes exports more expensive though.

What US industries get anywhere near Chinese level subsidies.