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Comment by Phiwise_ | Hacker News Reader

There has not been such a thing as an "Obscene Energy Denand" for half a century, especially not for something that has a chance to turn out to be the most impactful labor-saving technology since the electromechanical computer. The US has the blueprint [1] to step-increase electrical generation at a lower bound of five times, with zero environmental impact, and continue growing for many generations longer than the world population is expected to increase, sitting on the shelf collecting dust for whenever it decides to use it.

In light of this, articles with this sort of headline are just scaremongering nonsense. McCarthy didn't tolerate this intentional ignorance [2], so we shouldn't, either.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1212086

[2] http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/progress/nuclear-faq.html

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What labor did the current AI save yet? All I see so far is billions or even trillions in capex for stuff that barely works…

The value equivalent of that was invested into computation technology long before even a half-MIPS machine was produced. Its funders had the foresight to look beyond the present day.

I just wrote a blog post and need a graphic to go with it. My options are:

1. Spend hours and $ hiring a graphic designer to make one

2. Spend hours learning/doing it myself

3. Spend time searching the internet looking for images that aren't copyrighted, or spend time finding an image I like and spend time and $ figuring out how to pay/license it

4. Spend a few seconds prompting AI

or not add fluff images to your blog post.

I know this comes off snarky but it's been decades now and we've got to be the change we want to see in the world. "business person at the office" banner image is completely useless.

I fully agree there are plenty of blog posts where the image is completely useless at best, misleading at worst, and I react in a very similar manner.

But I've found a pretty interesting middle-ground/sweet spot (mainly with less technical audiences) where a nice graphic can really improve attention and retention, especially on a slide deck. For a recent example, I wrote about the importance of passwords for a "security awareness" training (the audience here are people in Pakistan who have only recently started using the internet). To help illustrate/reinforce the idea that if somebody gets your password they can "hack" you, I generated some colorful images of hackers, computer security, and even one with a person being arrested (in that section I was describing the law that could hold them accountable for breach of others personal information if their negligence allowed an adversary to gain access to the system). Personally to me it's fluff, but I ran a small (and not very scientific) A/B test with the first and second group and the version with the graphics was shockingly better at it's goal of raising awareness.

I agree that the stock business images of smiling guys in suit & tie are cringe as hell at this point.

That being said, visual input and aesthetic are deeply intrinsic human things and expecting us to move beyond that is very unrealistic.

The best we can do is optimise the IG methodology and/or use open, perpetually royalty free images and clipart for illustration.

it seems you can add fluff to existing projects with this round of AI but replacing labor that goes into dealing with the core of the tasks not so much.

I’m not sure gen ai even helps with increasing productivity yet - since tons of existing tools and services do all the same things without having much of this ai (ai chatbot better than a web search? gimme a break…)

I don't get why this would be someone's position. If it "barely works" it would not sustain mass usage across many product lines.

Just recently, I used generative AI integrated into databricks to build complex sql queries via English, used Google Gemini in Google sheet to formula a tricky pivot table, chatGPT build a cloud formation schema for new infra for a service & to navigate some tricky database primarily key setup for dynamodb; used copilot integrated into my IDE to speed up unit test and simple refractors and code complete every other line written.

I nor the other millions of subscribers to these tools are not subscribed because it barely works it's because it lets me work more efficiently.

It save tons of time across many product for many things that used to be sources of frustration or slow mundane tasks.

Those things are great but did you actually pay for them? At some point it has to actually make money. We are on the “fueled by investors and mania” part that made us think scams like WeWork and Uber would work at the low prices for a while. I use Google Gemini sometimes for questions but if I had to pay the real energy and financial costs it took to arrive at my innocuous question’s answer I doubt it would be feasible.

>I don't get why this would be someone's position. If it "barely works" it would not sustain mass usage across many product lines.

"Hype" is all it takes for that to be the case. Then every product had to "add AI" features to keep ahead of competitor's marketing.

How many people processes do you currently interact with that "barely work".

- Call Customer Service, go through a crazy flow chart and be redirected to 10 different people.

- Go shopping, sift through thousands of reviews/images/fake products to find one that works.

- Manually create graphics/designs for unique rooms

- Request a junior employee to write some basic code.

- Request a junior employee to perform task X.

The AI also has the advantage that it can scale up to 24/7, on-demand work without an additional engineer.

Product/material QC that previously took a human is now commonly done by detector networks. Improved spam filtering saves a little of everyone's time. Automated voice dictation, language translation, and video transcription have also improved massively. For applications like weather forecasting/early-warning systems or tumor segmentation and protein folding, "saving" is a bit more literal.

"with zero environmental impact"

I disagree, because 1. I live close to a former Uranium Mining site

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-are-health-and-environm...

2. Chernobyl

I live in the fallout area and mushrooms and boar meat is still contaminated 37 years later. Over 1000 km away from the plant.

>Uranium

Please google Thorium and Minor Actinide Incineration.

>Chernobyl

The manifest incompetencies of a literal Communist government are none of the US' concern.

The three mile island incident singlehandly shows that US' concern should be correlated to other countries nuclear incidents. Thinking that it only arrived because of "communism" is quite wrong, especially because of the technical capabilities of the USSR.

I don't see how the largest nuclear non-disaster in world history prompts a comparison between the US and the country that built the people's chandeliers and couches so large that the head of the planned economy had to give a speech declaring them too difficult to move in and dangerous to hang to be tolerated. Oh, and also their actual disaster killed an infinite multiple of people.

I'll be happy to compromise with you, though. If you support nuclear in spite of Chernobyl, I'll support the death penalty for any capitalist that oversees a nuclear meltdown not caused by an ICBM despite your lack of knowledge about the history of the USSR, and nature of communism. I might even support burning at the stake or something if that's what it takes to make the obviously correct decision for human progress. McCarthy wrote that link decades after Three Mile and Chernobyl. He wouldn't have done so if he didn't also know what I'm relaying to you now. Received opinion is the least grounded kind.

EDIT: Lol I missed what thread this was in. Again, was Three Mile Island a Thorium reactor? We'd all save so much time if questions were directed to Google instead of me.

Well there was Three Mile Island accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Another assured part of the litany invoked by anti-nuclear activists. There were no certain or statistically expected deaths from the accident and considering that it took place in a country that has been burning coal for power for a century, which has killed up to as much as 30,000 people per year in preventable deaths from inhalation of combustion products and particulates etc, bringing up TMI is trivial to dismiss.

Your argument is all true, but still doesn't go far enough. Today, plentiful nuclear energy will almost certainly make it conceivable, and maybe even profitable, to extract that century of coal burning back out of the air! Litany is exactly the right way to describe it. All over on the other side of this debate we see the pessimistic habit of mob chant suppressing reasoned imagination of a future made better by technology and determination.

I agree that Chernobyl is a poor reason to fear nuclear reactors. However, the argument that it was because of communism is one that has no meat and shouldn't be used to try to convince people.

Sorry, but I use a different criteria for judging the meat on the bones of an argument than if it offends your sensibilities or not.

One cannot take seriously people that use the most extreme outlier event in the history of a technology as a generally representative data point for said technology.

It would be statistically unwise to ignore the actual data points, no? What do you suggest instead?

Not using outliers for general talking points. At all.

Or maybe not start a debate with using statements that are plain wrong?

But you do take people seriously, who make absolutistic statements like "zero environmental impact", that can be disproved so easily?

I am not anti nuclear btw. I just call out BS, when I see BS.

And I just shared what affected me personaly, if you want to know more about potential and actual disasters:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_a...

Multiply that with x, if you increase the number of plants.

And watch out for Murphy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

To say nothing of waste, even when everything goes right. Nuclear is the grandaddy of instant gratification traps. Moment on the lips, hundreds of millennia on the hips. I think we can do better.

Isn’t it the case that all high-level nuclear waste generated in the entire course of human history could fit in a relatively shallow layer over a piece of land the size of a football field? (e.g. [0])

I understood nuclear to be, from most any lifecycle analysis, the modality with the fewest externalities of any grid-scale tech mature enough to field, and somehow almost cost-competitive even while regulated (as it is today) to safety thresholds many orders of magnitude more conservative than the incumbent technologies.

It sounds like you’re informed differently than me. What’d the better way that you propose in the last sentence?

[0] https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou...

A couple years ago I happened to be sitting around a group of energy investors and academics when nuclear energy came up. Their unanimous understanding was that building nuclear plants had become simply too expensive to do either safely or within regulations. Was common knowledge to them it sounded like.

Indeed, it is practically impossible today. If only there was some way to change a regulation in a day...

That sounds like the story behind SpaceX: Musk being told rockets were too expensive.

There are definitely lots of small startups promising to find the cost savings. Or I should say, lessen the variance and uncertainty in building costs, because SMRs are going to be more expensive than large reactors but have smaller financial risk profiles.

It remains to be seen if any can deliver. Early indications have all been extremely negative.

Sounds like something that ought to be nationalized.

In one sense, it already is, in that liability is backed by the US government, there are massive loan programs available for anybody who wants to do construction, and for the first time there are now massive tax credits for energy production thanks to Biden's IRA.

However, as for the massive logistics and management problem of actually constructing a nuclear reactor, it's unclear if having government employees would be better. It's clear that the current contractors are terrible, but that's no guarantee that the US gov would be better.

"Common knowledge" built on cherry-picking data and new alternatives is what we call "fashion".

Also, basing energy supply considerations solely on a dollar cost notion is questionable, even if the dollar cost values were true. It's turning out that 'high nuclear energy cost' FUD is part and parcel of much of the 'green' movement and based on faulty LCOE assumptions that are spread uncritically by self-styled 'greens' on social media.

Just looking at the data from "newly built" nuclear plants over the last 20-30 years suggests they cost a lot more than they initially anticipated. That's an investment thesis you'll have a hard time selling, especially with rising interest rates.

As it is, the rising interest rate regime of the past two years has already completely killed off two major windfarm projects on the US Eastern seaboard. That aside, the fact remains that the "expensive nuclear power" meme is based on cherrypicking the worst cases of cost-overruns in the industry and holding them as generally representative for nuclear industry and technology, while wholly ignoring the effective steps forward taken by Korea, China, the UAE and do on.

Also, this assumes dollar cost is the only relevant factor which is deeply unserious considering that we're dealing with a global long-term issue.

Rising interest rates also make other large infrastructure projects dead on arrival. Large onshore windfarms are probably ok (although a few of those probably got killed as well), but offshore is a bigger risk so I am not surprised.

It's a bit strange to rally against cherry-picking and then referring to projects outside of relevant jurisdictions. For some reason we cannot replicate their results, we can have it as a goal perhaps but as a basis for a cost calculation I would opt for jurisdictions that are home or close to home (in a cultural sense).

> Also, this assumes dollar cost is the only relevant factor which is deeply unserious considering that we're dealing with a global long-term issue.

For investors it is the only relevant factor, which is what you initially replied to.

I don't think you have caught up with any of the serious professional literature in the area, such as any of the assessments of the very very nuclear-friendly sources such as MIT labs or the DoE.

Ignore the greens, and definitely do not adopt their innumeracy, as so man nuclear advocates have done.

The real foes of nuclear right now are the economics and construction costs. The high costs are not "cherry picked," they are the data that are exhaustive and what everybody has available for decision making.

The people that need to be convinced to build nuclear are utility execs, not the public. There are a plentitude of sites that would be happy to add reactors to their existing pair, if somebody would come with the money.

That's the real fight here.

I think the regulations are changing as people understand what to change, but the construction problem is still a problem.

We are bad at construction, and productivity in the entire sector has been stagnant for half a century. In the meantime, we have seen soaring productivity in manufacturing, meaning that labor costs go up too, but without the corresponding productivity increase.

For a nuclear peoject, where so many of the very high up front costs are labor, this is devastating to the cost structure.

And of course, delays are devastating to costs when financing costs are more than 50% of the cost of the entire project.

Fix construction, and maybe nuclear will make financial sense. But not until construction is fixed.

Downvotes for sharing an actual industry insight...nice.

The New Yorker needs to sell magazines to the kind of people who read the New Yorker, alas. "Wizard on the hill takes resources from us clerks" is always a good for a few sales.

>especially not for what might turn out to be the most impactful labor-saving technology

Not as much "labor-saving" as bureucracy expanding by automating "bullshit jobs" jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place.

I’d argue Bitcoin is Obscene Energy Demand.

At least ChatGPT is writing essays.

Whereas Ethereum has clearly shown that you can have a safe chain without this craziness.

But from reddit to Bitcoin talk to Bitcoin core development, there's a handful of people that control everything and want the status quo preserved.

it's plagarizing other people's essays

Where are the copyright lawsuits, then?

You've missed New York Times having sued OAI and Microsoft recently, and joined by several others?

IANAL and I haven't dug deeply into the lawsuits, but my understanding is that using deliberate prompt engineering, they were able to get it to reproduce copyrighted material verbatim from its training set. That is obviously a problem, just as it would be if a human read the article and then reproduced part of it verbatim without attribution, but it's a very different argument than a blanket "everything AI generates is plagiarism"

Precisely. These headline repetitions as arguments do get tiring after a while.

humans can have original ideas, since they possess reasoning ability, whereas large language models cannot, since they have none

It doesn't? That's great! Why didn't you say so? And, of course, you have proof of that?

I'd suggest Chomsky for this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

of course there are others who disagree with him but they're wrong of course

It's plagiarizing essays in the same way that I'm plagiarizing dinosaur breath by using the same air molecules.

Yeah if I had to stack rank 'obscene' energy consumption technologies, Bitcoin would be number 1 and AI would be pretty low on the list.

If obscene means "I dislike demand for X personally", then sure. But if the actually useful definition of "demand for X will unavoidably collapse society" is used, then you need to actually read the second link.

Bitcoin is especially obscene because it counteracts efficiency gains. If a new Bitcoin miner that is 10x more efficient for hash rate comes out, Bitcoin won’t use 10x less energy, instead the difficulty will get 10x harder so it continues using similar amounts of energy.

With AI, on the other hand, efficiencies help. Of someone comes up with AI hardware that does inference or training 10x more efficiently, people will incorporate that and the energy usage for the same amount of work will decrease.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of the difficult mining in Bitcoin. It is to keep the currency scarce and difficult to obtain. If it didn’t scale with increases in technology all the Bitcoin would quickly be mined and you’d have money printing like the fiat money we are trying to escape.

when did mental math turn into labor?

I was just reading the other day about the history of x-ray crystallography, and how the Fourier transforms that were the domain of the supercomputers of the 1940's-1950's were, prior to that, months-long labors of human calculators [0]. It's a provocative history! I wonder what aspects of present life will seem, in hindsight, to have been "Sisyphean" labors—once they're no longer needed.

[0] https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5015/ ("Busting out of crystallography's Sisyphean prison: from pencil and paper to structure solving at the press of a button[...]")

This is exactly correct, and only a tiny fraction of the immense amount of hand calculation and clerical work computers replaced in short order.

(Well, long order, actually. Short order once the technology ripened on its like fifth iteration)

The same McCarthy who scaremongered communism?

Please click the link before commenting.

(Then click a little more haha)

Trigger -> response

Many people are named McCarthy.

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