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Comment by Fiveplus | Hacker News Reader

The funniest part is beyond the typo, the complete lack of physical intuition from the analysts who circulated this. 500,000 tons is roughly the weight of 1.5 Empire State buildings. If your rack busbars weigh more than the structural steel of the facility housing them, you have a geotechnical engineering crisis on your hands. It is wild that we reached a point where financial modeling is so decoupled from physical reality that nobody paused to ask if the floor would collapse.

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When I asked gemini it got it right away and as a source it provided a link to your comment... what a time to be alive, I hope you got the Empire State buildings calculations right because you're now part of the Truth ™

https://imgur.com/a/NaTfvtS

The irony is that I feel like everyone here is just copping off of WolframAlpha, which for the past 15 years has featured the ability to display references of similar magnitude for any query you give. And in fact, typing in "500,000 tons" into WolframAlpha tells you specifically that this is 1.4x the mass of the Empire State Building (and also 0.8x to 1.4x the mass of an Ultra Large Crude Carrier oil supertanker, and also 0.11x the mass converted to energy by the sun in one second).

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=500%2C000+tons

It feels strange to be cited this quickly (by gemini) about something so silly. I used Empire State as an example cause I had just been listening to that song by Jay Z :D

The world of financial analysis and modeling is broad. It’s common to give these tasks to juniors and expect them to grind through it when the output doesn’t really matter.

In this case the output wasn’t actually used for financial modeling. If it had been, it would have been caught immediately when someone put it into a table where they calculated the price or the supply constraints or anything else.

And anything to do with AI valuation is in la-la-land, so it's not that surprising that a set of made-up values is based on another made-up (or at least erroneous) value.

Kinda like when someone said that instead of running for mayor, Bloomberg could have given everyone in the country $1M. A guest said it on NBC and Bryan Williams, nor the pundit had any intuition that it seemed grossly wrong. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-...

The system incentivizes ‘sounds good’ over ‘is correct’.

If news agencies needed to pay out fines for false info, you better believe they’d be checking more.

Just to make it even more real: During covid I added a sub-panel and the wire (more like the sausage given the girth) between the sub-panel and main panel was aluminum because of cost. You just need to be a tad careful at the connection points with copper -- nothing a caring literate person can't handle

The incoming drop for a service panel is almost always aluminum (at least the residential stuff I've seen). It's cheaper and lighter than copper while still being ductile enough to work with. Just use the proper antioxidation paste at the connection point.

Did you use antioxidant paste on all of the aluminum terminations? If you didn’t, please pay an electrician to come fix it. If you did apply the paste, you are in the 0.01% of non-idiot non-electrician homeowners and can skip my rant about homeowners doing electrical work in the next paragraph. I sell electrical work and have seen some incredibly poor work done by homeowners.

Do not install aluminum wire if you are a homeowner unless you already know enough to use antioxidant paste and also to use a torque screwdriver or torque wrench for terminations and know where to find the torque values for the wiring devices you are using. If you don’t apply the paste, the surface of the aluminum will oxidize and could catch fire due to increased resistance.

I suggest not even touching copper as a homeowner, but it’s your choice and your house.

Kind of overstating things here. Noalox has not been required for modern materials made in like the last 30 years.

I always read relevant sections of NEC, UPC, and firecode whenever I DIY. I find the code books to be very clear and thorough and really don’t understand the culture of fear mongering tradepeople have around code. Almost like the code is some sort of mystic hydra only a tradesperson can comprehend. it’s really not complicated: read it and apply it like a recipe.

I wouldn't be surprised if that part was not really reviewed by an expert. They have the unit mass correct but maybe an editor is like ok but what does this look like for a gw project? It doesn't take more than 3rd grade math and a pocket calculator to do it correctly but journalist hasn't had to fumble that ball before. An expert knows its all too easy for any person to make that mistake and would second guess their own work.

My first thought was, this is the kind of thing that an LLM writes and nobody checks. But then I realized, any decent LLM would have probably caught that inconsistency

Yeah, the good ones will use tools and give you a nice markdown table. Any claims like this anymore, I trust AI to go through it and give the numbers a reality check. With all the claims made about datacenter resources, power, and water usage, it's darkly funny how bad people are at understanding these things.

The math they do with their assumptions is usually pretty good, and you can tell when they put in the effort, but wow, the models and assumptions are all over the place.

Do we think the people pushing new age LLM saviors are more or less stupid?

2008 would like a word.

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