ZeroGravitas

Well the "libertarianism" part is the clue. They were always the corporations.

The essay briefly mentions "Open Source" which of course was the corporate friendly rebrand of Free Software.

I'd quibble about the copyright/patents part. This was a time when large corporations were "harmonizing" their ownship of IP ever higher across the globe.

Wanting less of that wasn't crazy. Assuming the free market fairy would deliver it was at best certifiablly naive, at worst a spoiler operation to distract from actually doing it through normal democratic government channels.

Also, "Magna Carta" is fitting as the original was a deal between a King and his Barons. It's pointed to as a step on the path to modern democracy but that's not what they were doing at the time. The powerful were asserting their rights.

> These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day

That's a weird thing to say and makes me doubt everything else in your comment.

Just in case you were talking about some specific group I looked up who was doing the suing and they have lots of stuff about promoting trains and EVs etc.

They are literally suing the Trump administration (that Elon helped elect) on this topic.

> There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.

I wonder what drew xAI to this poorly regulated hellscape?

Also, one of the organisations suing xAI is also suing a) cement factories that burn tires for energy and b) tire companies that use the additive that kill salmon

Key quote:

> We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs.

And he's not even talking about nuclear power for electricity. But the weapon that has that as a byproduct.

And that's fine, but a modern state finds it hard to hide the military subsidy and doesn't want to admit it.

So it is getting more expensive or is it like autism, we're just getting better at detecting the underlying condition and pretending that it's something new to score political points.

This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.

And if that's the case "zero tolerance" would on the face of it seem to discourage this kind of fakery by punishing the faker too.

Even the comment before doesn't sound that relevant to the normal complaint because again, the two parties aren't both being punished, just the one reported to the system as a potential threat.

So we are complaining:

1. The victim and the perpetrator are equally punished (because it's hard to figure out who started it when a physical fight starts)

2. People shouldn't always believe reports of kids being potential school shooters, because they might be liars doing a mini-(or indeed literal) SWATing by weaponizing the institutional response.

3. People shouldn't always believe people who complain about bullies generally, because they might be liars being "cry-bullies"

These individually sounds like hard problems to solve. Combined they have further complexities and solutions for one seen to make others worse.

The tone of these complaints often make it seem like there is an obvious better way, but that may in fact just reflect the strong feeling that they were the victim, and that the other person should have been punished, not them (or their child).

Which is understandable but not really a great basis to make policy on.

Did I miss a simple motivating benchmark or goal?

I'm assuming this is faster, and/or lets you run a bigger, smarter model than just using the generic tool chain, but it doesn't spell out the level of existing improvements over that baseline or expected improvements as far as I can see?

Presumably you can work it out based on the numbers given if you have the relevant comparison values.

> Elon Musk was demanding full control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw that as way of buttering them up

Hey guys, please sit for hours and chat and make phone calls in this internet connected box full of microphones and cameras and GPS trackers I fully control while we decide who gets billions of dollars.

Yes but you could argue that one key driving force behind their policies is the knowledge that a Republican president was going to mess up their oil supply sooner or later.

The EU also depends heavily on imported fossil fuels. They just have more politicians that have been bought off.

People seem to have memory holed the decades-long fossil-fuel-funded campaign to convince the world that solar and wind didn't work, that they were expensive boondoggles, and, my personal fave, that the people pushing them were intentionally trying to destroy the world economy because they were secret Marxists.

And it eventually worked after a lot of time and effort but only on Republican voters, 1/3rd of whom now think solar and wind are no better and 1/3rd think worse for the environment(!) than alternative power sources.

Trump was not unusual in saying insane things about wind power in right-wing politics and media.

The political consensus that climate change even existed broke down around this time due to the Tea Party and Koch's funding.

At the moment, heat pumps are mostly retrofitted to homes not designed for heat pumps, which adds to the cost. You can't compare that work to a future heat pump swap which is a much smaller job.

It's implausible now because coal is no longer the cheapest source of energy, and that changes things quite considerably. Glad to see climate change deniers accept that reality.

Right wing media turned against wind across the globe in that same 2006-2012 time period.

It basically got good enough to be a threat.

It wasn't driven by grass roots, Republican leaning voters stayed very positive on wind and solar up until Trump ran and it's been sliding downhill since then, but steady for Democratic leaning voters. But the WSJ was putting out op-ed attacking it as part of their climate change denial at that time. Obama ran on supporting it in 2007.

On one of your graphs you have the CO2 per day of gas and heat pumps but the two use different scales on the same graph.

Another graph in a footnote table shows the heat pump is delivering 6x the heat of the gas boiler, which feels like it should be mentioned in the text when you say it costs 3x more.

And actually that makes the previously mentioned CO2 graph even more misleading.

It's the first comment from a new account so probably caught in some kind of spam trap.

You can vouch for comments (possibly depending on level of account karma) if you click through to the comment alone.

The Chinese EV truck market is already bigger than the entire US truck market.

Tesla has some lofty goals but sometimes it feels like that story about the pottery class where the teacher offered to grade by weight alone.

The moral of that story is that churning out lots of something is a good way to learn what you are doing and get better at it.

Some Chinese EVs have charge ports on both sides and can be charged faster by using both at the same time.

Not quite as elegant as the new flash chargers that rival the Tesla truck chargers with megawatt speeds but interesting.

The pillar is fiberglass too, I believe.

There's a (mostly terrible) documentary about a previous bansky "statue" deposited in London that, in one of its better moments, tracks down the people who actually make statues for artists like banksy.

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

edit: I feel I should clarify that this is not an official Banksy documentary. He made "Exit Through the Gift Shop" which is an amazing film which I highly recommend to anyone.

Cars on the road is less relevant than electric miles driven.

Newer cars are driven further than older cars. There's a site with data on the Norweigen transition. That shows the average EV is now driving more miles per year than the average gas/petrol, phev or diesel car.

Replacing cars that don't get driven much is less important than replacing taxis and delivery vehuckes and super-commuters. Luckily the economics seems to already be there for that.

Rick Perry (and his son) are now deeply involved in (claiming to be) building nuclear power.

The same guy that vowed to defund the Department of Energy, was later put in charge of it and admitted he didn't know what it did when calling to abolish it.

The pro-nuclear nerds on Reddit aren't hapoy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1sqzmg2/fermi_inc_...

> Fermi Inc: How to Make Your Son a Multi-Billionaire in a Year or Less Through the Guise of Building an AP1000 Nuclear Reactor, A Practical Guide in 3 Easy Steps

A little extra context:

Dav1d was the surprisingly fast assembly implementation of AV1 decoding. Even for something in hand-coded platform-specific-assembly I think the general impression was that they'd done amazing work to really chase down every last bit of potential performance.

It didn't initially exist when AV1 was first rolled out and its arrival was a step change in powering adoption on devices without hardware decoding.

Dav2d is likely to play a similar role, but it exists from the start of AV2 and can build on the work of dav1d, so should have an even bigger effect.

In a weird reverse chicken and egg scenario, having really good software decode that can be deployed will spur on hardware development and adoption due to network effects.

> Did I mention that those Chinese prices have been kept artificially low thanks to a price war among China’s hundreds of car companies

Yet another example of free market competition scaring and confusing American journalists.

The Flynn effect has its own little nurture vs nature debate within it.

Was it better medicine and food that stopped both your height and your brain from being stunted?

Or was it people being trained from birth for a world where doing abstract brain teaser tests was important.

Notably both cause problems for the typical racist's use of IQs. If you can improve the scores with such interventions it makes a lot of their genocidal policy recommendations seem less scientifically sound, so they put a lot of effort into denying that IQ scores can be improved by interventions. Even though they have been, for decades.

Note that it's massively more expensive in the US than other nations due to paperwork and regulations. But even there it costs about the same as the low end of nuclear costs per KWh.

Adding it when building the home in the first place eliminates much of the cost and danger since you don't double up on a lot of things.

That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it.

A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.

Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Solar is in actual fact covering the whole of increased electricity demand globally, as of 2026, and still growing fast.

It covered 75% in 2025. And wind the rest, also still growing.

We could have got there faster, but there was, and is, a long running disinformation campaign to deny there was a problem, question the root causes of the problem and demonise the most promising solutions.

You are accusing environmental organizations of not believing in climate change as a debating tactic. That is uncharitable! But also just weird.

Just leave that part out, it only detracts from your message.

"I think environmental orgs should support nuclear as it is low carbon and generally aligned with their goals. I'm disappointed that many of their members seem to be unaware of the true record on plant safety, particularly compared with coal"

Adding anything about them not believing in climate change makes it sound like you are repeating talking points you picked up from fossil fuel funded propagandists, who to this day are pushing that message.

(Your opinions on nuclear also reveal that media diet, but in a much more subtle way).

Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd.

Compare:

If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine.

It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.

The guy mentioned in the first sentence is linked to two different "think tanks" that question climate change and get the predictable fossil fuel funding.

Maybe we should just ignore these lying liars and the lies they tell for blood money rather than indulge whatever propaganda they're currently pushing?

https://www.desmog.com/mercatus-center/

https://www.desmog.com/independent-institute/

You appear to have invented a totally different history to the one we just lived through so you can be grumpy about it.

Why was coal going to be phased out ages ago?

I remember a global scramble by some of the best minds on the planet to drive the cost of solar below the cost of coal because that was the only way they saw coal being displaced.

Like Google's Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal, or RE<C. Launched in 2007, or the US government's DoE Sunshot initiative in 2011 to reduce the cost of solar by 75%

What do you remember from your parallel timeline?

Pumped hydro has been built to work with Nuclear in the past precisely because the flat output of nuclear doesn't actually fit the shape of demand.

Of course these days, you can feed the pumped hydro or batteries with much cheaper renewables.