ZeroGravitas

I'm interested to know what kind of development process leads to an AI valueing a specific human as worth sacrificing 4 Billion other humans for.

Polls really need to start adding filter questions like "Do vaccines work?" "Did humans evolve from small mammals?" because some people not believing something works is actually a positive signal.

Are there problems in Higher Ed? Almost certainly. Are changes to the situation driven by the "vaccines don't work crowd" likely to make things even worse for everyone? Oh yes.

But they are building such a link, because it'll make/save more money than it costs.

Imagine how many doom and gloom headlines we'd have avoided if these two massive construction projects could have been sync'd up perfectly or if we had a national press that could do anything other than try to scare people with big numbers.

But "stable" isn't really want they want or need. They have a) cold, dark winters so they want more energy in the winter not a constant amount year round, b) hydro (89% of electricity in Norway!) that is already used as seasonal storage and can be varied to meet daily variation.

Cheap wind that produces more in winter is the obvious answer and indeed seems to be a focus of their build out.

Why do you say "embrace nuclear" when the EU has substantial existing and planned nuclear plants? (Current gen is something like 24% nuclear in EU, 20% in wider Europe, 18% USA, 4.4% China)

And anyway, alongside that world leading nuclear already in existence why wouldn't they just install lots of cheap solar and wind, and heat pumps and EVs and reduce their imports of energy from their current high levels (about .6 Trillion euros in 2022, down to .35 in 2024 though that seems mostly a change in price, volume has declined only slightly)

But they did build more, the USA is just further south.

"We have to cut the money going to the poor and tax the rich less and throw up protectionist barriers we've spent decades forcing other countries to remove because communism is so much better at making stuff" is quite a bold take from the FT.

I can't even find Elon stans with this take on the early Tesla drama, do you have a source?

That's not Donald Trump on the cover it's a composite parody of Stan Lee and Jim Shooter, as Crumb's comics editor Stan Shnooter.

But Trump himself does show up in the 3rd issue, accessible via that same link and gets called one of the most evil men alive amongst other things.

> A former service member who helps run an online military forum and spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation said the lawmakers’ message is unlikely even to reach troops because the video was posted only on X and was far too long to be reposted on platforms like TikTok where troops actually consume information.

Some of this reads like an Onion piece.

The "scary foreign" parts of this seems to miss the forest for the trees.

Social media makes rage-baiting people into a lucrative career and opens it up to anyone with an internet connection.

Still Californian government providing orders of magnitude more cash for that to happen than Musk ever did.

Is there some technical contribution by Musk I'm unaware of?

Why did you name check Musk and not the actual founders of Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning, that took advantage of their experience with lithium batteries and the forward-thinking Californian regulatory regime to found their company there to build an electric sports car?

Why are the silicon valley fascists that own JD Vance so keen for Russia to annex Ukraine?

Genuine question. They seem like horrible people on multiple dimensions but presumably they're not cartoon villains that support the bad guys for fun. Are they paid off, compromised, or what?

I read an old study that claimed driving a mile cost society 20 cents and cycling a mile had 20 cents of societal benefits.

I'd imagine public transport is similar so we should move the Overton window towards bus and train tickets entering you into a lottery funded by charging cars for entry to, and for parking in, downtown areas.

I also liked Pocket integration.

But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable.

And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?

Yes, you can choose to work or be whipped by his army of robot overseers as they herd you into the biofuel production camps.

It got traction with Spotify and pretty much anyone who wasn't locked in via overlapping codecs licence requirements or network effects.

For the first device mentioned it has a discrete Nvidia GPU which also supports HEVC encode/decode in hardware, which I assume is also disabled?

I'm highly suspicious of anyone who can't clearly state that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change.

When they then claim, against all obvious facts, that there is a clear political consensus on fixing climate change in the USA, that becomes active distrust of their message.

This appears to be another subset of the so-called "Abundance" movement where people avoid the elephant in the room (political power of fossil fuels) and get all screechy about those damn environmentalists and regulators who are the real villains holding us back from solving climate change with the free market.

Meanwhile solar and wind farms are being illegally shut down by the government.

But sure, it's abstract regulation at fault, not the politicians paid off by oil who regularly state that the problem his company is solving isn't even a problem.

Somewhat off on a tangent but George Orwell got mentioned (possibly ”invoked") and he literally sent names of communists that couldn't be trusted to be involved in broadcast to the government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Are we talking about Donald Trump the convicted rapist with many credible accusations of sexual assault raised against him?

Donald Trump the child beauty pageant organiser that used to publicly boast about walking in on naked contestants?

Long term friend of Jeffrey Epstien, who organised parties for him with young models and sent cryptic birthday notes about secrets written on a drawing of the naked but undeveloped chest of a girl?

Who said his friend was a "great guy" who

> likes beautiful women… many of them on the younger side.

Well spotted, I've corrected to 1000MW (or 1GW).

The UEA are aiming for a longer than usual runtime, but only 19 hours, not 2 years.

Powering an extended, worst-case-scenario month-long dunkelflaute entirely with gas rather than a realistic mix of options would only take 5% of Germany's current gas usage (coincidentally roughly equivalent to Germany's domestic gas production).

It's wild how much attention that gets compared to the 50% being used to heat buildings.

That is a problem for which we already have great solutions. We have German made heat pumps, that could be German fitted and run off German generated electricity, or worst case EU electricity imports.

Solve 10% of that problem and you have freed up enough gas and money to cancel out an apocalyptic scale dunkelflaute or three every year.

A very large battery storage site, like the top 10 currently running has an order of magnitude more energy storage than you suggest.

The largest under construction for go live in 2027 has another order of magnitude, 19000MWh and will deliver up to 1000MW.

Things are changing fast as battery prices drop and experience accumulates.

That's the current load when the pricing structure actively encourages people to use power at night, because that was when it was cheapest to produce in the last century.

What does it look like if you actively encourage people to use power when it is cheapest to produce now?

I guess we'll find out when 3 hours of free electricity at noon becomes a standard offer next year.

There's a thriving second hand market for wind turbines.

Similar to EV discussions a lot of motivated reasoning seems to assume that these items are disposed of in a black hole or set on fire in a school playground after a few years to try to equalize the damage done by combustion alternatives.

In reality people are spending tens or hundreds of thousands to buy these used turbines because they have value.

I've not seen full calculations for wind but I assume they exist. I've read ones for solar which calculate replacing panels in a farm after 17 years and landfilling the old ones is still ecologically positive because the extra generation of the new panels would pay off.

Obviously this only gets better if you resell or recycle the old panels instead.

Your reliable BloombergNEF says that onshore wind became the cheapest source of unsubsidized new electricity in Germany and UK in 2015, a decade ago.

Coincidentally that's roughly when the UK government banned the building of onshore wind across England, which was only recently revrsed.

Now that sounds like an Ideologically driven attempt to raise electricity prices.

There was some kind of patent shenanigans about a decade ago around LFP.

I'm not sure if China invalidated dodgy patents or threatened to and got a good deal (or some combination) but I think LFP in China escaped a lot of patent fees as long as they were sold in China. This probably partly explains the regional nature of LFP success so further expiries might help the rest of the world catch up on LFP prices and adoption.