ZeroGravitas

The post by bdangubic that you replied to mentioned Gates along with Bezos and Zuckerberg.

> From the article: If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall.

I can't tell if that's the worst AI boosting analogy I ever heard or the most unwittingly accurate.

First of all, flat screen TV and plasterboard hole repair are in no way substitutable goods.

"Why is there a new TV behind the front door dear? The handle was bashing the drywall and it was cheaper than a handyman."

But okay, let's assume you accidentally but conveniently punched a hole right where you would want a TV. And you don't already have a TV there.

Who is going to wall mount this new TV in a home that can't do basic drywall repair?

> If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets. -- Chris Rock

I was going to mention MTV's Liquid Television animation showcase as a potential inspiration for this.

That link seems partly confirmed since they mention an online predecessor called Stick Figure Death Theatre and the Liquid Television segment (which re-enacted famous movie scenes with stick figure animations) was called Stick Figure Theatre.

Pretty much each individual segment of that show was mind blowing (it launched Beavid and Butthead) but the stick figure interpretation of Night of he Living Dead stuck with me for years.

YouTube has a compilation: https://youtu.be/-M7-Sew5aU8

One of the people running for mayor of NYC is making the argument that if you vote for him, he'll cave to Trump and avoid having soldiers sent to the streets of New York by the President.

Just the latest in a series of moments that make me think "people even just a year ago would not believe you if you told them that was going to happen" as things accelerate.

Regarding one of the threads in the article, the physics and books YouTuber Angela Collier recently proposed the name Mephistos for these failures that boost themselves via connections to fascism, based on the book "Mephisto: a novel of a career" and the real life story it draws on.

It's one of several Faust books she covers in "Faust and the Furious":

https://youtu.be/CnsDc9GDn1Y

How you reject the first one of these, compared with the hundretth and the millionth(!) is probably going to be an interesting development over next few years.

Personally, I've felt drained dealing with small PRs fixing actual bugs by enthusiastic students new to projects in the pre-slop era.

Particularly if I felt they were doing it more to say they'd done it, rather than to help the project.

I imagine that motive might help drive an increase in this kind of thing.

Solar analyst Jenny Chase did her yearly "thoughts on solar" update recently and said:

> By 2030 most countries will have spot power prices of zero in sunny hours. This will be passed on to end consumers, to encourage them to shift power demand to sunny periods by electric vehicle and battery charging, preheating, precooling, etc.

https://bsky.app/profile/solarchase.bsky.social/post/3m3mdc5...

So Australia is just ahead of the curve, as it generally is with solar.

Here's a recent article on the sub-industries that insure PV against hail, and predict and protect from hail:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/as-giant-hailstones-hit-the-suns...

Apparently in Australia climate change is making the hail bigger and more frequent.

You can't move the car protecting ones generally so it just comes down to making them tough and knowing your local weather, plus insurance.

Maybe the car insurance companies will cut you a check if you take the hit for them?

With the cost increases for this project and the drops for solar, wind and batteries I don't think there's any way this will be considered a financial success compared with spending the same amount on solar, wind and batteries.

It's debatable about whether that was an easy call at the initiation of the project though.

A key thing with long term storage is to compare it with long term generation plus short term storage, a hybrid of which can deliver electrons interchangeable with those stored for a long time.

These voluntary carbon offset things are only ever going to be a step in roughly the right direction.

It feels wrong somehow to be trying to turn them into a perfect way for committed individuals to opt into paying the full price for their individual contribution to only one aspect of the problem.

Instead we should perhaps take a step back and try to assign the costs of the whole system to everyone, regardless of whether they want to volunteer to pay more to make things happen faster.

It interacts poorly with EV or heat pump adoption where volunteering to pay for the last 5% of green electricity could tip the balance against those purchases. But buying them would lower your carbon footprint at even much lower percentage of clean electricity.

Are green conscious consumers ready for the complexity of paying for 95% clean energy?

I think they missed the word "crossing" after pedestrian, though it's still a bit vague with that in place.

A type C Zebra crossing is one that doesn't have the Belisha Beacon lights at either side. Rare now but it existed before that innovation.

Or put a slightly different way: libertarians were always lying about their noble anti-government ideas. They just hated the thought of the government helping women, minorities or the poor. And anything that threatened fossil fuel interests.

When they see the chance to seize the government and actively punish those groups they drop their fake ideals immediately.

There is a theory that talk of "those susceptibile" to gambling is in fact astroturfing by gambling corporations to make it seem like they're only damaging the weak willed.

And you're not weak willed are you? So nothing to worry about. Bad things only happen to bad people.

Are you one of the old school nuclear people that think these newcomers are crazy and this might actually damage nuclear's reputation or do you think this will actually work?

I was already sceptical, but this feels like nuclear DOGE.

> Many states only allow industrial customers to buy power at fixed daily rates.

It's fascinating how many of the challenges faced in decarbonisation are basically outdated rules and red tape.

You hear about 10 year delays to connect to grids and it sounds crazy, like a real technological challenge to overcome.

Then you hear that it was first-come-first-served and half of those are paper projects that stalled and by simply advancing projects that actually have funding secured solves the "problem" overnight.

Costing less per square meter than plywood was the most recent comparison that stopped me in my tracks.

The cobalt goes in the NCM lithium batteries.

It also goes in lots of other stuff, and is basically a byproduct of Congolese copper production.

The kids are doing artisinal mining because when capitalism doesn't need you to make money, you are pretty fucked. The big mines can make plenty of money with very few workers, leaving no need to build a decent civil society. Something to bear in mind for when our glorious AI future arrives.

Every chance that some countries become the Norway of AI and everyone is rich while others become the resource cursed Congo of AI and a tiny minority become rich and others are left to rot.

They installed 67% percent of it this year so that seems reasonable amount for them to build.

The full solar supply chain is currently being produced in the US, with low capacity but more planned.

SEIA has a solar and storage supply chain dashboard that they update with operational and planned capacities.

But clearly recent moves by the current admin are undercutting this progress.

About as helpful as his previous "solar PV isn't good enough, please invest in my wunderwaffe gadgetbahn ideas" approach.

Now it's "climate change won't kill us all, please invest in my wunderwaffe gadgetbahn ideas".

Both seem a net-negative to actually solving climate change and/or helping those affected by it. Impressively bad performance for an alleged genius.

Has he even made money from these investments? Even if we subtract the government money he's diverted from better ideas?

I asked Claude to translate a book title from Hebrew (well not translate exactly but locate the original English title of the same book).

That's not a language I speak or generally have anything else to do with.

I then asked it an unrelated question about a science topic and it returned something with a citation. When I clicked on the citation, not only was it not relevant to the science question it claimed it was cited to support, it was basically a conspiracy theory from the 1970s about Jews controlling the media.

Which somehow seems even worse than my usual experience of the link being totally made up dead end.

If the LLM gets smarter will it start recommending that you vote for people who will regulate the industry?

> At its peak in 2000, the nuclear sector provided 30% of electricity nearly emission free. Renewables supplied only 6.3% at the time. As nuclear fell away, Germany’s coal plants filled the void — the majority being fired by brown coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all. This autumn, Germany produced nearly 30% of its electricity that way.

German coal was 50% in 2000 and down to 22% for the full year in 2024. It seems they peaked at 26.5% in October that year.

Wild that they need to torture the statistics so much to try to support their point.

What really "filled the void" and more was deploying what is now 15% solar, 28% wind. That's rising from 0 and 1.5% in 2000 (the rest of the 6.3% renewables in 2000 they refer to seems to have been hydro and bioenergy).

Some people are never going to forgive Germany for kicking off the solar revolution.

Oh, and 50% of gas in Germany goes to heating and 30% to industry.

If you find someone supporting nuclear and hating heat pumps and EVs, then dependence on Russian gas is not the reason.

Well, they might be trying to increase dependence on it.

If I was rewriting Wikipedia pages with an LLM I'd maybe use all the different languages' Wikipedias as input.

Plus Dune, somewhat famously, doesn't have any AI in it.

The SF masterworks sister project has a Banks book, and the link in the wiki article to that list also has a quote from him praising their other choices as

> "amazing" and "genuinely the best novels from sixty years of SF".

The bit about energy, in between the "give us more government money" and "stop regulating us" sections, doesn't seem that bad.

Do any smart business people get locked into software ecosystems?

People seem very focused on the science to the expense of the business side.

Like it's possible to be pro-database but anti-Oracle. And if the Oracle guys called you anti-database it would be very transparent bullshit. Doubly so if they wrapped it in "databases are going to save the poor" rhetoric.

Replying to myself because a new report came out saying the UK saved a net 104 Billion over a decade by replacing gas with wind.

The major factor was reducing the use of gas which lowers gas prices. As a result the main beneficiaries weren't electricity users but gas users paying lower prices and saving 133 Billion.

So minimize the risk, not the number of vaccinations.

Decisions that take you in opposite directions.

Let's boil this right down:

A new wind turbine is built and plugged into the grid. Does this cause more gas to be burned or less?