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bopjesvla

496 karma · joined October 28, 2016

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bopjesvla··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind

The Netherlands: 50%, of which one third is biomass.

As someone living in the Netherlands, I would love to live in energy utopia, but stats reported by people who can’t read Dutch government reports are usually wrong.

bopjesvla··on Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy
That’s just a random website. Dutch bureau of statistics:

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2025/hernieuwb...

bopjesvla··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
> The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind

The Dutch bureau of statistics reports 50%, of which a plurality (one third) is biomass. The Netherlands is also famously gas-dependent. Natural gas isn’t converted to electricity for heating and many industrial applications. Can’t quickly find stats on production here, but renewables are only 17% of total energy usage. Renewables without biomass are ~12% of total energy usage.

bopjesvla··on The wall confronting large language models
The Chinese Room experiment has always been a hack thought experiment that was discussed in other forms before it was posited by Searle, most famously in Turing's "Can machines think?". Searle only superficially engaged with existing literature in the original Chinese Room paper. When he was forced to do so later on, Searle claimed that if you'd precisely simulate a Chinese human brain in a human-like robot, that brain still wouldn't be able to think or understand Chinese. Not a useful definition of thinking if you ask me.

From Wikipedia:

Suppose that the program simulated in fine detail the action of every neuron in the brain of a Chinese speaker.[83][w] This strengthens the intuition that there would be no significant difference between the operation of the program and the operation of a live human brain. Not a useful definition of thinking if you ask me.

Searle replies that such a simulation does not reproduce the important features of the brain—its causal and intentional states. He is adamant that "human mental phenomena [are] dependent on actual physical–chemical properties of actual human brains."[26]

bopjesvla··on Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs
Seconding this, also, how much increase in the probability is considered self-reinforcement? Small changes could be attributed to random variation. Interesting if true though
bopjesvla··on Tiny World Map
This has been improved in v2.
bopjesvla··on Tiny World Map
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. To give some context for our choices: until recently, country shapes were not the main focus of this project. For a long time, the version in the README without country borders was the only version, because we didn't think adding the entire world was feasible. Turns out, it was.

I've published a nightly version [1] that removes fjords and adds more detail elsewhere, including the much-requested islands. It also generally has a higher resolution. The reason we originally didn't do the latter is because old phones, especially those running Firefox for Android, can crash while drawing large amounts of polygons. I have since optimized the drawing procedure, but beware!

[1] https://tinyworldmap.com/beta.html

bopjesvla··on Tiny World Map
I've published a nightly version [1] that removes fjords and adds more detail elsewhere. It also generally has a higher resolution. The reason I originally didn't do the latter is because old phones, especially those running Firefox for Android, can crash while drawing large amounts of polygons. I have since optimized the drawing procedure, but beware!

[1] https://tinyworldmap.com/beta.html

bopjesvla··on Tiny World Map
This has been fixed.
bopjesvla··on Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden
Despite the name, this variant is absolutely mind-bending and games look nothing like regular chess. Have fun trying this out!