lambdaone

You can also jam the uplink, by making noise louder than the ground terminals make, pointing upward at the satellite.

This is absolute nonsense. Neither Google AI or YouTube are owned by Meta. What gave you the idea that they were?

The subprime mortgage crisis that led to the Great Recession comes to mind.

The destruction of Boeing for short-term profits.

Private equity's destruction of public companies.

The entire American health insurance system.

I think the image of 12 year old boys as GW's customer base is probably outdated. I know a woman who is _massively_ into Warhammer, and spends a lot of money and time on it. An N=1 anecdote is not data, but it would certainly be interesting to look in more detail at GW's demographic.

H2 economics don't work at all, and H2 is largely a fig-leaf for the fossil fuel industry.

If you were to have an environment in which H2 would actually make economic sense, non-H2 storage and distribution systems would be even cheaper, and they can be added incrementally rather than needing a big bang, preventing investing in H2 from taking off in the first place.

Syngas makes a lot more sense than hydrogen, in the short term. But what really makes sense in the longer term is massively scaled Carnot batteries. Slightly less efficient than batteries, but really cheap to build (it's a combination of resistive heating and old-fashioned thermal power station technology) overbuilding renewables is cheap, and you can charge your Carnot battery [almost] all year long.

Although it looks like bad news in the short term, China is building even more renewables than they are coal stations, with the result that the fraction of fossil power consumption in China is actually decreasing: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

Remarkably, even most cloudy weather still lets a suprising amount of sun in. And it doesn't stop the wind from blowing. The threat is when the wind stops blowing at the same time it's very, very cloudy and in the middle of winter (short days). This happens, but it's very intermittent.

However, as seen above, there are lots and lots of ways to store (or equivalent) power over long periods, it's just the economic incentive to build them that is needed - and is now on the way. Renewable-gas low-duty-cycle gas peakers, Carnot batteries, and sodium-ion batteries are top candidates, with the first being the low-hanging fruit because they already exist.

Alas, this is absolutely right. It's trivial to find places to put hydropower using global elevation data and GIS tools, but almost all of the good ones are already either being exploited, or in the process of being readied for use, or facing barriers such as the side-effect of destroying cities or heritage sites.

Syngas (infinitely better than hydrogen, which was always a stupid idea), or huge-scale Carnot batteries (the square-cube law is your friend) would do the trick nicely in both cases.

Airbus.

Achievable near-future net-nearly-zero in the near future is a lot better than waiting longer until we can achieve full net zero. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The real issue is the cost of keeping gas peaker stations around that are mostly idle and fire up only a few days a year, but that's an economic issue, not an engineering one.

In the longer term, you could even run them off net-zero renewable syngas that you make the rest of the year using low-cost electrical power at peak solar generation times; you only need to store a relatively small amount of it, and old fossil fuel reservoirs are ideal for this.

But it's not you, it's everyone. And some people will be swayed even by that 10 to 20 cents. Put them all together, and you have a substantial "virtual battery" capacity, and all you need to do it is to make sure people have price awareness.

Don't knock small gains like this. Even a couple of percentage difference is worth having; all the marginal gains add up to make large scale gains.

Even though petroleum product shipping accounts for almost 40% of shipping, the surprising efficiency of ocean transport still means that it's not that big an energy cost; a single-digit percentage of the energy content of the shipped oil/gasoline.

But even that is still worth saving - it's a few percent more benefit for electrification.

For all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape.

I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.

This would be the reality-based editorial slant, then? What are you proposing as an alternative?

Power is quite literally power, in both the physical and political senses. The Chinese know this, and Europe is catching up fast. American private enterprise knows it too.

Battery storage isn't quite where it needs to be, yet, so there's still some need for fossil and nuclear power, but when it is, decommissioning the remaining fossil power system is a no-brainer, and those with the biggest existing solar and wind estates will benefit most, and fastest.

The problem with all of these, even the most recent one, is that they have the "AI look". People have tired of this look already, even for short adverts; if they don't want five minutes of it, they really won't like two hours of it. There is no doubt the quality has vastly improved over time, but I see no sign of progress in removing the "AI look" from these things.

Rust programmers are far more likely to have the vigilant mindset than C programmers, or they wouldn't be using Rust.

You can get an awful lot done very quickly in C if you aren't bothered about security - and traditionally, most of the profession has done exactly that.

And even better if someone can implement the whole massive spec securely...

Python type hints are static - at the moment, they are advisory only, but there is an obvious route forward to making Python an (optionally) fully statically typed language by using static type checking on programs before execution.

Python is a typed language. Perhaps you were trying to say something different?

And we'd be wrong about that. Different domains are showing wildly different characteristics, with some ML models showing superhuman or expert level performance in some domains (chess, face and handwriting recognition for example) and promising but as yet just not good enough in other domains (radiography, self-driving cars, question answering, prose writing). Currently coding is somewhere in the middle; superhuman in some ways, disappointingly unusable in others.

I don't we can make any conclusive verdict about the promise of ML for radiography right now; the life-critical nature of the application it's in the unusable middle, but it might get better in a few years or it might not. Time will tell.

The archive link above is broken: this is an earlier archived copy of that page with content intact:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230713101725/http://bactra.org...

Some pages have 'semi-protection' or 'extended semi-protection', where a user must have a Wikipedia account which must have made a certain number of edits and be older than a specified time period.

However, this isn't one of them.

You can edit it immediately, either with or without creating an account.

You are absolutely correct that the difference between y against x and x against y fitting perfectly demonstrates why the bias exists, but the correct way to remove the bias is not normalization, but to use a coordinate-independent regression technique.

See the other comments by many other commenters for details.

Also relevant to this topic:

Fred Gruenberger's Measure for Crackpots (1962):

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2006/P2678...

John Baez's Crackpot Index (1998):

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

This looks to me like it's "I Can't Believe It's Not Helvetica."

Arguably, all we do is something similar to hallucination; it's just that hundreds of millions of years have selected against brains that generate internal states that lead to counter-survival behavior.

I recently almost fell on a tram as it accelerated suddenly; my arm reached out for a stanchion that was out of my vision, so rapidly I wasn't aware of what I was doing before it had happened. All of this occurred using subconscious processes, based on a non-physical internal mental model of something I literally couldn't see at the moment it happened. Consciousness is over-rated; I believe Thomas Metzinger's work on consciousness (specifically, the illusion of consciousness) captures something really important about the nature of how our minds really work.

"Hallucinate" is a term of art, and does not imply a philosophical commitment to whether LLMs have minds. "Confabulation" might be a more appropriate term.

What is indisputable is that LLMs, even though they are 'just' word generators, are remarkably good at generating factual statements and accurate answers to problems, yet also regrettably inclined to generating apparenly equally confident counterfactual statements and bogus answers. That's all that 'hallucination' means in this context.

If this work can be replicated, it may offer a way to greatly improve the signal-to-bullshit ratio of LLMs, and that will be both impressive and very useful if true.