nonfamous

Amber is my retailer, and it’s their SmartShift VPP system that controls the battery to minimize grid consumption and maximize export revenue. The battery/inverter system is SigEnergy.

Distribution charges are per kwh and vary by the hour (more expensive in high-demand morning and evenings, lower during the day and at night). The spot price has to be high enough to exceed the distribution charges for net income on export.

Most of the time, distribution charges are higher than the spot wholesale prices for import and export.

You also need to take into account the fact that VPP systems like this stabilize the grid by flattening the peaks and troughs, and reduce the average length of outages.

When coupled with solar, batteries are absolutely a net producer of energy. Around the clock too, as it allows solar generated at low-demand times to be redeployed when needed most.

Absolutely. It’s amazing here how government incentives to install batteries have led to stabilization of the grid. Power outages are pretty much a thing of the past now.

This is the case for us, too. The reason is that whenever there is more supply than consumption on the grid the excess must be shed, and that costs the utility. Hence negative export prices to discourage supply to the grid.

Our battery/inverter system automatically curtails solar generation when our battery is full and export prices are negative, so this isn’t anything we need to think about. (Exception: I’ll charge the car to drain the battery overnight if I expect curtailment the next day. No point letting all that free sunshine go to waste!)

I’m in a similar setup where I live in Australia. Our house has solar and battery — unlike the people in the FA, we purchased it directly ourselves, although with a significant government rebate.

Our battery is under automatic VPP control, but it’s not like it randomly starts exporting when we don’t want it to. When regional demand is high (hot days) or supply is low (no wind or cloudy), our battery might start exporting. But that’s a good thing for us, because our electricity is priced wholesale and changes every 5 minutes, and export rates are high in this situation. A couple of times there have been price spikes and we’ve made a few hundred dollars in under a hour. It’s a win-win for us (making money) and the grid (providing stability). To be fair, those spikes are rarer now than they were a year ago.

You can always control the battery if you want. Sometimes I’ll manually export even if prices aren’t high if I know I don’t need the power in my battery. Sometimes I’ll prevent export if I know I want to charge the car overnight from the battery. But mostly I let it do its thing.

From an investment perspective, the battery has been a no-brainer. Even without the windfalls from price spikes, being able to defer grid consumption to daylight hours (when wholesale prices are very cheap or even negative, i.e. we get paid to charge the car) puts the ROI in the 3-5 year range.

Seems like they are still unable to prevent sandbox escapes, and are reliant on manual human intervention when it occurs.

>>> When a model gained live internet access during a recent training run , our monitoring detected the activity and paged a human reviewer, and we stopped the run.

Well, they hide the fact that the food prices are marked up for one thing. Even if you pick up yourself, menu prices in DoorDash are at least 20% above the restaurant’s posted prices. That undisclosed upcharge comes on top of the delivery fees and service charges they do disclose — but only after you have made your order.

Fascinating site! TIL the human eye can detect polarization of light (search for “Haidinger's brush”).

Take a sheet of A4 paper. Fold it in half. Fold it in half again. That’s about the size of the Duo inner screen (a little larger actually, A6 is about 13% smaller than the Duo screen).

>> In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps.

Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought.

The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is missing?

Nice little metaphor in the footnote, there:

>>> Think about that: We booted an operating system and then booted another operating system around it, so that the original operating system was now running inside a virtual machine controlled by the second operating system. It’s like leaving your house, walking down the street, and halfway down the block, realizing that you’re now walking inside a movie studio set.

I used to work for Microsoft, and the marketing teams would regularly change the name of products days before big announcements and tradeshows like Build and Ignite.

Of course, they couldn’t tell anyone who needed to know ahead of time, because it was a “PR Moment” and leaks would upset the news media attention.

But the practical effect was that I’d be on the show floor and customers would come up and ask to see “Microsoft Turquoise AI for Haberdashery” and I’d be like “WTF is that??” and they’d say “The thing Satya just announced at the keynote” and I’d be like “employees aren’t allowed in the keynote can you explain what it does” and they would and I’d say, “oh, that’s the old Microsoft Designer for Clothes, I can tell you about that” but then I’d find all the demos I have aren’t relevant anymore because the name has changed and the PMs weren’t given any time to redo them with the new branding, and I can’t give a live demo because the UI has changed completely and I haven’t been trained on it.

This happened EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

I moved from the US to Australia recently, and Amazon isn’t really a thing here. Yes, it exists, and it is heavily marketed, but the range available in the store is at a guess less than 1% of what’s available in the US store. I occasionally go to amazon.com.au to look for things, have the same issue having to wade through irrelevant slop in the search results, find nothing suitable, and leave.

And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later.

It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient.

Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.

There appears to be some language confusion in the replies. FYI in Australia “gas” refers to natural gas (used in domestic cooking and some power stations), not gasoline for cars (which is called “petrol” here).

From the Twitter advisory on the issue being referenced here [1]:

>>> To every other developer: we believe this is a sober reality of the new AI paradigm. AI-assisted code review can now find latent bugs at a speed that is outpacing even the industry’s most seasoned experts. If your firmware is open-source or has ever been public, assume it's already being read by attackers and defenders alike.

Kinda turns the “many eyes” principle of OSS on its head, eh?

[1] https://x.com/nvk/status/2083216713693151552?s=61

From the Twitter advisory [1]:

>>> To every other developer: we believe this is a sober reality of the new AI paradigm. AI-assisted code review can now find latent bugs at a speed that is outpacing even the industry’s most seasoned experts. If your firmware is open-source or has ever been public, assume it's already being read by attackers and defenders alike.

Kinda turns the “many eyes” principle of OSS on its head, eh?

[1] https://x.com/nvk/status/2083216713693151552?s=61

That advisory would probably be more helpful if it described what the actual issue is. (I’m thinking maybe some content got lost when the Update at the top was added?)

I learned “real” programming in the early 90’s by learning Elisp to customize Emacs. (Before that the only languages I’d written in by choice were C64 Basic and Assembler.) Like the OP, I used Elisp for everything - scripts to bulk-edit files, manage the file system, format posts, etc. etc.

Unlike the OP I hated the scratch buffer for running Elisp, so I created a REPL for Elisp that behaved more (in my naive eyes) as a real language. I was very excited when RMS emailed me to ask to include it in Emacs. Last I checked (a few years ago now) it was still there as M-x ielm (Inferior Emacs Lisp Mode).

Qantas (I think, it’s possible it was BA) used the upper deck for economy and it was my favourite place to sit. The window seat had a little locker between your seat and the window (the curvature of the fuselage meant the seat couldn’t be right up against the window). It was a great place to keep all your stuff accessible without having to bother the aisle seat to get up to the overhead storage.

Excel 97 had an easier egg where if you entered a certain formula into a certain cell, a flight simulator would be invoked. In the flight simulator, you could fly to see an obelisk that listed the developer credits.

This is real.

Err… right here in TFA?

>> The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs

LLMs may be chameleons, but, to steal an excellent quote, if you can’t tell does it really matter.

My personal take on this is that consciousness is a thing induced, not a thing evoked. If it generates a response on the observer as a conscious thing would it is, by my definition, conscious.

This entire essay basically boils down to one simple contention: LLMs can’t be conscious because only humans can be conscious and LLMs are not human.

What an unimaginative argument: essentially ruling out the possibility of the title by definition. And the author fails to touch on the really interesting question posed by the article’s title: what if human consciousness is more like the working of LLMs than we think?

Cameras are not a suitable replacement for rear-vision mirrors for the same reason that screens are not a suitable replacement. It’s even addressed in TFA: focal length.

>>> But more importantly, current screen technology requires the driver to focus on the surface of the screen itself, which is mere feet away from their eyes. This is a large change in focal distance from looking at the road ahead.

If you’re over the age of 40 or so, it takes time, a few hundred milliseconds at least, to refocus your gaze distance. A screen is near. When driving, you’re looking far. A mirror is something to glance at.

I test-drove a Polestar with a screen for a rear-vision mirror (and no actual rear window) and it was completely undrivable for me. It takes longer for my eyes to refocus on the near distance than I feel comfortable removing my gaze from the road ahead. I turned around after 10 minutes and returned it to the lot.

OTOH, I learned a hell of a lot about microprocessor internals by using POKE.

>> Prices will increase a lot.

Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.

Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.

That “might” is rather load-bearing for something you are literally staking your future on, though.

This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder.

It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.

>> That is 2 sigfigs too many

Don’t take up baking then, where the difference between 175 mLs of water and 200 mLs of water can be the difference between unworkable dough and the perfect pie crust.