Viewing profile — myrmidon

Absolutely. Gas is a lot less problematic than coal. But my point is that it fills (in China) a very similar role for the electric grid and countries don't get to choose what fossi…

Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China). Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, b…

This is misleading, because China has no gas, and they use coal power as dispatchable source with lower capacity factor (similar to gas elsewhere). Coal+gas electricity is basicall…

> The majority of federal government spending is a wealth transfer to old and poor people Sorry, but that's a ridiculous take. Thats just like saying that public schools are a weal…

Agree with this. As soon as things get in range for motivated amateurs, progress skyrockets. Has also been the case for things like chess computing; a lot of the progress we made o…

"Base load" is not an actual demand that needs to be satisfied. Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/c…

> You're wrong. If we did that [spread manmade climate change over next millennium], meltwater water supply would essentially stop (in somewhere between 8 months and 2 years), ever…

How do you know that human logic is any more/better/qualitatively different from the LLMs "predictive ability"? It's already pretty easy to find humans that are strictly worse at r…

Important for what? Not getting snitched on when comitting crime?

Copper price is up ~500% since 2000 btw, this is already downregulating its use. Not sure what your benchmark for shortage is, but if we had similar price development with fuel peo…

This is not robbing. Undesired distillation is a ToS violation, at best. There is not even jurisdiction over Chinese companies, because they don't sell their LLM subscribtions, unl…

Are you generally happy with it? What do you mainly use it for? I'm kinda tempted by the frameworks because they are somewhat energy efficient and compact (which I both value highl…

Anecdotally, lots of intelligent people I know like to pretend to be completely uninfluenced by advertising, which I think is delusional. In my view advertising is in big parts (yo…

Is this excluding maritime shipping? According to eurostat ( https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac... ) that is two thirds of freight volume and it probably …

> How much of that "decoupling" is actually just "exporting"? Some fraction certainly is. Here is trade-adjusted CO2 per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-…

The reality is obviously more complex, and many countries have already managed to somewhat decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions (very good!), but as a crude approximation: M…

Agree on a lot of this but not AI; it's already aged like milk. In my view, you don't get to dismiss LLMs as "stochastic parrots" unless you can argue with precisely defined terms …

Outsourced manufacturing is much less of a factor than people typically assume: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e... US numbers are insanely high because…

Sure, but if you want dynamic loading from your c stdlib (which is defensible IMO), and you want the behavior/implementation to match with the loader, then you need some kind of co…

Yes. Would currently be "free" (<1c/kWh) around 1400-1530 tomorrow, and go up to ~15c/kWh at night. Fixed costs might distort everything significantly though.

Quick numbers that I found suggest lifetime healthcare costs of >$300k even if you're 65 already (with current yearly spending trending more towards $600k-ish). So even with a (sin…

Isn't that kinda to be expected if you want to provide dynamic loading functionality (dlopen)? Is the windows situation really all that different/better (with GetProcAddress in ker…

What would you want to hear from a non-American biased model in response? Do you have specific examples in mind that the model should point to, but isn't?

If you circularize the orbit at 550 AU (which is costly but possible, at ~1km/s of delta-v), then you end up with an orbital period of >10000 years (to complete your whole-sky surv…

First: Orbital period out there is over 10000 years. And if you circularize (which is expensive to do in delta-v), you minimize the time window you have for observation (because yo…