That said, exponentials don’t exist in the real world, we’re just seeing the middle of a sigmoid curve, which will soon yield diminishing returns.

Yes, but the tricky thing is we have no idea when the seemingly exponential growth will flip over into the plateuing phase. We could be there already or it could be another 30 years.

For comparison Moores law is almost certainly a sigmoid too, but weve been seeing exponential growth for 50 years now.

From historical data, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither are providing enough.

The difficulty there is that there are a lot of places where you frequently get multiple weeks of both solar and wind at <10% capacity (google for dunkelflaute) that would need an implausible amount of storage to cover.

The OP article is already talking about 5x overbuilding solar with 17h of storage to get to 97% in the most favourable conditions possible. I dont see how you can get to an acceptably stable grif in most places without dispatchable power.

97% is great (though that is just for vegas) but it is still a long way from enough. Its a truism of availability that each 9 of uptime is more difficult to get to than the last, i.e. 99.9% is significantly more difficult/expensive than 99%

Then get it from the sources that already exist.

The problem here is that you cant simultaneously say “Solar is so much better than everything else we should just build it” and “we’ll just use other sources to cover the gaps”. Either you calculate the costs needed to get solar up to very high availability or you advocate for mixed generation.

None of which is to say that solar shouldnt be deployed at scale, it should. We should be aware of its limitations howver and not fall prey to hype.

97% sounds impressive, but thats equivalent to almost an hour of blackout every day. Developed societies demand +99.99% availability from their grids.

One chat request to an LLM produces about as much CO2 as burning one droplet of gasoline (if it was from coal fired power, less if it comes from cleaner sources). It makes far less CO2 to talk to a chatbot for hours upon hours than a ten minute drive to see a therapist once a week.

I doubt anyone expected it to work completely, but it is interesting to see to what extent it worked and how it failed (halucinations and sycophancy)

Except it isnt, because the judge dismissed that part of the suit, saying that people have complete right to digitise and train on works they have a legitimate copy of. So those damages are for making the unauthorised copy, per book.

And it is not STEALING as you put it, it is making an unauthorised copy, no one loses anything from a copy being made, if I STEAL your phone you no longer have that phone. I do find it sad how many people have drunk the capitalist IP maximalist stance and have somehow convinced themselves that advocating for Disney and the publishing cartel being allowed to dictate how people use works they have is somehow sticking up for the little guy

You think that 150,000 dollars, or roughly 180 weeks of full time pretax wages at 15$ an hour, is a reasonable fine for making a copy of one book which doe no material harm to the copyright holder?

The problem isnt anthropic get to use that defense, its that others dont. The fact the the world is in a place where people can be fined 5+ years of a western European average salary for making a copy of one (1) book that does not materially effect the copyright holder in any way is insane and it is good to point that out no matter who does it.

Civil cases of copyright infringment are not theft, no matter what the MPIA have trained you to believe.

Gosh, its a good thing openAI and google dont do the same thing for the US government isnt it?

FWIW, a short query to a typical sized LLM takes about 1Wh of energy, there lots of variance on how big the model you are using and how long the input and outputs are but thats the correct order of magnitude. 1Wh is the amount of energy consumed by a 1kW electric kettle in 3.6 seconds or a 2kW hairdryer in 1.8 seconds.

if you assume that energy was produced in a coal power plant (the worst for co2 emissions) then it makes around 0.3g of co2 emissions, which is the equivalent of burning about one droplet of gasoline.

I agree with your first part, but I dont think I’ve ever used a windows, osx or linux computer that hasnt had issues connecting to printers, the problem there isnt with the computer.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

I’m not a huge fan of Ed Zitron generally, he leans towards histrionic too much for my tastes, but he makes a compelling case here.

The popular well crafted ones are, but not all are well crafted.

Given that I torrent without a VPN and it had nothing on there, and it also got my location wrong by over 500km, I dont think I’m too worried.

I’m pretty sure that in 100 years time people will look back at the current age of social media with the same kind of horror as we get looking back at doctors recommending cigarettes for weight loss.

I wasnt really thinking about crewed mission tbh, more the cost per tonne which Space X certainly brought down dramatically (though not quite by an order of magnitude).

Falcon9 bring the cost of launching something to LEO down by an order of magnitude?

Because he’s speaking to a British newspaper about British policies. I’m assuming the second part as I don’t subscribe to the times so cant read the article, but there are currently plans in place in the UK to introduce an opt-out framework for people to remove permission for training on their work, with pushback from big names that want to charge rent on their old works, so I assume that is the subject.

Even if he wasn’t talking about the UK at all (which I think it is clear he is from context) my larger point still stands, the choice isn’t between stopping AI and allowing AI, its between allowing AI companies to operate in your jurisdiction or AI being trained elsewhere that is out of your control. There is no option for “stop this entirely”, unless you can persuade the USA and China at the very least to sign up to it. Which they wont.