It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.
Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
Then why is California down to 25% fossil generation from 60% a few years ago? And still dropping fast as more and more batteries and renewables come on line. Tell me again how baseload generation is still a relevant concept
What do you think batteries are if not baseload generation? Batteries + renewables compete with nuclear for baseload. They take up substantially more land mass for the same amount of power though.
is is often repeated in these threads, baseload generation is an obsolete term. Base load itself is real - the minimum demand on the grid, usually in the early am. Base load generation was a term given to a class of generators (mainly coal) that were cheap but inflexible, so you built them to match the base load and had more expensive variable output generation on top. That economic setup no longer exists, variable generation exists 24x7. So base load exists, base load generators do not. And yeah, thats why nukes are no longer economical, their base load generation role is economically obsolete.
Note that when Fortum was declined it was because two others were given approval. Lack of new nuclear in Finland isn't because no permits, but because Olkiluoto 3 exposed the real costs so Olkiluoto 4 was cancelled. Russia was the partner in the other one so that went to hell with the attack to Ukraine.
In my experience, (fellow) engineers conflate the importance of the work their doing and the importance of their role as their personal importance to the company. They think that because they build (part of) the product, the product can't be built without them but most engineers (and employees) are fairly replaceable. How many times has someone put in a two week notice and the company went out of business?
The only thing that's really irreplaceable in a company is creativity and personal skills, something engineers typically don't value.
It could be that a model prefers the tribe mentioned in closest proximity to the word candidate most of the time. It could be that it prefers the one that's third in a series. It could be that it prefers the one with even numbers of letters.
The model is biased. That's it's entire function, to bias certain tokens over other tokens based on a bunch of vectors and context. There's no telling what is influencing that bias.
The models will be statistically more likely to choose one of the options for completely unknowable reasons.
Young people seem to be surviving just fine in areas where the market value is lower. Sucks to not live in the heart of the city but luckily they have their entire lives ahead of them to accumulate the wealth required.
I think the people that are saying that mean that the inference is massively profitable. From what I've seen, the margins are between 50 and 90% on an API call. It's the training that's very, very expensive!
As far as I understand, for both OpenAI and Anthropic, currently the majority of their GPUs are being used for training, with only a smaller portion being used for actual customer serving.
Inference requires training. That's a disingenuous point.
It's similar to people talking about drug companies charging hundreds of dollars for a medication that costs dollars to manufacture. Nevermind that it took them 15 years of research and trials to discover it and get it through trials and the approval process. Nevermind again all the drugs that failed at one of those steps.
I’ve not heard anyone say that the whole thing is profitable. Companies like Anthropic have said that inference is profitable, but I assume that’s only on a steady state basis, which nobody in the industry has ever reached at this point. As far as I know, everyone is still burning cash with data center buildouts and overall training costs.
There is almost always a next big thing. What happens when it ends is people move to the next thing. Practically everything needs some kind of construction, management, software, hardware, etc.
I'd be rich if I knew what the next big thing was but the economy has been running on the assumption that there will be a next big thing for many, many decades. Each cycle has the same rhymes of "what happens when it ends" questions but there has always something.
I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together?
RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
I thought I was more clear than I was being about rss in the context of the conversation about text based news.
How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts?
We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.
> We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed.
I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy.
That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS.
(The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.)
> People don't know what an rss feed is.
I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially.
The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.
You can follow them both from your own mastodon account on a third server.
It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.
We need to stop focusing on the specific protocol when it's not relevant and focus more on the patterns. Wanting RSS, specifically, made sense back when everyone had an RSS reader, the same way it makes sense to have an HTML website today because everyone has a web browser. But since very few people have RSS readers now, there's infinite flexibility in the format you use to provide your feed. The most useful is probably a phone app that vibrates your phone with a notification when your train is delayed. RSS can be provided as an option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making alternative political movements care a lot about how decisions are taken. For instance, authors like David Graeber consider that majority voting only makes sense in the context if backed by violence.
So what percent of people are required for "consensus" because it seems like 50%+1 to 100%. There seems to also be an implication that democracy is 50+1 when it isn't. It can require any percentage to reach a decision.
Those two words refer to the same "type" of system where the members make a decision by ascent or descent. Both systems require an agreed upon barrier of acceptance.
They are the same. The US congress reaches decision by consensus.
Consensus is strictly 100% agreement (or at least 0% disagreement). Granted, it's not always possible. But in some setups and given some objectives, it's sometimes possible to have a collective that finds compromises that satisfy everyone (consensus).
IETF for instance, makes the distinction because they do not use a fixed vote threshold, but use a judgement of someone with good judgement, taking all facts into account such as the strength of disagreement.
And of course if that person turns out to have bad judgement they won't listen to him next time.
It is certainly possible for this to become unstable and split into two or more groups. This may work for the IETF which frequently creates and destroys working groups.
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
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