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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • That is only an issue in very small grids that are entirely renewables in one location. And the impact of AI on the grid has been much more problematic than any renewable sources because it’s localized and its is sudden spikes in usage whereas spikes in generation can be mitigated with battery and capacitor tech. Spikes at the usage side need to either be mitigated by the user or the grid has to implement mitigation at just those locations which is more difficult to plan for.





  • Well he is planning to leave NATO, so it will be the US against NATO. Sure the US has more weapons now, but unless billionaires start paying taxes instead of taking them, there’s no way the US could maintain a sustained war against all of NATO. So the US would need to ally with Russia and even that might not be enough, so probably China too. That or China will take advantage of the chaos and turn on Trump since he and Xi aren’t as friendly as Putin. It would be an interesting, if disastrous time to be alive.


  • 4k thing may not be Netflix itself. There’s a ton of DRM that has to be working just right built into a lot of hardware and software. Many things can cause it to have issues and it’s designed to break if there is anything it considers abnormal. Problem is that it’s kinda, sorta new and hardware can’t be updated. Same issues happened with 1080p at the time. My PS3 HDMI port broke multiple times during warranty and then I gave up after it expired. Just the slight distortion caused by the defect made the TV and all the other devices decide it was being used to pirate content and so they refused to work. These days the devices are more stable and the media industry has stopped aggressively enforcing the DRM to be so aggressive. But they still are doing it with 4K. Any little bug in a driver, software, or hardware firmware and it falls back to 720p or 1080p if you’re lucky.



  • Two ways to process voice, on device or on server. Device-based solutions either are very basic and just detect differences between words or need training data based on your voice or they need lots of processing power for more generalized voice recognition. So is your battery draining and phone is often hot because an app is keeping the mic on and keeping the phone from slowing the processor? Other option is to stream the data to the server. This would also increase battery usage as the phone can’t sleep, but might not be as noticeable, but more evident would be your phone using a lot more bandwidth than is reasonable while you aren’t actively using it.





  • Not exactly. I just think trying to apply a single threaded, cyclical processing model on a process that is neither threaded nor executed in measurable cycles is nonsensical. On a very, very abstract level it’s similar to taking the concept of dividing a pie between a group of people. If you think in terms of the object that you give to each person needing to be something recognizable as pie, then maybe a 9-inch pie can be divided 20 or 30 times. Bit if you stop thinking about the pie, and start looking at what the pie is made up of, you can divide it so many times that it’s unthinkable. I mean, sure there’s a limit. At some point there’s got to be some three dimensional particle of matter that can no longer be divided, but it just doesn’t make sense to use the same scale or call it the same thing.

    Anyway, I’m not upset about it. It’s just dumb. And thinking about it is valuable because companies are constantly trying to assign a monetary value to a human brain so they can decide when they can replace it with a computer. But we offer much different value, true creativity and randomness, pattern recognition, and true multitasking, versus fast remixing of predefined blocks of information and raw, linear calculation speed. There can be no fair comparison between a brain and a computer and there are different uses for both. And the “intelligence” in modern “AI” is not he same as in human intelligence. And likely will never be with digital computers.


  • Regardless of how you define a “bit”, saying 10 in a second when most people easily process hundreds of pieces of information in every perceivable moment, much less every second, is still ridiculous. I was only using characters because that was one of the ridiculous things the article mentioned.

    Heck just writing this message I’m processing the words I’m writing, listening to and retaining bits of information in what’s on the TV. Being annoyed at the fact that I have the flu and my nose, ears, throat, and several other parts are achy in addition to the headache. Noticing the discomfort of the way my butt is sitting on the couch, but not wanting to move because my wife is also sick and lying in my lap. Keeping myself from shaking my foot, because it is calming, but will annoy said wife. Etc. All of that data is being processed and reevaluated consciously in every moment, all at once. And that’s not including the more subconscious stuff that I could pay attention to if I wanted to, like breathing.


  • I just skimmed it, but it’s starting with a totally nonsensical basis for calculation. For example,

    “In fact, the entropy of English is only ∼ 1 bit per character.”

    Um, so each character is just 0 or 1 meaning there are only two characters in the English language? You can’t reduce it like that.

    I mean just the headline is nonsensical. 10 bits per second? I mean a second is a really long time. So even if their hypothesis that a single character is a bit we can only consider 10 unique characters in a second? I can read a whole sentence with more than ten words, much less characters, in a second while also retaining what music I was listening to, what color the page was, how hot it was in the room, how itchy my clothes were, and how thirsty I was during that second if I pay attention to all of those things.

    This is all nonsense.


  • No it’s the cost. Reprocessing wouldn’t create weapons grade materials in most cases. Not anymore than the enrichment for the existing reactors anyway. Problem is that it requires expensive equipment, lots of security, and doesn’t produce nearly as much energy as the existing reactors, at least not in the short term, and companies (especially publicly traded ones) only really have incentive to care about short term profit.

    Then you have the problem of limited supply in a given area, and if you need to get it from all over the world, the transportation is definitely a security issue and major expense. And once you reprocess all of the existing waste, it takes time for more to be produced. Then you aren’t making profit.

    It’s just not a profitable undertaking, so it will never happen. The general conceptual technology has existed at least as long as nuclear reactors. But hasn’t been developed at all. That’s the reality and will remain the reality. Especially considering that other, truly renewable energy sources are cheaper to build, and don’t require as much security and maintenance to produce as much energy.

    The biggest thing that would solve a lot of problems in renewables would be investing in battery and other efficient energy storage. But the fossil companies own most of that tech now, have traditionally shelved it after buying it, and with the current political atmosphere, are being incentivized to more aggressively dig for more fossil fuels rather than plan for the future. Especially in the US with the next administration planning to increase oil and coal production and eliminate the environmental restrictions that make it more expensive to dig up, process, and use what little remains.


  • The waste. There are currently no operational longterm storage facilities much less permanent ones. It’s too expensive, so companies just go bankrupt or governments like the US just stop funding them and the waste sits in pools waiting for a natural disaster, terrorist, or war to damage them and poison the soil and water tables for generations. The Pacific Ocean already got a taste with Fukushima, but it’s enormous and could absorb it…mostly, but what if a tornado hit a facility in the landlocked Midwest US?