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Comment Re:Suspicious (Score 1) 88

And that's a problem exactly why? I don't claim it to be 100%, I just point out the error of assuming 100% uptime for any type of energy source. Any power source based on heat and mechanical components has a lot of wear and tear, and components have to be serviced and replaced all the time, be it coal, gas or nuclear.

Comment His Whole Pitch is Safety (Score 5, Interesting) 71

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

Comment Re:Cooling? (Score 1) 90

It's a lot more complicated. Remember the solar panels to power the data center? They catch Sun light, so you need to add them to the surface of your data center. And to keep it at 300 K, you need twice the area to the other side to radiate off the heat. And those areas should not face each other, because they would then heat each other. It's a lot easier with convection, because then, the moving gas molecules transport away the heat.

Comment Re:Cooling? (Score 2) 90

You can calculate the amount of heat you can transfer via radiation. It's called Stefan-Boltzmann law. At a temperature of 300 K, you can radiate 460 Watts per square meter as a maximum. But from the Sun, you get 1370 Watts per square meter. That means that you have to have at least twice the area away from the Sun to keep temperatures at 300 K. A spherical body like the Earth would be at equilibrium at 279 K if it gets no other energy except direct Sun radiation.

Comment Re:Nuclear would have prevented this! (Score 1) 73

You can build nuclear if you want, But all I see right now is nuclear construction happening in China, and in China only. All new nuclear plants built in the west were to replace older ones or are upgrade of them.

Even France, which never had a problem with nuclear, basically stopped building them in the 1990ies, and the only new plant coming online since then is the Flamanville EPR. It was always easy for electrical companies to stop nuclear projects and blame the Left and regulations, when in fact, the projects simply became too expensive compared to the alternatives. It's similar to the turbine car from Chrysler, where environmental regulation were cited why it stopped, when in fact, turbines still suck in partial-load situations, which is what most cars are in most of the time.

I don't think nuclear will have a great future. It might exist for some niche applications, but in most cases, it's just fricking expensive.

Comment Re:"net-zero emissions by 2050" (Score 2) 73

Maybe it's not the CO2, but the methane from cow belches. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, although it breaks down more rapidly in the atmosphere.

While Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas, it is also one which gets removed rather quickly from the atmosphere, because it gets destroyed by the sunlight and turned into water and Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide on the other hand is stable, and if not actively extracted from the atmosphere, will stay there indefinitely for billions of years.

Comment Re:By digital sovereignty. (Score 1) 25

Let's put it like this.
  • Natural Gas accounts for 12% of Germany's electricity generation in 2025
  • Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricty generation in 2025
  • Solar accounts for 19% of Germany's electricty generation in 2025
  • Biomass accounts for 8.5% of Germany's electricity generation in 2025
  • Lignite accounts for 16% of Germany's electricty generation in 2025
  • Hard coal accounts for 6% of Germany's electricity generation in 2025
  • Other sources (Coal Gas, Incinerator plants, Oil, Hydro) make up less than 8% of electricity generation in 2025

Now you can throw around buzzwords like deindustrialization, or you can look at the actual numbers.

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