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Comment Re:at least 10 years too early (Score 1) 27

Sorry, but you're wrong. LLMs are already quite useful in science and math...but not with the internet as a training basis. The LLMs that are useful in sciences need to be specialized for the particular science, and they need to be used as hypothesis generators rather than as answer givers. They can also be used to filter out noise (though in that case there's more need to beware of errors).

Comment Re:Twice as much electricity? (Score 1) 136

If that's a nationwide average, then it's quite possible that large segments *do* have more electric power available than the median US user. China has lots of rural, partially modernized, population. And there may be more people in those segments than the population of the USl

Comment Re:China may or may not has overtaken (Score 1) 136

Solar panels have that potential, but it requires proper use and planning to achieve it. Ditto for wind turbines. Once those get above a small fraction of the load you need load balancers. For this purpose most batteries are only short term, and you really need something that's good for weeks or months (preferably years). Pumping water uphill can work, if you've got the right situation and you plan for it. Other things can do the same job. Storage always comes with additional costs, if only in efficiency.

Simple answers here are so bad they're wrong. You need a good plan that you follow and do the necessary maintenance on.

But, yes, solar cells are a great component of such a larger plan. And we've been botching it.

Comment Re:So much winning (Score 1) 136

Not to be snarky but i think you need to reread the summary. The author's claim is based on electricity generation, meanwhile as the summary points out the Trump administration is canceling massive amounts of new power projects. Trump of course isn't the source of all of this problem but the claim is that he's very actively making it worse.

No question about that. On the flip side, I'd argue that those power projects are corporate welfare, making the entire country pay for power generation that is used by only a small percentage of the country, for the primary benefit of a few power companies that happen to get the grants. I'm not sure that's really a good use of government resources. Power companies should pay for their own construction, or else they should have to pay back the money to the people with interest.

One of the biggest fiscal mistakes in our country's history was spending so much money to build private power and communication infrastructure with public funds. If the government pays for it, the government should own it and lease it out for public benefit without taking a profit. When our government has done it this way — various municipal fiber projects, TVA, etc. — the results have been high levels of efficiency at a low cost. When our government has done it the other way, the results have been monopolies that have to be broken up.

Cancelling projects is frequently stupid because of sunk costs, and I would bet good money that the current administration did not do adequate analysis to determine whether this is the case, because they have a long history of failing to do so, but that doesn't mean that they aren't right to question that spending.

What we need is a few dozen clones of TVA in various regions of the country, operating in a not-for-profit fashion as a government-owned corporation to build and maintain power infrastructure. Federalize as much of the infrastructure as possible, make all future construction paid for by the government be done through one of those companies so that private companies don't solely reap the benefits, etc.

The real problem is that Republicans scream "Socialism", so Democrats try to work around it, and the result is corporate welfare, where everything is as inefficient as possible.

Comment Re: China may or may not has overtaken (Score 3, Informative) 136

I'd care more about the vaccines part if my government hadn't tried to murder me with an experimental death injection and lied about almost everything. I'm a-ok with Kennedy's actions so far.

https://www.scry.llc/2022/02/1... .

I'm laughing at the failure to recognize that COVID was the driver of those deaths, not the vaccine. That's why the overall death rate in the U.S. actually dropped by about 5% in 2022, making the increase predicted by that website rather laughably wrong.

Comment Re: Bad ideas that just won't go away (Score 1) 138

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Comment Re:Bad ideas that just won't go away (Score 1) 138

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

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