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Comment Re:They Don't Really Work Everywhere (Score 1) 209

gotta being insulting? typical troll, sorry I don't fall for it troll

my point stands, heat pumps are more economical even in cold weather

the more you resort to being abusive, the more evident is is you don't really have a defensible position and you're wrong and deep down you know it but you lack the integrity necessary in order to openly admit it to yourself

i feel sorry for you and all those just like you

Comment Re:They Don't Really Work Everywhere (Score 1) 209

There are temperatures below which a heat pump doesn't work at all. No amount of insulation can fix that. Not a lot of people live in places like that, but they do exist.

so much bs, when you have to stretch that much to make your point, you've already lost and you just look wrong

heat pumps don't need to pull heat from the outside air, they can pull heat from mass walls and shallow geothermal all winter long.

it's just engineering

Comment Re: They Don't Really Work Everywhere (Score 1) 209

not true at all, geothermal can be used to store and use heat from mass walls and shallow ground loops, basically people use their yards and garages to store heat during the day and use it at night or during the summer and then released in winter months, google shallow geothermal

also google Saskatchewan Conservation House for passive solar development history in cold climates

Comment Re:They Don't Really Work Everywhere (Score 1) 209

with R60 and R100 insulation values in building codes, heat pumps are more than adequate, not to mention how they can run off of roof top solar so no grid, EVs can be used as battery walls and not to even mention passive solar

people, we've all been cheated by Big Energy who do everything they can to keep us from being energy self-sufficient

what we have now is just classism, corporatocracy and corruption in action

Comment Re:Apple and Google, evil squared (Score 1) 59

You don't have to support either of these companies. You have that choice. But you don't want to give up what they are offering you.

/qu

We have no choice, this is what a duopoly is, both choices are unacceptable and both options are rip offs

this is the illusion of choice offered by evil upper class people whose only interest is in satiating an insatiable greed, thee people are hopeless addicted to power, they can't give it up and the only way to get more is to steal power from the rest of us

money is power, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, the upper class is absolutely evil

the rich and powerful are wrecking everything for everybody

Comment Re:Not my lord. (Score 1) 29

Only primitives believe in imaginary sky friends, people too weak to face up to their own irrelevance.

It seems only fundamentalists have trouble grappling with concepts like externalism, existentialism, metaphysics,multidimensionalism, nihilism and theology. Not only that but to dismiss it all so they can apparently feel superior to those they see as merely superstitious seems suspect.

Just saying.

AI

'What Kind of Bubble Is AI?' (locusmag.com) 100

"Of course AI is a bubble," argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

The real question is what happens when it bursts?

Doctorow examines history — the "irrational exuberance" of the dotcom bubble, 2008's financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. ("A few programmers were trained in Rust... but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.") So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind? The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They're expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run.... Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical.

AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments... There just aren't that many customers for a product that makes their own high-stakes projects betÂter, but more expensive. There are many low-stakes applications — say, selling kids access to a cheap subscription that generates pictures of their RPG characters in action — but they don't pay much. The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can't think of anything that belongs in it.

There are some promising avenues, like "federated learning," that hypothetically combine a lot of commodity consumer hardware to replicate some of the features of those big, capital-intensive models from the bubble's beneficiaries. It may be that — as with the interregnum after the dotcom bust — AI practitioners will use their all-expenses-paid education in PyTorch and TensorFlow (AI's answer to Perl and Python) to push the limits on federated learning and small-scale AI models to new places, driven by playfulness, scientific curiosity, and a desire to solve real problems. There will also be a lot more people who understand statistical analysis at scale and how to wrangle large amounts of data. There will be a lot of people who know PyTorch and TensorFlow, too — both of these are "open source" projects, but are effectively controlled by Meta and Google, respectively. Perhaps they'll be wrestled away from their corporate owners, forked and made more broadly applicable, after those corporate behemoths move on from their money-losing Big AI bets.

Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they'll do if the AI bubble doesn't pop — wrangling about "AI ethics" and "AI safety." But — as with all the previous tech bubbles — very few people are talking about what we'll be able to salvage when the bubble is over.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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