By the numbers in TFA, we would need 2000 of such plants to hit 2030 climate targets

The numbers for doing anything sounds large when you apply it to the whole planet. But the planet has 8 billion people. Exactly how many man-hours of their labour, for how long do you think was needed building this plant and producing the raw materials that it was built from? The answer is going to be a tiny number relative to the total man-hours of the global labour pool.

Everything we do on a global scale involves mind-boggling numbers. It's so dumb how people act incredulous at large numbers when we already deal with large numbers with power generation, oil production, steel, fertilizer, on and on and on. The scale of the infrastructure we've had to build for thee things is staggering. "2000 plants"? I don't know how to break it to you, but there's an estimated 10 million factories on Earth.

Playing "these numbers sound big!" isn't a useful way to analyze the situation. You have to look at cost effectiveness vs. alternatives. If it's cost effective, said 2000 plants (or more realistically, fewer, larger ones) will get built. If other options are more cost effective, they'll happen instead.

The math is irrefutable

Your understanding of what's happening is not.

Deep buried rocks are not in some minimum energy state with respect to the atmosphere. As you can readily see from the rapid chemical changes that happen to lava flows when exposed to the atmosphere - most visibly, the oxidation of FeO to Fe2O3. Not only is deep buried rock not exposed to the atmosphere, but the thermodynamic equlibria are also different under their different temperatures and pressures. In said rocks, calcium and magnesium oxide and hydroxide - as with a typical basaltic lava flow - like 15%-ish of their mass in basalt like that under Hellisheiði - can bind with CO2 to form carbonates. This happens naturally (calcite, aragonite, magnesite, dolomite, etc), and we can induce it artificially as well by providing the CO2. And it most demonstrably works - on surprisingly short timescales, too. But you need the right strata to be present, and you need wells down to them.

If you don't believe me, quick question: you know what quicklime is? You know how you make it? You take limestone (calcium carbonate), and you apply heat to it to decompose it to calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. You have to input energy, even at surface conditions, let alone under the pressure at depth, to turn it into calcium oxide. It's more thermodynamically favourable for it to be in the state of calcium carbonate than it is for it to be in the state of calcium oxide plus CO2.

You can potentially see this in your own house. Ever seen a concrete slab that's started to burst out, exposing the rebar? Do you know why that happens? Carbonation. Steel in the high-pH environment of concrete is rendered passive; oxidation rates are almost nonexistent. However, concrete contains calcium hydroxide. This slowly reacts with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to form, again, calcium carbonate. Because the very cement in the concrete was itself made by applying energy to drive the CO2 off, and it's now returning to its earlier state. As the carbonated layer gets deeper and deeper, it eventually reaches the steel; the pH drops, the steel is no longer protected, starts to rust, expands, and the concrete spalls out.

Thermodynamic equilibria vary with temperature and pressure - that is, a reaction may go in one direction in certain conditions, but the opposite direction in others. For example, driving CO2 off calcium carbonate with heat to make quicklime, cooling it down, then react with water to make calcium hydroxide, which slowly reabsorbs CO2; at elevated temperature at 1 ATM, the opposite reaction was favoured to at lower temperatures at 1 ATM. The balance is complex, because heat may favour a given reaction but pressure may disfavour it, or vice versa; it all depends on the specifics.

Deep rocks are simply not in thermodynamic equilibrium with the surface. Period. Because this is a system with huge differences in temperature and pressure with depth, changing their thermodynamic equilibria as matter cycles both up and down through the crust and mantle. Gas commonly escapes during these changes, rising to the surface and is lost. Rocks that would slowly absorb CO2 (or oxygen) if they were on the surface to exist in a non-reacted - but reactive - state, because the things they could react with simply don't exist there. A situation you can remedy by supplying said CO2.

Do you understand now?

it would reduce atmospheric carbon more if this green energy was used to power whatever we want to power

This green energy is located in Iceland, a remote island country where essentially 100% of all electricity consumption is already from clean energy. The only way we can export energy (barring the megaengineering project of the world's longest subsea power cable, by huge margins) is to do energy-intensive industrial activity here. For example, there's not a single bauxite mine in the country, but we're a major alumium producer, importing bauxite and exporting the metal, and in effect, exporting its embodied power. It would be more efficient to do the processing closer to ore production, but the power is here, not there, and we can't just send it there.

It's not "a random place". It's at Hellisheiði, Iceland's largest geothermal plant, and one of the largest geothermal plants in the world. So that they can inject the CO2 down the wells of the plant, where it binds with the rock to form carbonates.

1) Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.

2) Increasing CO2 levels does help plants, via reducing photorespiration per unit carbon fixed. Not, however, as much as killing them with worsened weather harms them (in particular; a warming client sees the monsoon belts move poleward, dries out soil faster, makes rivers more seasonal, and increases the intensity of peak rain events - aka, both drought and flood become more common). Plants also have optimal cultivation temperatures, and most are C3 plants, which tend to not like hot weather. Higher temperatures make them less efficient, and again, to a greater degree than CO2 helps them. C4 plants are generally better at dealing with drought and higher temperatures, but they don't benefit as much from increased CO2 availability, as they're already so good at capturing CO2 and could grow in CO2 levels a tiny fraction of that which we have now.

3) This is a bizarre argument. So, say, if I dump tonnes of cobalt in your drinking water, that's not pollution, because the human body needs to consume billionths of a gram per day? Some bacteria produce energy from oxidizing arsenic or using arsenic compounds to conduct photosynthesis - you okay with me contaminating your food supply with it? Some bacteria consume uranium - okay for me to fill your air with uranium dust?

The post you're responding to is literally quoting the dictionary.

What I care about is, does it come with CUDA preinstalled and everything ready to use the vast number of PyTorch-based packages?

You say in response to a person who uses it constantly.

Why hav companies Dudley all gone for mass layoffs and are earning money hand over fist?

It's because they all know a mass financial reset is coming, they want as much cash and as few people as possible to live through it.

It is a wave that will sweep many companies, and people, aside...

Good luck everyone.

"If we only did the right thing then we couldn't do what we want to do."

Which in itself says nothing whether you are or are not violating the creators' rights.

You as the non-owner of the IP have certain fair use rights that depend, not on the mechanism by which you obtain a copy of the data, but on the effect of what you are doing with the data upon the copyright holder's proprietary interests. A download button does *not* indicate content is free game for commercial use.

If you're big enough to afford a strong IT department I suspect you should be able to get good cloud support, the big cloud providers have enough scale that any decent sized customer should get good support.

As for the knowledge, even the best IT person is going to have limits and fires they don't know how to put out at a moment's notice.

Sounds like a good setup. But that means you need multiple locations and qualified personnel at each of those locations, how many outfits don't have those resources?

That's also assuming your workload is predictable and you don't need to scale.

It was years ago and I was a dev who had strong enough Linux/Unix skills that I helped out with the IT, so it's probable I'm misremembering bits, but the company could afford one IT person (later 2) who also helped out with clients and the network was a gong show running on some kind of old 5U and the local backup server an old desktop.

They later got two good sysadmins and after a couple of years they mostly got stuff cleaned up, but still, I think the companies with less IT staff than they need and a gong show behind the scenes isn't that uncommon. It costs a lot less to get the kind of redundancy and uptime you need with the cloud.

Red Hat has launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), described as a foundation model platform that allows users to more seamlessly develop and deploy generative AI models.

Hopefully whatever they do there will rub off on Fedora. It's always a massive pain to get setup...not least of which because NVidia usually develops one or two GCC versions behind (and you can't use incompatible versions with nvcc), and by the time they're caught up, the distro is already end-of-life.

If you have the training and resources.

And if you're a big customer I'm pretty sure you get very good support very quickly.

And if a fire took out your main data centre?

Stupid point-and-click admins *love* turfing their responsibilities to 3rd-parties. It allows them to command Windows Admin Wages while having dick for responsibility. Oh, sorry...we're still working on it. We've got Microsoft on the phone, we've tried rebooting because that's what every Microsoft forum post tells you to do, and sfc /scannow is about 20% complete. We're basically waiting on highly-paid external vendors to unfuck the situation for us. We're basically glorified Google Search users with some knowledge of how to navigate support IVRs and we're pretty good at tracking down serial numbers and license info....but only because we hoard the license info so we can play with this shit on our home computers.

At my old company our sys-admin quit, so a manager and myself started splitting sys-admin duties until we could hire a new one. One day the manager was on site with a client when our main server went down and ~50 employees sat around while I fixed the corrupted disk to get samba up and running again (we had an in-house backup and offsite backups, but that was fastest).

Even with a few good staff and some redundancy it doesn't take a lot.

One of the only orgs I see that do have a decent claim for staying off the cloud are control centres, because that's crazy high security and a ton of resources. But they literally have a second control room in a second facility just sitting there ready to go live. And making sure that switch-over works is not easy. That's the kind of resources you need for cloud-like reliability.

It's already extremely safe. Cycling has a lower death rate per participant than *tennis*. And while your risk per *mile* is signifiantly higher on a bike than as a passenger in a car, your risk per *hour* is signifiantly lower. Since most cyclists aren't putting nearly as many miles on their bike per week as their car, the bike represents a low risk to them; in fact if you take up cycling your chance of dying in the next year goes down by 1/3 once the fitness benefits kick in, even though you've just added a new way to die to your personal list.

So tech like this is unlikely to reduce *absolute* risk very much, because absolute risk is already very low. It so happens this particular tech could reduce the most fatal type of accident -- being struck by an overtaking motorists -- but these types of accidents are very rare, as are cycling fatalities. Since there's only about eight hundred cyclist mortalities / year in the US there's not a lot of room for improvement, especially as this tech is bound to be installed on only a tiny minority of bikes. It does nothing for the two most common types of accidents: (1) cars entering the street to make a turn and hitting a cyclist traveling along that street and (2) cars passing a cyclist and making a right turn at an intersection across the cyclist's path (the "right hook"), so it's unlikely to affect metrics like ER visits and hospitalizations very much.

We have to sharpen our thinking about what we're actually trying to accomplish when we talk about "making cyling safer". I'd suggest there's two things we can be reasonably trying to do: eliminate as many *preventable* deaths and injuries as possible and make people *feel* safer when riding a bike. There's a lot of injuries that can be taken off the table by designing and marking intersetions better and improving lines of sight. Many of these changes would also reduce car-pedestrian accidents and car-car accidents too.

Technologies like this can't make cycling statistically much safer than it aready is. But they can do a lot to make cyclists feel safer -- much the way some cyclists are spending hundreds of dollars *today* on rear-facing radar units. Those are good things, but they're no substitute for better design which would both make cyclists feel safer and make everyone statistically safer.

Oh, they absolutely are available. Tons of uncensored models on Huggingface. But you have to run your own model or find a place that hosts said models.

Unfortunately it could also tell you where to find prostitutes and how to kill yourself...neither of which can be monetized today.

Well, TODAY maybe, but...