Assuming there are 2028 elections. Let's see how he reacts to the mid-terms.

They probably have intel that China is making good progress on it's "before 2030" goal. They have all the parts needed either working or in late stages of development, and their plan is conservative and focused.

I fully admit that this might be a 'me' problem, not a them problem; but I just don't understand why this agent monitoring setup was so vulnerable and is being treated as so novel.

Sure, the monitoring of whatever goes on inside the LLM is comparatively new and exotic; but when you set it loose on the internet it's going out through one or more of your WAN links, presumably with your router and firewall and so on in the way, and is mostly doing HTTP(s) stuff. Keeping an eye on what an internal host is doing when you can insert whatever trusted roots you want for TLS MiTM and you 100% own the pipe that it is using to communicate is not necessarily a desperately enjoyable task; but it would have been a relatively banal requirement a quarter century ago.

I'd also think that, when you are spending $$$$$ on the exercise in Nvidia compute gear, and it's a test of a 'frontier model' whose behavior and capabilities you are trying to better characterize and refine, allocating the handful of terabytes necessary to just store a full packet capture of the session in case it is relevant would be a no-brainer item.

Is there something I'm missing that makes this case more complex? I'm not talking about the 'grubbing around in the LLM's vectors and such' side; just the "a host is doing HTTP stuff through a WAN link we control, can we observe what it is doing?" aspect.

What are you talking about? EV sales are booming, in no small part thanks to Trumps war with Iran.

My EV is an appreciating asset at the moment because used prices are rising.

Those are often the first things to be electrified, because the operators are closer to rational actors who see the immediate savings. Of course the real world gets in the way, but for example about half the busses here are electric because one of the companies replaced them all as part of a fleet upgrade a couple of years ago. They are much nicer too.

Of course, Norway isn't some third world country.

Michaux has been widely discredited. His 2021 report, for example, listed 65.4% of energy as wasted. That's probably true, most fossil fuel powered systems produce massive amounts of waste heat. But he still seems to think that we need to produce that much if we switch to electricity, which is obviously not the case.

Some of it is just misrepresentation. He uses Germany as an example, claiming they need 12 weeks of energy storage. The estimate he cites, which was already outlandish, actually says 24 days, and that's ridiculous. In the real world, there is no need for a whole country UPS because with enough renewables you only ever see hours of deficit, which can be covered with gas (only because it's cheaper to do that and offset it than to go 100% renewables/storage).

He also ignores all the HVDC lines that were being built at the time, and hasn't updated for all the once built since or announced since, so his estimate for the battery storage requirement is at least an order of magnitude off. He also bases his mineral estimates on old chemistry that was poor even when he wrote it, let alone today, and assumes it all has to be lithium ion battery storage.

He does the same thing with copper. Bases it off old technology, ignores aluminium as a conductor, ignores recycling, and vastly over-estimates the requirement.

The whole thing is full of obvious holes. Reality is that most countries can get to over 95% renewables + storage, and then some other sources for the remaining few percent which can have carbon capture and offsetting to reach net zero. The result is cheaper energy and a small chance we might not completely bugger up the planet.

Sure we can produce enough batteries for everyone to have an EV, and for grid storage too. The main issue is we have fallen a bit behind on the tech, on the chemistry.

Not that we shouldn't do that sort of thing, but to have any chance of this not being an absolute shit-show that causes an unprecedented global disaster, we need to do a hell of a lot more than just plant trees.

Basically everyone needs to do what China is doing in terms of renewables and storage build-out. The scale is unimaginable for most of us in the West. The biggest projects we ever did are tiny in comparison.

That's very doable with current EVs. In fact about a decade ago Bjorn Nyland used to tow a trailer that size in the middle of the Norwegian winter, with an old Tesla.

A few hours journey is no problem, even in cheap EVs. Here, for under the equivalent of $25k before tax, you can get an MG that will do 3 hours of non-stop driving at motorway speeds. I've done it in March, in the rain and the dark. It's only when you push out to 5 hours that you need to stop and charge, but personally I need a comfort break anyway.

As more people get EVs, other people start to realize that they will work for them. They work for almost everyone, except for people with *very* unusual and special requirements. As for used, the situation isn't ideal at the moment, but here the standard is an 8 year battery warranty and repairs/replacements after that period are possible, so it's on a par with buying a fossil. Actually probably slightly better, as there are some really unreliable combustion engines on the market. JLR is notorious for them.

No, they are cheaper to buy. Both new and used, cash or credit.

Even in the best scenario we will need solar panels to provide shade. In Europe they have been found to increase crop yields significantly by reducing the damage that extreme heat does. They are good for animals too.

The cars are cheaper than fossils here, and that's not including the cost to run. Charger installation doesn't cost much and pays for itself in the first year.

We do need to make sure everyone can charge at home.

Most people don't need to rewire their house or plug in every night.

It depends if you live in a first world country with decent infrastructure or not. For me the convenience alone would make me never want to go back to fossil.