Basically any service you can think of only costs as much as it does because there are limits to how much quality and reliability it actually promises. Electrical utilities tend to keep the grid pretty stable most of the time; if you want better than that you end up talking to Eaton or similar and running increasingly involved onsite equipment; just as people who want internet access to be very reliable rather than mostly reliable end up buying redundant links.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where it would make sense for the utility to operate and sell the additional reliability, rather than the customer DIYing it, whether because there are grid topology things they can do to get the result more effectively or just because they have greater experience with alarming AC gear; but that would be a tier above the standard offering, not a concession that it's reasonable to run the entire grid at the level of the worst-case customers.

You could get into the same argument about water. Hospitals and precision chemistry applications often have fairly elaborate onsite setups to provide sterile or ultra low ion water for their particular requirements because that's not the standard to which utility water is normally held. In theory you could shuffle around ownership and responsibility for the additional processing steps, and in some cases it might even make sense; but it's not terribly compelling to run the entire water system as though it is being piped into a burn ward or a chip fab; and, at least in agricultural areas, there's often another tier below the 'standard' for non-potable irrigation where you can worry less about microbe counts and whether there's matching sewer capacity because it's just getting sprayed on fields.

This is unknowable until we stop finding more complexity in the brain. That we keep doing that is how we how we can't make a brain replacement yet.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not feeling or seeing a great deal of excitement about the arrival of AI on our personal devices. I'm also at a loss about what the compelling use case is supposed to be. Of course there are coding assistants and AI-driven help desks, which are great, and the AI summary in Google search is becoming more useful, but outside of corporate (read: easily monetizable) applications, where is the killer app that warrants, the trillion dollar investments, and the terawatt data centers?

Which would raise some ethical concerns. LLMs are not sentient, not even one little bit, even if they appear that way. But a "brain in a vat" might become sentient. Does it get rights? Or is it relegated to a living hell, an eternity of figuring out which ad to best serve up next on thousands of streams?

"New York's GDP per capita is higher than Californias, so if they were the same sized state with the same population they would outperform California."

Wat

Rent free

Yeah, that is ALWAYS wrong, PERIOD, because the government is inducing profit for someone at your expense. Literally everything you are required to pay for should be provided at cost.

They don't do it when I walk into a bus

They are evil, not necessarily incompetent. They make more by shafting customers than by serving them, and they buy laws which let them do that.

A traditional UPS comes in two variants, UPS and SPS, U = uninterruptible and S = standby. But anything which can supply backup power is arguably a UPS and that includes solar power systems and the like. These days it is common for them to be grid tying. And it's now common for grid tied inverters to have a boost mode, where they will compensate for voltage sags by supplying synchronized power. Therefore the functionality is absolutely available, though what exactly the hardware is called may vary.

He doesn't know shit except how to abuse customers and employees. He could definitely fall for someone telling him it's possible. It's fundamentally a stupid idea, because the brain is not a computer and doesn't execute instructions like one, and therefore doesn't have any such thing as a core algorithm. The closest thing it has to that is physics.

It's one thing to retain all of the video forever. It's another thing to analyze the video and store notes about what occurred forever, and store any interesting video forever. They can be and probably are doing both things because it would be valuable AI training data.

FTFS:

and

If it took three months to figure out it was a Waymo, they weren't working on that case for most of that time. Perhaps they were working other cases, but not doing some quick preliminary work when new cases come in to see if they can be moved forward is fucking up by definition.

It's more likely to get sent to the nearest news outlet by the other side. Literally.

I suspect it's a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid's problem there's not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are 'mining' crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn't particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.