So much this..

Yes except, we are not talking about keeping ourselves warm in the winter, cool in the summer, the lights on in the ER etc... We are talking about power for AI data centers; not even data centers for "traditional" computer applications and software.

I'd be the last person here to argue we don't to develop energy infrastructure. I would agree that could maybe even should include nuclear fission at least in the form of modern much safer designs with real consideration for who bears the cost for the 'common defense' when a commercial entity is permitted to paint a giant target on a community.

Never the less this is a societal cross roads, where it comes to AI. The choice isn't massive unrestricted AI build out or mud hutts. We options spanning a range of carrying on like it 2016...damn the torpedoes restart EOL reactors and generating plants to feed the things.

Nuclear power plants (particularly 3rd gen and older) represent an enormous socialization of risk. Their really isn't any getting around that. Historically a rising tide has also lifted *most* ships. Even if it is not immediately clear and their are short term employment impacts etc, AI driven productivity probably will make most American's better off and a small subset with a lot if direct financial interested in things like restarting aging nuclear reactors more fabulously wealthy than they already are. So the question is does this "Promote the General Welfare" in net or not in terms of should regulators really go along with it.

The problem with Nuclear power is that it looks really good in the abstract sense but where it encounters reality it does not suit society so well.

Someone on here a few days ago pointed out that with something like 400 power stations and large industrial reactors there have only been three serious containment incidents.

I would say that isnt actually that good a track record given the cost of such calamity. Which really is unbound as far we know because it remains unclear what dealing with Chernobyl may still require as there is still fissile activity producing enough heat it could destabilze the surroundings, and all kinds of weird fungus that might be attacking the structure of the buildings, and Fukushima while it looks like we have handle on the ongoing clean up requirements, there can still be surprises. If scale the numbers of 2017-19 Chevbolt fires to 30 years you still have a rate of about 2 tenths of percent where spontaneous ignition would occur. GM still did a a recall and that only burns down your garage...

The other problem is the size and acute nature of catastrophe when it does happen. Yes you can prove with statistics coal plants release more radiation and kill more people one way or another. That's fine but they tend do it over decades at a rate society can absorb those costs. Even when a tail pond lets go or something we are usually looking at the loss of one town not a 1000+ sq miles. That is difference between one these 100 year floods and 500 year floods right there, in terms of social cost.

The picture for modern reactors does not change as much as Bill gates wants us to think because humans. Sure maybe it can't meltdown, maybe it can't produce hydrogen and create explosive conditions that will scatter materials on their own. But that does not mean some nut job shouting "Death to America" won't crash a jetliner into it, or execute some other kind of attack potentially spreading contaminates over 100s of miles. Remember you don't need a blast its the fire and the smoke that pump stuff high into the atmosphere where it can rain down later.

I don't disagree with any of that. I see a lot of LLM and agents being thrown at problems we used to have much more tailored tools for that did at least as good a job, while consuming a tiny and by some comparisons almost immeasurably small amount of compute resources.

You're not wrong, Word 6 on a 486 with less than handful of megabytes of memory was able to perform grammar checking on word doc. Now you need 10s of gigs of primary storage, perhaps as much as 50 gigs of secondary storage between the model and the office suite. How much better a job it actually does is disputable. The experience is different, and a no-knowledge user can get started immediately. There is value there in both aspects. I don't see people who get paid access thru and employer etc to claude, gpt, etc stop using it or ignore it.

You're asking a deeper question though, how does that no-knowledge user become someone who understands the system when the system is getting bigger all the time and the short term incentives to learn anything about it get smaller smaller. I don't know. There is a lot of scifi on the subject, dated from before 2020, so thinking without being colored by recent economic interests, probably worth reading.

I love when the jackals start fighting each other..

As Eric Raymond (ESR) says, AI is a force multiplier. My elaboration: If you are good at what you do, it will let you do accomplish more good stuff faster. If you are not very bright, AI will let you be not bright more efficiently, but it won't make you bright. It's just a tool. It needs to be utilized correctly. There is no shortage of things in this world that can do tremendous damage if not used properly. AI is nothing new in that regard.

"AI slop" is so 2024. That argument isn't valid any more.

I'm surprised you didn't use the word "slop". Spewing a bunch of slogans that would have to be more clever to make it on to bumper stickers makes you look like the people you are complaining about. There are legitimate criticisms to make about AI, and ways to support and defend those arguments. You are not doing that.

Exactly, my top use of AI is probably, this prompt:

Please review the document below for typographical and grammatical errors and make the required edits. Do not suggest edits that simply alter style or tone. You may make clarity changes, such as splitting a compound sentence into two separate thoughts or exchanging a pronoun for the proper noun it references. Replacing a less specific nouns such as 'thing' and 'it', with a more concrete noun being referenced; as long as it will not read as overly verbose is appropriate. Finally suggest verb replacements where there is a more appropriate term of art, as and example it would be reasonable to rewrite "Next run the code." with "Next execute the code." Make all your changes with tracking enabled so I can review and accept any proposed edits.

I don't think that makes the document any less your own than having a human copy editor conduct a similar review which has been done since forever.

It was very much built upon an existing code base. If not, what was the AI trained on then?

Which is nonsense. There is nothing new under the sun. People have been kicking off interactions to complex to fully imagine all possible outcomes for as long as we have had laws, and the law has had approaches to assigning responsibility anyway.

Say you are back country camping in a national park. You absolutely can be held responsible if your campfire gets out of control and you start a forest fire, and you are found to have acted 'carelessly'. Even if you had a back country permit, and even if the park rules allow campfires.

We are not in uncharted territory here as how to apply standards like negligence. We may very well have gaps in our current law where various hacking and electronic abuse laws don't cover a negligent mens rea, but that could be easily fixed. It just takes little amendment to change a 'knowingly' to 'negligently' and its fixed. What we lack is a public will to hold these people accountable for anything. This is I think why they are so desperate to go public even while their actual financials SUCK...They want to cerement themselves as TBTF entities.

Sometimes the worst port of incident response is the responders not knowing when to just STFU.

Honestly what a statement to make. Nobody breaks into a system exfils and bunch of records without authorization without some intention to miss use the information. I guess there is a edge case where it is 'just a stunt' or part of some pentest/proof of concept exercise, in the latter case though it isn't an incident and is authorized just not thru ordinary procedure.

All saying you have no indication the information has been miss used is really saying is - it is absolutely being used against us (collectively) or our personnel individually AND we don't have the intelligence capability to identify how or whom specifically..

This is worth a mod up ^

5k is a heck of a lot of headcount for what Mongo seems to have in terms of scope of product offerings and support services.

 

Sounds like you're not defending Access so much as ODBC.

It's mighty convenient for you that your claim makes it impossible for you to provide evidence of this outrageous claim.