You would expect the same thing with tournament chess players who spend hours working hard at trying to calculate and visualize move possibilities. The process has something in common with navigation. It does involve pattern recognition also, but there is a strong element of navigation.

An interesting comparison would be with tournament bridge players who calculate but probably don't visualize in the same way. (Can't say for sure as I have only played bridge a few times, years ago.)

The hypothesis would be that spatial navigation effort safeguards, and the prediction would be that chess players will have lower rates of Alzheimers than bridge players.

I'm a citizen of a democracy, and vote on energy policy and the directors of it both locally and nationally and am in that role fully entitled to opinions on both. With or without a PhD.

And when I look at the data of wind generation in the UK what I see is blackouts coming towards the country. I do not see, and you do not explain, how a couple of GW of wind power generation during a calm is going to supply 10s of GW of demand. I do not see any plans in the UK for any measures that will fill the gap.

I am not alone. From the UK Telegraph today:
_________________________
Measures that came into effect this week give the National Energy System Operator (Neso) the authority to tackle electricity shortages with rolling power cuts around the country.
Each area would have its power switched off for three hours at a time. Neso would have to give just eight hoursâ(TM) notice to use the so-called demand control rotation protocol.
The new measures, first reported by The Guardian, are designed to bridge a gap between Nesoâ(TM)s current emergency powers and rolling-blackout plans that require government approval.
Currently, the UKâ(TM)s electricity supply emergency code, a national plan of energy rationing, can only be triggered by ministers and requires emergency legislation.
It is intended for prolonged national crises lasting more than 24 hours.
Neso, meanwhile, has the ability to disconnect up to 20pc of power at five minutesâ(TM) notice in the face of imminent system collapse, such as the nationwide shutdown seen in Spain in 2025.
Under the updated rules, Neso can activate rolling local blackouts without political approval.
___________________________

I was saying this 20+ years ago when I was studying AI and its history back then, long before LLMs existed.

This post is not flamebait. Its sincerely held rational opinions based on the facts of the UK experience, backed up by the data readily available from gridwatch or gridwatch.templar, I understand that people would like desperately for wind to be a viable technology for industrial societies, but the verdict is coming in from the gigantic experiment, and it just isn't.

What dooms it is intermittency. Well, and high costs too.

Just look at the results of the latest UK wind auctions, and look at the estimates for building transmission capacity from the north coast of Scotland (where the turbines are) to the Midlands and South where demand is. Look at constraint payments. Look at gridwatch to see what all this is delivering. Read the Royal Society report to see what the best UK minds can come up with regarding storage.

It isn't working and it isn't going to work. Folks, you need to get out of denial and look at the facts of experience!

If they are trying to run the country on wind and solar, then on a winter evening when there is the usual blocking high and wind calm, and no solar generation, your UK friends will be trying to supply 45GW (or north of 60GW if they manage to convert everyone to EVs and heat pumps) while having only about 10GW generation. Assuming they manage to get around 100GW of wind installed, which is a real question also.

Don't believe me? Look at gridwatch. Lows from 30GW face plate wind can go as low as 0.5GW. Can be below 5GW for a week or ten days at a time.

And this is going to continue for a week or ten days, as it does almost every winter.

By day two they will not be discussing the difference between stocks and flows. They'll be discussing

"CCGT capacity in the UK is sufficient to cover the rare times when there is zero wind."

No, it isn't. Just look at gridwatch. zero wind (or close to zero) is not a rare occurrence at all.

As to enough gas, the UK has about 30-35GW of gas depending exactly how you count. Peak UK demand is around 45GW.

The UK has twice this year been on the verge of blackouts. The last one, in June, it escaped by the skin of its teeth by importing on an urgent basis from France.

Need to read the UK news. Its impossible to run a country on intermittent generation technology. Its especially impossible to do so while raising demand by moving transport and heating to electricity, and while making no or inadequate provision to cover intermittency.

The question is, what is the value of wind generated power?

The UK has real time and archived data available to anyone who really wants to answer this question. The data shows, in summary, that wind generated power is not the same as conventional or nuclear generated power. You can see it clearly here in graphical form ( and from other sources, (www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk for instance) there's the raw data available in csv format. Here's the graphical version:

www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind

What happens is that much of the time peak wind generation coincides with low demand. This leads to constraint payments, when operators are paid as if they were generating but have to turn off supply. Then, there are regular calms, several a year, lasting a week or so, when peak demand coincides with low generation. When this happens gas has to be turned up to cover. The effect of these two factors is to lower capacity factor. It doesn't appear in the usual accounts of this, and it is never reckoned with in LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) calculations. LCOE is basically accounting fraud, comparable to stuffing the channel in manufacturing. It assumes that all power generated across the life of an installation is of equal value, but it is not.

How low is low generation? As you can see from gridwatch, 30GW faceplate of wind can fall well below 1GW for quite long periods.

This is not primarily about climate. Whether you think there is a climate crisis or not, the problem is that this is not a technology that is fit for the purpose of supplying a reliable electricity system to a modern industrial economy. The problem is there is no cost effective way of dealing with intermittency. In fact, without having total backup for the wind, there is no way at all.

The way to think about this is that what is being done with wind at the moment is not a transition. What is really happening is that a functioning conventional or nuclear system is required to pretty much fully cover peak demand. The buildout of wind is basically supplementing it. The case, if there is one, for doing this is not that a cheaper method of generation will replace conventional. Its that when the wind works and coincides with demand it can reduce fuel consumption of the primary generation network.

A further problem which the UK is experiencing is that wind power locations are far removed from demand centers. So they are having to build at great expense large transmission facilities from the north coast of Scotland - for which there is no other reason than the fact that wind farms have been built there.

Does it in fact do this? Is it cost effective to build (in the case of the UK) all those turbines off the north coast of Scotland, and all that transmission to get the power down to the Midlands and South, in order to save some fuel on your main conventional network?

I have seen it claimed, but have never seen any fully costed case showing that it is. And the fuel savings themselves? Maybe a lot less than you would expect, because to accommodate the wind power fluctuations you have to have rapid start gas, which is very fuel inefficient.

Some reading this will say 'batteries'. The Royal Society considered this, and dismissed it as absurdly expensive. It was so expensive and impractical that they thought a better solution would be to excavate and seal vast caverns and fill them with stored hydrogen. They did not specify where this was to come from. The fact that they thought this a more practical solution speaks volumes about the scale of the problem. The report goes into the question of intermittency in some depth, and draws attention of the observational fact that whole seasons can be low wind.

https://royalsociety.org/-/med...

What happens if you close your eyes and go ahead anyway with trying to transition to wind? The UK is finding out. Its had two cases this year of approaching large scale blackouts because of insufficient reserve to cover fluctuations. So far its been lucky, and there is some evidence that the narrowness of the escape was covered up. But the smart money is that one of these winters luck will run out, and they will then have to cold star at scalet and, if they have had to retire their gas by then, insufficient spinning reserve. And no, you will not get spinning reserve over the Euro interconnects, they don't do that.

There may be alternative technologies which will generate the levels of reliable power our economies need. But wind is not one of them. So on the whole the Administration is right. Its expensive to cancel it, but its a lot cheaper than going ahead with it. The UK is an early warning system. Its the canary. Or if you like, its like a bystander watching the lemmings and figuring out he does not want to join in this particular rush.

AI is, and always has been, exclusively nothing but exponentially-increasing requirements for logarithmically-plateauing results.

Any mathematician will tell you what that means in the end.

A classic example of current cultural pessimism.

The present administration is said to be doing something dire - "The alleged administration never saw a math problem it could understand and has been busy cutting research funding that doesn't directly contribute to producing widgets for its industry friends."

But no numbers are shown to support this. Then there are the '"beancounters" - obviously a derogatory term, presumably for accountants, and they are supposed to be saying something completely stupid, and the sort of thing that accountants in real life never say, and if they were to, no-one would listen.

We actually need accountants. Without accountancy we would find it impossible to run a money based economy. You may not like what proper accountancy shows about a given project to which you are emotionally attached - that's one usual reason for a generalized resentment of accountants. But with all the imperfections of the profession, we need it and its a positive force.

And finally you arrive at the dire predictions which don't follow from your arguments, the attribution of racist denigration of mathematics. How you dragged racism into it? The US is going to run desperately short of mathematicians due to its approach to AI. OK, but how on earth are you to bring race into this? By arguing that the Chinese are visibly doing AI better, and that the only reason the US does not imitate them is racism about them. Oh, so its not the bean counters and the alleged administration at all - or maybe it is, but they are all motivated by racism. Or maybe its the administration that is racist too?

Its all completely incoherent, but its worth dwelling on for a few moments to see a pattern of doom laded resentment, with dire predictions associated, and no solutions, which occurs in the other great progressive issues of the day. Gender, climate/energy, race, periodically even diet, where we switch from demonizing fat to carbs to protein and back every few years.

No, there is not going to be an apocalyptic shortage of mathematicians due to the US approach to AI by this administration. There are lots of ways in which education for employment, and education in general for life, can be improved, not least by changing the attitude and objectives of the teaching profession. But we are not going to run out of mathematicians.

One can make similar points about the other great progressive issues of the day, but this is long enough and contentious enough already, so I'll leave it with that cryptic observation!

The laptop line seems to have great hardware, and I would buy it in a flash, except that I don't want what I see as an awful OS - not so much the OS itself, but the restrictions and app choices it ties you into. I know Apple enthusiasts see this differently, but I just don't understand their enthusiasm for the company.

Don't much like Windows either as OS, but sometimes for some purposes you need it, and it runs very nicely in a VM for those occasiona, and otherwise keeps out of the way.

When they let you run Linux on an Apple machine in the same way you can load Debian or whatever onto an HP or Dell, I'll buy, but the whole spirit of the company is antithetical to that -- which is why I'll never buy one as things are, and they are not going to change.

Pity about the hardware, but there you go. Some compromises are just not worth it, and they want and always have wanted too much. Whether its as in the past buying inferior hardware to get an OS you wanted, or as now, buying an OS you don't want in order to get desirable hardware, the price is always too high and the compromise too great..

I will not write it, Sam-I-Am,
I will not offer colored ham!

Function did its job, exactly as designed.

Whether it's legal to use or not is dependent on jurisdiction and circumstances (and still hasn't been established!), but the function existing and allowing a user to use it is no bad thing.

Think a mugger demanding you access your bank accounts. Oh, no, look, the phone's stopped working...

a.k.a. throwing money at rubbish ideas, and seeing what sticks.

The greatest business strategy of all time /s

It's like a miniature version of the "big kernel lock" thing that took years to resolve.

Sure there were some blocking issues causing performance setbacks for it in certain locations but it was orders of magnitude more difficult to slice it out and replace things with smaller locks, and it still didn't have MASSIVE increases in performance or any user-visible way at all.

It's just code maintenance.

Who the fuck leases a PHONE.

I think that's the question we should be asking. Just buy the thing. If you can't afford to buy the thing, then get a loan/card to buy the thing.

And a phone just shouldn't be that expensive or difficult to maintain or break so often that you can't do either.