We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

**WOOSH**

There were winners in the dot-com boom/bust. The problem is the wins always rush to the top, and nothing trickles down.

Some pigs got slaughtered. That's all. Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.

But more importantly, the new market's signature dish is the distribution of most of the wealth to the few, who then rig up the next boom/bust to "distribute" even more wealth to themselves. This is why this activity is being engaged in so fearlessly. And it is, as real economic value crawls to an asymptotic halt, becoming a zero sum game. There little left of the rising tide for all boats. Get used to it. All late-stage empires go through this. Growth halts and castes ossify. Then you can only have what you can take. You don't earn anything any more. You steal it.

Our system of capitalism has been completely gamed. It's become a wealth concentration system, with near zero opportunity or mobility. Mobility is rapidly becoming something on the level of a lightning strike. Lucky if you can get it. You certainly can't get it through merit or hard work at this point. The only reason people tolerate it is there is enough largess for bread and circuses. You don't notice the increasing number of people who "don't matter." If wealth concentration continues, there will be dwindling largess to pay for the opiates, and then it gets ugly. In fact, we have literally given people opiates at this point.

But capitalism is not about distribution by effort, industry, and/or merit any more. For most, what's "distributed" is a begrudging loan from those with real wealth to those who hope to have actual wealth, and think they are earning it. But they only have a loan, not wealth. The interest is what we lose in the next bust. The APR is determined by the people who cause the boom/bust cycle. They take from us at whatever rate makes them whole. The market, through this willingly caused cycle, is another form of taxation if no one in power can ever fail. If you can roughly predict the boom and bust, and can tax away anything you might lose in the bust, the long game becomes very easy.

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.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.

We know that brain function is altered by the blood chemistry changes made by gut bacteria. This means that any mental illness exacerbated by this route where the chemistry added is verifiably unique to an undesirable bacterium can be targeted by the immune system.

Will this be all mental illnesses? Obviously not.

Do I know of any such chemistry? No, which is why I said "in principle". The potential for the vector exists and the potential for training the immune system to attack it exists, but the reality of such a vector actually existing is unknown and the safety of attacking it is also unknown.

"Potential" and "Unknown" are very important words here. They mean that we do NOT know if the probability of such a vaccine being possible exceeds zero, but equally we do know that a key underlying requirement has a probability that isn't zero. But that is all that we can definitely say at this point in time.

Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.

Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.

Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.

So a murder suspect can appear in court and explain that someone gave him the wrong photograph, so it's not his fault?

The US, and many other countries, need to put forward a new law -- if an excuse applies to officials, then it applies to the citizenry. This is not because officials don't sometimes need extra freedoms, but because the vast majority of manmade disasters are "perfect storms" and because this case is a perfect illustration of the banality of evil.

Legitimate causes are just that and they won't cause problems. If, indeed, they are truly legitimate. Excuses mean that they knew they were doing wrong but felt that finger-pointing would confuse the issue for long enough for the storm to die down. Innocent people do not make excuses. Innocent people don't need them.

But this isn't something officialdom will ever accept. Nor will they tolerate a loss of power. So you don't take away their power, you merely insist that powers they claim are the same everywhere for everyone, and that the powers they deny are likewise denied to all. The sensible ones will see in seconds precisely where that's going to go and will get rid of the stupid ones very quickly. Not because they're morally better, but because such a rule is highly volatile and self-interest takes on a very different meaning when the consequences are unpredictable.

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.

In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.