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Comment Re:Compared to....? (Score 1) 106

by gurps_npc (#66241584) Attached to: US Suffered a Major Power Outage Every Month of 2026

You make a lot of good points.
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However, two environmental disasters creating an increase may indicate an underlying cause. Many environmental scientists claim that both more fires and more frost are a result of climate change that is itself a trend that will continue.

Adjustments for population growth is also an underlying cause, not something we should ignore.

The idea that it is a couple of local problems rather than a national one has significant importance. Texas in particular, being a separate power grid, may have issues that the rest of the country does not.

Comment Compared to....? (Score 1) 106

by gurps_npc (#66241412) Attached to: US Suffered a Major Power Outage Every Month of 2026

This is one of those things that people do not have a frame of reference for.

The question is not did we have a power outage every month, but did we have MORE power outages these past 6 months than we had last year during the same 6 months. Without that data, we have curiosity and mindless fear, nothing more.

Here is the actual data the industry uses, from 2014 to 2024.: https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

While these numbers are hard to inteerupt without a graph (particularly because 2024 was a 'bad' year), there are some clear trends:

Non-major events is pretty much unchanged.
Major events have gone up significantly - perhaps even doubled.
Durations of events have also gone up.
Finally, losses due to power plant failures ('supply removed') rather than transmission line events has a slight upward trend.

Submission + - US Suffered a Major Power Outage Every Month of 2026 (electrek.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit post making the rounds this week claims the US has experienced at least one major power outage every month of 2026 – but is it true? I dug into several outages, the extreme weather behind them, and what we can do to help keep the lights on. [...] The claim that hundreds of thousands of Americans were without power over extended periods at least once per month, every month of 2026 surprised be in two ways. First, because I had no idea if it was true – and, second, because it felt true. We try to do better than writing about things that feel true around here, however, so I did a bit of research (translation: I Googled power outages by month) and came up with the following examples in about sixty seconds

January: More than 296,000 customers still without power as winter storm freezes much of the US
February: More than 380,000 customers without power as winter storm hits US Northeast
March: Storms Cut Power to Over 1 Million Customers in US Midwest, Mid-Atlantic; Ohio Hardest Hit
April: At least 29 tornadoes touched down in Central Illinois on April 17th
May: Energy Secretary Issues Emergency Order to Deploy Backup Generation in the Mid-Atlantic Amid Heatwave
June: More than 373,000 US customers without power due to extreme weather

... and that list is far from comprehensive, and how you feel about it might depend on what you consider a “major” outage, of course – but consider that there are tens of thousands of Americans without power right now, and that’s not making the news. [...] The lesson here is that weather-related grid outages – whether they’re caused by wildfires, mudslides, derechos, tornadoes, ice storms, hurricanes, heat waves, or some other disaster I’m lucky enough to have forgotten about – read like statistics when they’re happening over there, but get personal real quick when they’re happening to you.

Comment Serious quality improvements (Score 1) 66

by gurps_npc (#66239782) Attached to: Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

I can easily see a day where every bit of software is subjected to an AI check before it is released.

There may come a day when hacking is far more rare and requires government level resources to pay for an AI better than the one software makers use.

There will always be vulnerabilities but they might only be visible to government spies.

Comment Stupidest product I have ever heard of. (Score 2, Insightful) 103

It is designed under the assumption that AI works better than it does without any need for verification.

Screens are cheap, put one in just to list what prompt the AI heard, you idiots.

Smart homes are dying because they were stupid BEFORE AI came about. No one is willing to let an AI control their temperature, let alone the lighting, doors, etc.

What is going on is people are trying to create products for a Science Fiction version of AI, when what we have is closer to a Horror movie version of AI.

Comment Re:good self awareness (Score 5, Interesting) 61

by jd (#66238352) Attached to: IBM Stock Collapses After a Grave Warning About AI

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

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