Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 1) 97

Not altogether different from polymorphism in chemistry and as soon as a lower energy form gets created, the fallout of nucleation sites makes making some higher energy forms insanely difficult. It would be hilarious if it hit critical mass and spread through systems shutting down everything electronic, banks, infrastructure like electricity and water, modern cars, everything with a sizable computer. Mainly because nothing is automated fully and it is not going to ever be at this rate.

Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 1) 97

However, the anthropic/hugging face incident clearly outlines how a modest amount of tokens (by a corporation) and a modern model can spin up an ecosystem of agents that are extreemly adept at breaking things. After all, it’s far easier to destroy than create. It’s also very easy to distill a trillion dollar effort in models with a few million dollars, effectively ripping off their rip off of all human knowledge. This makes all the money spent in R&D and server hardware with a half life of 3-4 years, nearly worthless when you can just use an open source model nearly as capable slightly later.

The new models aren’t even any better at executive functions, despite narrow task performance improvements meaning no more job displacement. So “we need to slow down for safety” means they want to continue investing despite a lack of improvement, and hopefully get a bailout while making open source AI a felony to possess so only a handful of companies can monopolize it.

Comment Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it. (Score 2) 79

Cryptocurrency does have some valuable uses, outside brokerages anyway. You can transfer money into or out of countries bypassing their banks and laws, and even international agreements. It enables money laundering, and allows for payments to and from criminal organizations. Those right there are very sound business cases that won’t be going away and provide strong underpinning of its value, though which token is self reinforcing and needs critical mass so it’s only something like bitcoin and maybe a few others. It’s also more convenient than tulip bulbs for speculation.

Comment Re:Renewable+storage = reliable (Score 2) 194

Batteries that are cost effective largely solve the intermittent renewable problem. Lithium batteries aren’t even suited to anything more than very short term storage of minutes to a few hours, lithium was developed for energy and power density, able to sustain vibration and impacts without damage (such as being dropped without dents), and the cost can be relatively high as these are mobile device requirements like for laptops, power tools, and EV.

Grid storage is almost diametrically opposed. Energy and power density almost don’t matter at all, if a lithium battery needs to be a ten foot cube, something 100 times less dense mass or power wise is only 46 feet. They can be extremely fragile, and not work under vibration or movement. Low cycle cost lifetime is extremely important. It’s also much more important to have a high efficiency of discharge energy to charge energy. So really lithiums only make sense in niche cases and it’s why pumped hydro is still the vast majority of stored kWh.

Comment Re:Pay attention to the timing (Score 1) 121

The "new electrical demand"

The data is from actual use in 2025.

You do need kilowatts to serve many image requests per second. You don't need much energy to serve a single AI request. You do need kilowatts to serve many per second.

An average text response takes 0.0003 KwH of energy, and 0.1s of server time. That much energy used per 0.1 second is about 10kW. My wording and your complaint was about a single hosting of an image, not thousands or millions. A single hosting of a screenshot uses about 0.0000004 Watt-hours (Wh) per year.

Comment Re:Pay attention to the timing (Score 1) 121

Despite being 15% of all data center usage, AI data centers accounted for 50% of all new electrical demand and are expected to be 70% of all data center growth through 2030. You don’t need kW of energy to store or host an image, but you do to host AI. To put it in a car analogy, it’s like saying republicans hate cars instead of saying EV. You lose a lot when you drop the qualifier like you did.

Comment Re:Pay attention to the timing (Score 1) 121

Republicans, as in the constituents, are largely against data centers as well. All AI and data centers do for them is threaten their jobs, devalue their property, and increase the cost of utilities. Maybe if there was a bit of socialism in giving back there would be a silver lining. But at this rate we are looking at more of a silver ammunition situation.

Comment Re:Straight out of War Games (Score 1) 121

Reminds me of the scene in War Games where Joshua is playing the various games over and over and over: Jennifer: What is it doing? David Lightman: It's learning.

Was it even updating the information into its training or implementation layers beyond the instance of the agent? I’d say it was burning more natural gas than learning.

Comment Re:Yawn. (Score 1) 167

but the fact that the recent advances have been so astonishing should at least give us pause.

It took life 3+ billion years, and we might replicate it in 3000 or 5000 years of technological development, but science is barely 2000 years old at the moment. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you can make a computer for the foreseeable future, it will be dependent on humans for everyone’s lifetime reading this, and far beyond. Sure, they could destroy the world, but it’s about a million times more likely by causing resource wars over climate change aggravated by their bottomless consumption before all these nonsense bedtime stories.

Comment Yawn. (Score 1) 167

“AI” models like LLM are barely functional in narrow bands of capability mentally, and are hopelessly complex machines that need constant tending to, while taking 10,000x the power and resources a human does. Computers break down frequently, need constant human attention, need something physical to do everything from mine the resources to fabricate base materials, to fabricate base materials into components, then to design and assemble the components and finally the data centers. Factories have some automation, no factory is 100% automated including diagnostic and repair needs.

Humans are self healing, self replicating, insanely efficient (probably pushing the limits of efficiency baked into physics), machines able to adapt, evolve, and are broadly intelligent. The natural technology they are based on is so many thousands of years more advanced at the current exponential rate that they are indistinguishable from magic.

Wake me up when I can pull a chunk off my server, drop it in some hydrocarbons, irradiate it with UV, and have a brand new complete server (with ram and storage), all in a few months.

Slashdot Top Deals

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.

Working...