If the long press isn't working, pull the plug. HTH, HAND.

Obviously, I agree.

My other question, is how long will they be able to get away with this sort of thing, before customers decide the risk of disclosing your data to these external AI firms, is greater than the cost of building the capacity to run your own models in-house.

I don't use LLM, generally. But I was messing around and got some older models running on my laptop last night. Nothing special, no idea what I would use them for (couldn't generate a paragraph of text before clearing losing all coherence, because these were small old models running on 5 year old hardware). Supposedly Mac Studios and Mac minis are selling like hotcakes because hobbyists want to run local models. How long before the Venn Diagram for "can be run locally" and "capable enough model" overlaps for most use cases, making the risk of data exfiltration by these firms not worth the risk?

Lot of words to say this kind of thing may accelerate the bubble bursting.

How many of the other miraculous math solutions attributed to LLMs recently were similarly snooped from academics who bowed to pressure to stay silent on the matter?

At least pay to use a frontier model for the highest quality nonsense.

Also, people who aren't good at negotiating also deserve fair wages.

I'm not saying that they don't. And that's why sports figures have agents so that they don't have to be good negotiators themselves. My point is that being in a union doesn't stop you from negotiating if you think you can do better.

Perhaps some people are too young to remember the dot-com hype. We had so many businesses back then who had the "idea" that putting your business on a website was sufficient for wild success. Many of the businesses were just half-baked ideas. Some were precursors to services we have to today, but done too soon, expanded too fast, got unlucky, or too the wrong approach: Webvan (30 minute delivery guarantee was bonkers though), Pets.com, Flooz, eToys, Go.com, Kozmo, Garden.com, Furniture.com, etc. While other dot-coms just hemorrhaged money with no clear way out; basically businesses with no credible standalone monetization model. Maybe Kozmo (deliver anything from a convenience store to you in 1 hour) seems stupid (it did at the time), but that's exactly what the rideshare and food delivery services offer on the side. And Pets.com basically works as a model as Chewy and others have shown, through more careful cost control.

Why, then, does Major League Baseball have a union? These are very high skilled jobs, very well paid. The highest performers make FAR more money than the middling ones - having a union doesn't prevent that.

My father spent most of his working life in union supermarkets in Los Angles, most of the time in management. Except when he was just starting out, he never worked for union scale, but negotiated a higher rate because he was known to be good enough to deserve it. No matter what the unions say, you can always get more if you can make the boss believe that you deserve it.

This is America, if we're ever in a situation where we have to choose between a business or data center having power 24/7 with 99.99% reliability (1 hour or less) and residential customers having some reduced level like 99.9% (8 hours of outage a year) then you can be certain that's how it's going to play out.

Where we draw the line is really the only debate. Like 95% is more like having 36 hours a month with an outage. Maybe even rolling blackouts every week, so some people don't have power on the same day every week. If that is what is necessary to keep datacenters running, you can bet that the tech billionaires and their buddies in the government would find a way to keep their lights on, at the expense of keeping the lights off with regular people. (who are voters - which ought to be a serious political issue, but I don't think it is an issue anymore)

They're typically Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP), good for 5000+ cycles before they degrade enough to be a problem. So charging every day they're good for about 10 to 15 years.

In practice, they'll have a site with multiple generations of batteries. So they're always extending their capacity and keeping old batteries in service. Eventually replacing degraded packs with new equipment when it is cheaper (in terms of storage capacity vs cost) to swap out the equipment than to simply add new.

US DoE averted rolling blackouts for 17 states back in July. (California not on that list)

Texas had a rolling blackout back in 2021, which I believe was the last rolling blackout in the continental US.

And there was an unplanned multi-state blackout in the Northeast way back in 2003 due to software+human error. I'm a bit surprised with all the cyber security issues we have today that these kinds of blackouts aren't happening every year.

Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), there is one going on almost every week in some part of the state. I get maybe two a year, if it is going to be a windy day and it is fairly dry they'll cut my power for 6-12 hours typically.
There's several PSPS going on in the Sacramento valley and northern Sierra because it's dry and windy right now. (September 9th to 14th). PG&E has about 1000 people working on it right now.

The way brownouts are evaluated is quite broken. There is little logged with regulatory agencies on sags unless a customer complaint has been filed. If that isn't working for you then escalate to CPUC's Consumer Information Management System (CIMS). This is the route you can go if you have reported brownouts or sags or other service issues and there appears to have been no action taken by SCE.

Last week it was high-90's and low 100's along the central coast (Santa Cruz & Monterey). It cooled down at night, but I also don't have A/C because I almost never need it, maybe for 3-5 days every 3-4 years it would be appreciated.

San Francisco is its own particularly bizarre climate compared to the rest of California or even the Bay Area. Just going from the tip of the peninsula to the South Bay can add +20F degrees to the temperature. It can be 75F in SF and 95F-105F in San Jose. Sometimes SF gets to 90F weather most years, specially downtown, even while the Outer Sunset is buried in fog by the next morning.

But last week had some parts hitting high 90's in most of the City, and it was 100F in The Castro and Corona Heights I am told. Very few residential buildings have A/C in SF. Not central air and not even a window unit. With mini-splits getting cheaper and easy to retrofit to old buildings, we're going to see more SF residence adopt A/C to deal with the hotter weather that has become more frequent.

Like saying people were to blame for the reflecting pool fuck up. Sure that was true, just not any of the people Trump or the justice department blamed, it was the installers and morons who managed the project. Yah we get it, thanks for the lying pro-tips.

Current battery capacity only last a few hours after sunset, and starts charging at sunrise. There's a nice graph in this article that shows about a 4 hour coverage with batteries.

Better than nothing, but the shorter daylight hours of winter tends to highlight the limitations we currently have with our battery capacity.