I guess you could go semi off-grid... i.e. turn the master breaker off at the meter most of the time. My installer says that if you haven't used any power from the grid in 30 days, the power company will contact you to find out what's up, and if you haven't used any in 60 days they will definitely contact you. Of course, you'll still have to pay the basic connection fees even if you avoid actually using a non-trivial amount of their power.

My power company already reduced the credit from $0.09/kWh to $0.04/kWh, and changed so they net out the credits and debits each billing period, where before they'd allow credits to carry over for up to 12 months. My ROI estimate is based on the current deal, which of course could change. Probably will, somewhat. I do expect the price to go up over time. Right now I'm paying $0.07/kWh off-peak -- and of course with the battery I should never pay on-peak prices.

I just installed solar + battery on my house (full commission is this afternoon, meaning I'll be able to net meter against the grid). As things stand now, the ROI is there, but the payback period is a bit long (~10 years), but that's only because my electricity is pretty cheap ($0.12/kWh is the average price here; I'm on a TOU plan where I pay $0.28 on-peak (6-10pm weekdays) and $0.06/kWh off-peak). Given the grid challenges I think it's reasonable to expect prices to go up and knock a couple of years off that ROI.

Of course, having the government pay for 30% of the system definitely helped, and that's not available after December 31. Unless/until it gets reinstated by a future administration.

Kind of, yes, and clearly we should stop, but this isn't the same thing. We're supporting an ally that has gone off the reservation, not doing the bad thing ourselves, and that distinction does matter.

Indeed. The US actions toward Venezuela are worse than China's against Taiwan.

That's true, and bad, but also completely different. China has much more intrusive spying of its own citizens plus actively and deliberately suppresses any kind of dissenting press (meaning shuts them down and throws them in jail or disappears them, not just ceases inviting them to press conferences) and openly and energetically works to block citizen access to any source of information not under the party's control.

Your post was largely a list of false equivalencies between pairs of vaguely-similar things, but this one has to take the cake.

I'm not prepared to agree that credit scores are actually a bad thing, but even if I were, those scores just rate how good people are at managing money (and whether they manage their money the way the banks like), not anything like a Chinese social score.

Indeed.

All true, and I don't think any of this is particularly "bad". Trading partners leverage their advantages, that's how it works. We let ourselves get into a bad situation on rare earths. That's hardly China's fault.

No, it's really not the "same shit". You're pointing out a bunch of bad things that we're doing, things that are objectively not equivalent to the worse things China is doing, and calling them equivalent. If you're willing to play that game, every country is terrible, because all of them are imperfect. The degree of badness matters, and the system's interest in and options for correcting the badness also matter.

Well, there's some reason to hope that American voters may realize that what our government is doing is not what we want, and vote to change it. That option doesn't really exist in China. OTOH, there's no guarantee that American voters will wise up, so...

His claim that we're as far away as ever implies that he has some ability to discern how far from AGI we are. My point is that he does not, no one does.

There's another objection that I did not raise, but it's worth mentioning: His contention that we have made no progress implies that the observable progress we've made over the last decades, and especially the last five years, is actually not progress at all. That implies that it must actually be motion in a different direction, orthogonal to the direction required to achieve AGI, because clearly he cannot be claiming that there has been no movement. If that's the claim, well, he's just delusional.

It is, of course, possible that all of our progress has been in the wrong direction entirely and that therefore we've made no progress. I think that's unlikely, because it certainly looks like we're moving in the right direction, but we can't fundamentally know what constituted progress and what didn't until we arrive, which brings me back to my point about the unknowability of our position.

I would assume he is given he described exactly what happened when he tried to not set up a Wi-Fi connection.

You're quoting someone as saying we're as far away as we ever were and claiming it's nonsense because nobody knows how far away we are?

You're not addressing the issue implied and nothing you're saying remotely contradicts it.

How can an atheist hate God? Do you know what those words mean?

Science fiction has generally answered that multiple times, a giant AI of the type proposed (and unlikely to happen - spicy autocomplete is not enough for AGI, it's not even 1% of what's needed) is not going to be located in a single place.

The obsession with cloud computing over the last 15 years has basically created an infrastructure for a supposed electronic intelligence to exist that cannot be easily depowered or disconnected.

(Note that I don't think an AGI is around the corner, just that it's not going to be running on a System/370 in your basement, liable to be disconnected when you trip over the power cord. This is an issue people have thought about and come up with solutions for over and over again, and it's the same solution each time, and yes, unfortunately, it's viable.)

Nobody said he didn't have "accomplishments". They said he's a sociopath and has no good sense of anything.

Basically Musk made it rich out of luck after Peter Thiel and friends bought his payment company. He managed the merged company, PayPal, for a short while before Thiel kicked him out for being incompetent.

He decided he really liked what Tesla was doing (not hard to do!) and recognized that US oil consumption was, at the time, considered a national security issue and felt one way or another a car company like Tesla would get help - so he bought it, took it over (this time with nobody in control enough to say no), and, well, kept fucking up. BUT because the product was compelling (not something he did, merely something he recognized) and because he is a decent salesman, the company managed to avoid bankruptcy, and the cult around him forced the share price through the roof.

I mean, this is a company where one of the stories told about "how good" Musk is involved Musk realizing, days away from bankruptcy, that Tesla hadn't actually fulfilled most of its pre-orders, and maybe it would be a good idea to get the cars rotting on the lots out to the people who put down deposits. So he pressganged everyone at Tesla, even the computer programmers, into calling everyone who put down a deposit to ask them if they wanted to buy the cars.

This is told, by Musk fans, as a story about how great a manager and CEO Musk is, rather than a sign Tesla is abysmally run.

Then there's SpaceX. Which *is* well run! Yes! But it's also famous for having an entire team of people whose job it is to manage Musk when he visits because they know he's awful.

Then there's the Boring Company. Uhm. OK. What happened to that again?

Then there's X. He takes over the second most popular social media network on Earth, whose infrastructure worked, alienates and/or fires most of those working for it, makes grand pronouncements about the technology that are clearly ill informed, and the thing he turned it into is... terrible. I mean, I can't even see a thread any more without logging in. And if someone links to a post all I see is the post itself (no replies) and a lot of spinning gifs. Meanwhile everyone that was worth following has fled to Threads, Bluesky, or the fediverse. The only reason it hasn't crashed out completely is inertia. And's clearly losing more money than it was when it was independent.

He's not a great business man, he's someone who knew what to invest in, but everything he's micromanaged has either failed, or succeeded despite him.

Yes he has accomplishments, but he's nonetheless awful. He's a walking demonstration that America needs to get over its obsession and worship of rich people. They aren't that smart. In fact, most of the richest among us seem to be the biggest idiots.

Do you think you'll still feel that the presidency is above the law, allowed to override or ignore Congress, when a Democrat is in the office? I think the theory of the all-powerful executive that Trump is pushing is clearly unconstitutional, but let's suppose it becomes the law of the land. Do you actually think you'll like that outcome?

This really isn't accurate. Yes, SCOTUS has stayed a lot of injunctions, but I think most of the rulings on the merits -- where they actually do have to give some plausible reasoning -- will go the other way. I think the Roberts court wants to give Trump his way on basically everything, and I think they'll employ a lot of very twisty logic to justify what they can, issuing a lot of bad ruling along the way, but most of his actions are so wrong that they'll ultimately have to shut them down.

Nonsense.

No one knows how far we are from AGI, and anyone who tells you they do is either deluded or lying. It's impossible to know until either (a) we achieve it or (b) we have a sufficiently well-developed theory of intelligence that we can explain it. And, actually, even knowing whether we've built AGI is difficult without the explanatory theory, because without the theory we can't even define what AGI is.

We might be decades away, or we might have already done it and just not noticed yet.

About the only thing you can say for certain is that there is no logical reason to believe that we won't build AGI eventually. Unguided evolution, which is just random variation and competitive selection, achieved it. Our own knowledge creation processes are also variation and selection, but because they operate at an abstract level without the need to modify a physical genotype and wait for phenotypic expression and outcome, they run many orders of magnitude faster. So we will succeed at creating AGI unless we collectively decide not to, and collectively decide to be very serious about enforcing a ban on AI research.

There similarly is no reason to believe that AI won't become superintelligent. Silicon-based intelligence has obvious advantages over the much less-capable substrate that evolution cobbled together. And even if that weren't the case, we would just devise better options. So, the only logical argument against superintelligence is that there is some law of physics that dictates an upper bound to intelligence, and that the peak levels of human intelligence have already achieved it. And even if there is an upper limit on intelligence, and we're it, we should absolutely expect our AIs to reach the same level BUT be orders of magnitude faster than we are, thanks to better miniaturization and faster signal propagation. Imagine the smartest people in the world, but make them able to think and communicate 1000 times faster. Could we even distinguish that from superhuman intelligence? And it seems far more likely that there is no upper bound on intelligence.

The author of TFA may be right that some people are using discussion of AGI and ASI as a way to amass political power now, but that doesn't change the underlying reality that AGI and ASI are almost certainly coming, even if we have absolutely no idea when. Personally, I think it's more likely that the author is uncomfortable thinking about the implications of the arrival of AGI and ASI and prefers to retreat into political theories that keep humans in the pre-eminent position, maintaining the comfortable view that we only have to be concerned about what humans do to each other.

It's not clear that when you include all externalities fission power is the cheapest way to power the grid. But there are places where it probably is the cheapest way to power something. (Or if not cheapest, has other overriding benefits.)

OTOH, including all externalities is tricky. I'm always dubious when I read a claim that it's been done.

FTFY.