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Comment Re: Maybe programmers aren't quite obsolete (Score 1) 141

A point to the contrary- in the US, you would think that the advent of spreadsheet software would have bad for the accounting field, that jobs would go away and fewer accountants would be needed. The opposite turned out to be true. Accountants gained productivity and because each thing became cheaper to keep track of, we started keeping track of more things. There's a big shortage of accountants now, the profession has not suffered under the technology advancements of the past 50 years.

Comment Re: unsportsmanlike buttock comfort (Score 1) 120

That's where I see the problem in the sport. Bicycling on a single-rider bike is inherently an individual sport. Differences in equipment are just a way for wealthy people and organizations to buy better results. "Strategy" in this sport is often on the edge of unsportsmanlike behavior, at least from my perspective. Teams deciding who should be the winner among those on the team, and whatnot. But monied interests like the status quo so it will stay like that.
Cycling should be on the same field as singles tennis, where the choice of racket makes not much difference, strategy is only about exploiting your opponents weaknesses, and victory is overwhelmingly due to the skill and mental fortitude of the individual (or mistakes by opponents). Probably I don't understand cycling, but there seems to be a lot of wiggle room for other factors in what should be a simple contest of who can ride a bike the fastest.

Comment Re: Isn't that the point? (Score 1) 84

It all depends on how critical accuracy is to the question at hand, the consequences of being wrong, and how reasonable the answer appears. I'm getting better at remembering the temperatures meat is supposed to be cooked to, but if a model tells me chicken is safe to eat when cooked to 165F I'm not going any deeper. Seems legit and the consequences of being wrong are mild. I have many non-critical queries throughout the day where that's good enough. For more important stuff I'll check the references.

Comment Re: The economy is struggling (Score 1) 241

There is always a nugget of truth, but that is used to justify disproportionate and a poor response. Clinton cut 400,000 employees, but hacking at headcount was not how it was done. It was a slow process, following the normal government processes and in collaboration, not the wild adversarial and demoralizing method under Trump. Lawsuits didn't happen because the rules were followed. The biggest method used by the Clinton administration was eliminating government processes which didn't need to be performed anymore, which takes time and diligence to uncover and wind down in a way which doesn't invite lawsuits. It is slow work but produced results.

Comment Re: This is great but misplaced (Score 1) 117

They are following the Buc-ees business model. A very limited number of locations which are mega-fuelling stations. It is far more efficient and easier to implement than running dozens of locations. A typical Buc-ees has between 80â"120 gas pumps, with all the recent major builds having 120. They do have a small number of smaller stores in rural communities but they are the exception. They have been very successful with this "build-big" approach. You don't have to worry about underperforming locations or mis-estimating the demand if you become *the* highway stop.

Comment Re: Great News ... (Score 1) 23

Because that's what class actions are for. A company harms a lot of people, but it only hurts each a little bit. Individually it would be frivolous to sue, but as a group of harmed people you can exact a legal win to punish the company. And lawyers who can package up a group of people and present the harm to a judge need to be compensated because otherwise the class action lawsuit wouldn't happen. Class action lawsuits don't always end in justice, but they are a reasonably efficient method to try to find it.

Comment Re: Useful If Verified (Score 1) 248

Many people, including myself, don't write code everyday, and it's not something we have to be good at. Any assistance is appreciated since the alternative is to bang away for hours, copy stuff from the Internet and try to make it fit the problem I'm trying to solve, resolve bugs etc until somehow the code works. The new tools are not a perfect time saver, but they still save much more time than they "waste".

Comment Re: I am surprised... (Score 1) 86

A subsea power cable that long is a bit unusual, as in it just isn't done unless there is no better alternative. It would be very expensive. The other options might also be expensive but you can buy an awful lot of power plant for 32 billion dollars and you wouldn't have the risk of an anchor incident. The insurance alone on a cable that long and expensive would be eyebrow-raising.

Comment Re: In case anyone is wondering why (Score 1) 80

And fiber in my area. An upstart fiber company did the hard work of putting lines in my whole neighborhood about 2 years ago. This prompted AT&T to finally wake up and they upgraded their copper lines to fiber last year. The new fiber company offered no caps and a flat monthly fee and so Comcast quickly lost at least half the neighborhood.

Comment Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score 1) 41

I'm sure it uses some very cherry-picked numbers.

Let's say a query uses 3000 watts for 10 seconds. That's probably within an order of magnitude because a 300w consumer GPU can do quite a lot in 10s, but the bigger models will be using a bit more hardware.

If every bit of that 0.00833 kWh of that went into boiling some water, you could vaporize about 13 grams or about 1/40th of a bottle of water.

We then need to consider that the data center cooling system will add about 1/3 more, and that to produce that electricity in a 40% efficient (coal) power station entirely cooled by evaporative cooling would a little more than double it again.

But we should also consider that not all thermal power stations are that inefficient, that even in evaporative cooling setups significant heat is removed by conductive b means, most thermal power stations in the US West are air cooled, and a lot of power will be coming from renewables. On a cowboy calculus basis you're back to 1/40th of a bottle or less.

One could argue that this doesn't include the energy to train the model, but amortizing that over all the queries made during the economic lifetime of the model probably doesn't add much more than 1x the power used by a single query. I would say that shouldn't be included in what a single query costs anyway.

In any case it isn't anywhere near using a bottle of water.

Comment Re: Possible Weld Issue (Score 5, Insightful) 167

It is a big deal though. Pressure vessel and piping integrity are not typically major issues for a rocket this far along in development. Their QC program must be in a sad state for something like this to happen. It points to a culture that emphasizes speed and not quality, which completely aligns with how the CEO works and how the company is run. And that won't get better quickly.

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