Probably LRO vs. Danuri

I didn't realize it was so heavy.

Yes, Donald Trump is stupid, and yes he knows exactly how to play to his base. These things are only incompatible if you think it requires intelligence and strategy to play to his base. It doesn't. He just does what he does and it happens to resonate with them, most of the time at least.

Meh. "Gambling" is such an amorphous term when it comes to betting on events that aren't carefully constructed to be the result of pure chance.

The question is, what is the value of wind generated power?

The UK has real time and archived data available to anyone who really wants to answer this question. The data shows, in summary, that wind generated power is not the same as conventional or nuclear generated power. You can see it clearly here in graphical form ( and from other sources, (www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk for instance) there's the raw data available in csv format. Here's the graphical version:

www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind

What happens is that much of the time peak wind generation coincides with low demand. This leads to constraint payments, when operators are paid as if they were generating but have to turn off supply. Then, there are regular calms, several a year, lasting a week or so, when peak demand coincides with low generation. When this happens gas has to be turned up to cover. The effect of these two factors is to lower capacity factor. It doesn't appear in the usual accounts of this, and it is never reckoned with in LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) calculations. LCOE is basically accounting fraud, comparable to stuffing the channel in manufacturing. It assumes that all power generated across the life of an installation is of equal value, but it is not.

How low is low generation? As you can see from gridwatch, 30GW faceplate of wind can fall well below 1GW for quite long periods.

This is not primarily about climate. Whether you think there is a climate crisis or not, the problem is that this is not a technology that is fit for the purpose of supplying a reliable electricity system to a modern industrial economy. The problem is there is no cost effective way of dealing with intermittency. In fact, without having total backup for the wind, there is no way at all.

The way to think about this is that what is being done with wind at the moment is not a transition. What is really happening is that a functioning conventional or nuclear system is required to pretty much fully cover peak demand. The buildout of wind is basically supplementing it. The case, if there is one, for doing this is not that a cheaper method of generation will replace conventional. Its that when the wind works and coincides with demand it can reduce fuel consumption of the primary generation network.

A further problem which the UK is experiencing is that wind power locations are far removed from demand centers. So they are having to build at great expense large transmission facilities from the north coast of Scotland - for which there is no other reason than the fact that wind farms have been built there.

Does it in fact do this? Is it cost effective to build (in the case of the UK) all those turbines off the north coast of Scotland, and all that transmission to get the power down to the Midlands and South, in order to save some fuel on your main conventional network?

I have seen it claimed, but have never seen any fully costed case showing that it is. And the fuel savings themselves? Maybe a lot less than you would expect, because to accommodate the wind power fluctuations you have to have rapid start gas, which is very fuel inefficient.

Some reading this will say 'batteries'. The Royal Society considered this, and dismissed it as absurdly expensive. It was so expensive and impractical that they thought a better solution would be to excavate and seal vast caverns and fill them with stored hydrogen. They did not specify where this was to come from. The fact that they thought this a more practical solution speaks volumes about the scale of the problem. The report goes into the question of intermittency in some depth, and draws attention of the observational fact that whole seasons can be low wind.

https://royalsociety.org/-/med...

What happens if you close your eyes and go ahead anyway with trying to transition to wind? The UK is finding out. Its had two cases this year of approaching large scale blackouts because of insufficient reserve to cover fluctuations. So far its been lucky, and there is some evidence that the narrowness of the escape was covered up. But the smart money is that one of these winters luck will run out, and they will then have to cold star at scalet and, if they have had to retire their gas by then, insufficient spinning reserve. And no, you will not get spinning reserve over the Euro interconnects, they don't do that.

There may be alternative technologies which will generate the levels of reliable power our economies need. But wind is not one of them. So on the whole the Administration is right. Its expensive to cancel it, but its a lot cheaper than going ahead with it. The UK is an early warning system. Its the canary. Or if you like, its like a bystander watching the lemmings and figuring out he does not want to join in this particular rush.

I was going to say this is way too general, and AI involves many algorithms that are not LLMs.

Then I started thinking through the algorithms of the past, and many of them have indeed shown great promise in the beginning, then exponentially-increasing requirements.

Because of bureaucracy. Individuals all up and down the hierarchy are trying to meet arbitrary metrics set by someone who doesn't understand the situation. The ones who meet the metrics get promoted, even if the metrics make no sense.

Of course, there are smart scientists in China who try to do good research, but as is true everywhere, bureaucracy is a hindrance.

That is too optimistic on the listening.

A lot of people out there only heard "stay six feet away from people" and logicked, "What, a disease can only travel six feet then it drops dead?" No scientist said anything remotely close to that, but that is the reasoning people ended up with because they weren't listening at all.

I was thinking about the biotech, and creating a disease that will kill a bunch of people is easy enough that it will almost certainly happen.

On the other hand, creating a disease that will kill all humans is not easy. It's actually quite difficult. Which doesn't make you feel better if you run into a disease that kills you, but unselfishly I guess we should feel good about humanity?

I didn't see anything in that paper about the last universal common ancestor.

And this study is more about redefining life rather than producing any new information. Not very exciting in science terms.

It's hard to think of any laws that current LLMs actually follow.

The only one I've come up with so far is, "Respond if and only if the user gives you a command (prompt.)"

This is really no different from many other areas in which you can have conflicts of interest. For example, sports! And the answer isn't to ban betting, it's to ban betting by people who have a conflict of interest. This is well-trod ground.

I'm not particularly a fan of Kalshi or Polymarket and don't really care if they exist or not. My point is just that this isn't really any different from anything else.

The biggest clue that he hasn't read the books -- or maybe just doesn't remember them well -- is that all of the books and stories were built around demonstrating ways in which the rules failed. The 0th rule is only one example, and far from the clearest.

Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.