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Nuclear is an answer along with other sources. Opposition to nuclear by the Green Party in the UK is a self-sabotage IMHO. They may argue how limited government subsidies should be allocated but outright opposition to nuclear energy is just stupid to me.

I don't think there is a large intersection between these two groups at least in Europe. Price sensitive people didn't buy SUV. Better-off folks who buy SUV unlikely to be significantly affected by this price increase. In the US it may be different because most cars on the market are SUV/tracks and it's harder to find a small car.

May be base-load is not the best term but in case if batteries and other storages will run out during long cloudy stretch with weak winds nuclear will at least allow to power critical infrastructure. It’s bad that some consumers will loose power but less bad than total apocalypses when the storage is empty and you have no unintermittent power source in the grid.

for the foreseeable future that weather-anomoly backup role is going to be filled by gas. Spins up very fast, nearly zero marginal cost while sitting idle. And yes, it creates emissions, but if you're only using it for rare weather events, you're probably talking >5% of the supply annual total that produces emissions. Which is fine.

Data hoarding predates LLMs. There where other machine learning methods which also needed data for training.

“Before LLM’s there was_____”

I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.

Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable.


Do LLMs require that much more data than the tradional ML approaches we've seen over the years?

That’s not the issue I’m hitting here primarily but yes.

My concern is that I can open up chatGPT and even with a free, “anonymous” account run an assembly line generating tens of thousands of words a day to pump to Twitter that are good enough to prop up multiple fake accounts and cause mayhem.

Now make it thousands of people like me doing it. Now add funding and political orgs. Add company leadership that turns a blind eye so long as it drives engagement. This scale and pipeline wasn’t possible 5 years ago, even if we clearly see the throughline.

I’m not even getting into fake images either. That used to require some know how. There are basically no hurdles and even if most people learn it’s fake, millions likely won’t. If you’re a little lucky, less scrupulous “news” outlets will amplify it for you as well for free.


Yes. This is pretty well established. Neural networks in general are considerably less sample-efficient than traditional ML methods. The reason they became so successful is that they scale better as you increase training data and model size. But only with modern compute power they became useful outside of academic toy model applications.

I really hate this when it's something negative that humans also do. It's like, yeah, people do do that, but why are we automating {negativeTrait}?

Unfortunately the answer is usually people just want to hand wave away the critique for one reason or another. “People already do that” is an easy truism for stifling discussion.

> Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example) at a scale previously unimaginable.

I have the faintest possible hope that such things are going to be the death knell of social media. Yeah a lot of credulous idiots are happily giving AI thirst traps their money for stroking their confirmation bias, but that's just who's left at this point. It feels like every social media app I use is gradually bleeding users who aren't hopelessly addicted to the dopamine treadmill, because what's left is just plain unappealing to them, which selects for the people who are most vulnerable to AI shit, which is far from ideal, but also means those platforms are comprised ever more of that vulnerable population and nobody else. And the problem with all these businesses going through that is without a diverse, growing audience, you just become InfoWars, slinging the same slop to the same people every day, and every ounce of said slop is great for what's left of your audience, but absolute garbage for getting anyone new in it. And it just goes on that way until you sputter out and die (or harass the wrong group of parents I guess).

I wish all social media sites a very haha die in a fire.


Mate you're on a social media site right now that often has AI-generated content displayed at the top of whats "trending". Sure the general user-base does a better job here flagging that sort of stuff, as AI seems to be a shared interest in much of the community, but it still sneaks it's way by

You’re technically right but I think we can all agree HN is significantly different from the major players. The vast majority of us see the same posts and comments, for starters. The churn of posts is also much slower. You log on 2-3 times spread out in a day and you see 90% of the main posts. Top posts linger for 24-48hrs regularly.

No media uploading, memes are few and far between (usually punished), etc.


One of TUI advantages over GUIs (including modern web sites) - all text can be selected/copied (you may need to use modifies in some TUI). It's a bit frustrating when GUI shows text but I cannot select and copy it.

Is that always beneficial? Do you ever want to select the text of a confirm button?

What if it just popped on top in a dialog to the content you were about to select?


It's not only about buttons. A web-app of trading platform I use doesn't allow to copy-paste a fund name (both in web and in the mobile app). I don't think they disallow this intentionally, likely an artefact of GUI framework they use.

That's a very good point. I hadn't thought about that aspect before.

Because in the current job market many job seekers will accept 1st offer after spending months looking for a job without any offers.

> There isn't really an alternative for jet fuel, is there?

But in many cases there is an alternative to air travel, at least for short distances. I don't really understand why railways (at least in the UK) such ridiculously expensive. Return flights from London to Edinburgh start at £30, train tickets between the same cities start at £100. A return ticket from a station in 50 miles from London is more than £65 (peak times).


The current state (no real threat to RSA) ≠ plausible but not certain future state (RSA and EC are broken).


In a long run - hopefully but in a short run big oil (outside the gulf) collecting windfall profits and Asian countries returning to coal.


A substitution of coal for oil, or more likely natural gas, isn't that big a shift of emissions in the short run if it's a stopgap for massive solar and wind investments. Solar and wind install quick.


May be still cheap in the US but in the UK all this almost 2x more expensive than before COVID while salaries nowhere near 2x higher. It's a small fraction of cost of saying in a hotel but not a negligible one.


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