Veedrac

6 ms·

61.
by Veedrac 1y ago
The intro to the article explicitly states that it will put aside any fanciful ideas that the technology might be better in the future; that "rather than try to forecast the future as it might turn out, I’d prefer to describe reality a
62.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I was thinking more wrt. the top end, which did stall out for 30 years from WWII but has otherwise been on fairly smooth exponentials since the beginning.
63.
by Veedrac 1y ago
For sure; the US kills literally hundreds of thousands of people in ways other countries have solved, and bigger faster vehicles seems at odds with the lack of driver and infrastructure responsibility here. I don't want to make light o
64.
by Veedrac 1y ago
It's wild that after a hundred years there is still exponential progress in the power output of cars. The most unusual part to me is how EVs are fundamentally a consumer technology, so it all rapidly falls into mass production territor
65.
by Veedrac 1y ago
A refusal to even acknowledge that AI might work isn't a very sensible refutation of the risks we're going to face.
66.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Because clearly what Acemoglu did was look at current AI systems, noted that they are pretty good at providing contextually relevant information to people, dumped it in the ‘provides contextually relevant information to people’ economic buc
67.
by Veedrac 1y ago
> Think of AI providing useful, context-specific information to electricians, blue-collar workers, nurses, educators and others, This prediction is insane. Pong was invented 53 years ago. The Apple II isn't even 50 years old. Nor is
68.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Nobody knows. Flight 11 is the last of the 'Block 2' Starships, so not 11, but potentially Flight 12 could be a successful derisking mission of Block 3, and then Flight 13 would be first full operational mission. Actual full reuse
69.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I don't think there's a simple answer to this. It's a lot of things all at once. It's pretty obvious that the programme has had issues that I don't think SpaceX were prepared for, in the parts that aren't the a
70.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I frequently find myself hitting repeat. I have over a dozen I've listened to, according to the stats, more than 50 times each. By your definition that's interesting. QED?
71.
by Veedrac 1y ago
This seems broadly correct? Industrialization was amazing for people's standard of living, but it absolutely meant that the average physical good became detached from their craftsmen's learned and aesthetic preferences.
72.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I've been avoiding trying to class what counts as 'interesting' because it feels like the wrong point to make, for a medium so entwined with personal preferences that are so often at odds with each other. To single out my tas
73.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I also don't want mood playlists, the majority of the time. I'm saying I use AI generations for exactly the opposite — so that I can explore and listen to things that are more intellectually interesting in the ways I find intellec
74.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I think moritzwarhier's replies are highlighting that I didn't miss the point. Maybe I expressed it badly.
75.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I was using ‘consumer preference’ here as a proxy for ‘the things that people tend to care about.’ The point I'm highlighting is that it's weird that when AI audio comes up, there's a reliable crowd of people discrediting it
76.
by Veedrac 1y ago
This argument always seemed weird to me because it's obviously the case that ‘intent and creativity’ is at best a slim minority of consumer preference. If I want a simple dubstep line with random romantic words meaninglessly peppered i
77.
by Veedrac 1y ago
The point being made is equivalent to pointing out that by strict mathematical definition there aren't physically reliazable distinguishably-non-Markovian processes, because computers are finite objects. Yes, you can talk about Markov
78.
by Veedrac 1y ago
The Rust example is illustrative, and indeed I was thinking about it when I wrote my post. One valid angle is to say that languages should hide the reality of the machine from the user any time it would get in the way of the pure semantic d
79.
by Veedrac 1y ago
> and they allow you to support a whole family of things that look like "Promise<T>" and async functions, all using the same framework. You've highlighted here the part that would actually explain the purpose of a mo
80.
by Veedrac 1y ago
The energy use claims are questionable, but I at least get where they're coming from. The water use is the confusing part. Who looks at a server rack and goes ‘darn, look at how water intensive this is’? People use water as a coolant i
81.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Gentoo should be able to be ideological without being stupid.
82.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.
83.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Yes, fair.
84.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I'd assume the design as proposed isn't overbuilt, so we'd need to go from, say, 4 months cycle times to 8 hour cycle times, which is maybe 350x. While that's not going to increase the cost by 350x directly, it is going
85.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I meant ‘bare minimum’ in the sense of what's needed for the system to be profitable, not in the sense of ignoring costs. The problem with using this approach for daily cycled loads is that it relies on passive heat transfer to distrib
86.
by Veedrac 1y ago
500x should be conceptualized as the bare minimum, not evidence of massive low-hanging fruit. A battery that cycles daily makes revenue on its capacity about 350 times in a year. A seasonal energy store makes revenue on its capacity about o
87.
by Veedrac 1y ago
The article never frames this as off-grid storage for individual homeowners. They say > A typical site is a factory, power plant, or town with a large earthen mound at the edge. The mound might be the size of a house for a smaller factor
88.
by Veedrac 1y ago
> The pile of rock required to heat an average home for a couple of weeks handily outweighs the house itself. Maybe I'm failing to follow the intended argument here, but I do not see what is expensive about this. Houses are hollow;
89.
by Veedrac 1y ago
FWIW another way to handle this is a local function with early returns. In this example you can also just use a single regex and most likely win performance too. := is so common in other languages, or even other Python statements, that it d
90.
by Veedrac 1y ago
There is no honor in hiding behind euphemisms. Rationalists say ‘low confidence’ and ‘high confidence’ all the time, just not when they're making an actual bet and need to directly compare credences. And the 16.27% mockery is completel

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