Veedrac

10 ms·

91.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I'm not really following. You said, "I don’t think we can scale up storage enough at any reasonable cost." We checked the math. The math said that even with pessimistic numbers, that assume no cost improvement and that everyt
92.
by Veedrac 1y ago
You don't have to go all the way to battery prices scaling to 5% of the price they are today to consider it likely the price continues to fall at all. Replacing the whole system every 20 years still seems really wild to me, especially
93.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I find this hard to believe. Let's math it. Let's put grid storage at $200k/MWh, or about 4x current battery prices. Let's keep it at that level for sake of argument. Let's very pessimistically say we need to replac
94.
by Veedrac 1y ago
3% GDP over a single decade is certainly not a trivial amount, but it's worth noting the comparison here is spending more than that every year forever. Similarly, 100 TWh sounds like a huge number, and it is, but it's like the equ
95.
by Veedrac 1y ago
This is basically just not true. Energy is fungible and the grid is demand driven. Every watt of solar displaces a watt of something else. In many places like the US we've basically stopped building nonrenewable energy generation as it
96.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Even if, for sake of argument, one outright denies the evident exponential growth in solar, a purely linear extrapolation of 2024's rate from [1] puts solar equal to today's coal output by 2042. Solar is fundamentally a factory pr
97.
by Veedrac 1y ago
> At some point I was even hearing the claim that digitization (e.g. GenAI) was finally divorcing the tight connection between economic growth and resource extraction Kind of? Mostly it's a result of renewables. The US basically doe
98.
by Veedrac 1y ago
The author plot the input/output on a graph, intuited (largely incorrectly, because that's not how sufficiently large state spaces look) that the output was vaguely pretty, and then... I mean that's it, they just said they ha
99.
by Veedrac 1y ago
No. You're not being civil right now. You are lacing your reply with insults.
100.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Ah, you're right, thanks for the correction.
101.
by Veedrac 1y ago
A defense of the Luddites against sewing machines was honestly not something I expected. Support for the Luddites in general, sure I can predict that, but the claim that sewing machines are bad, exploitative, produce "shitty" clot
102.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I appreciate the good these organizations do, but I don't think that's the right measure of it. A person wouldn't in expectation serve global health better by becoming Catholic than by joining EA. That Catholicism is large is
103.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Please be civil. I genuinely don't understand how you can point to someone's calibration curve where they've broadly done well, and cherry pick the failed predictions they made, and use this not just to claim that they'r
104.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I wish it were, but it's clearly not enough. There are plenty of people with healthy emotional empathy in the world, and yet children still die of easily preventable diseases. I am plenty happy to simp for the Gates foundation, but I t
105.
by Veedrac 1y ago
If putting up evidence about how people were wrong in their predictions, I suggest actually pointing at predictions that were wrong, rather than on recent predictions about the future that that you disagree over how they will resolve. If pu
106.
by Veedrac 1y ago
It seems very odd to criticize the group that most reliably and effectively funds global health and malaria prevention for this. What is your alternative? What's your framework that makes you contribute to malaria prevention more or mo
107.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Most of the benefits of manned space exploration are fake, yes. The incentives of the people doing it though aren't to be honest about it. NASA talks about how critical a constant human presence on the ISS is for ‘science’; never once
108.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Trams don't actually scale higher than busses; the highest ridership BRTs have far more ridership than the highest ridership light rail. The key thing that makes it work is having a dedicated right of way. I expect busses get a bad rap
109.
by Veedrac 1y ago
This is one of these sets of information that don't seem to make sense until you fit it all together. Busses aren't much more efficient when riding down a lane than lower occupancy vehicles, but streets aren't bottlenecked by
110.
by Veedrac 1y ago
It's frustrating seeing Block 2 go through pain we thought we were past, but we're talking about flights this year January, March, and May. The last Block 1 flights were on the cusp of success, so we know if the tiles can get a
111.
by Veedrac 1y ago
An explosion can be fine, but the details really matter. The yardstick here is whether this iteration was better than the last, and the pace of progress if so. I don't think this flight reassured anyone that the Starship program is mak
112.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Process isolation only works across processes. You can't just execute an untrusted block of code without setting up a whole sandbox for it.
113.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Without speaking to all of the issues, this is all made much harder by the underlying hardware having extremely bad defaults. The idea that running code on the hardware is itself an unsafe operation means that any time you want to touch it
114.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I've suggested a different take on PNBL in the context of gambling before, to protect people against addiction without outright making it illegal as is widely done today. The idea is if you want to gamble more than some unprotected qua
115.
by Veedrac 1y ago
Fun fact, you can extend this logic to measure the upper limit for how discriminating your RNG's test is, by shuffling a 2^n long vector with a CSRPNG and testing that until failure the same way. When I tried this ~8y ago, I believe th
116.
by Veedrac 1y ago
That New York has made all other bike share companies illegal doesn't mean Citi Bike, a private company without monetary subsidy, isn't selling into a market.
117.
by Veedrac 1y ago
It's free advice but if you're a part of government and think a service is good and should be encouraged, I recommend not proposing bills whose only contents is making the existing market for that thing illegal.
118.
by Veedrac 1y ago
So much of policy success comes down to doing obvious and reasonable things, and most of the problem is how to incentivize making those choices. For all China's flaws, they've figured this out. The best news here is that we might
119.
by Veedrac 1y ago
I don't think you're understanding the comparison here. The Chongqing metro area in 2015 had a population of 13.4m, today it's 18.2m, a 4.8m difference, or 36% growth. The Netherlands went from 16.9 to 18.1 today, a 1.2m diff
120.
by Veedrac 1y ago
These articles which are little more than blind scarequotes peppered with ad hominems invite little more meaningful discussion than more ad hominems. What is the value of a comments section filled with little but "this is stupid and an

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