snewman

10 ms·

61.
The industries AI is disrupting are not lucrative(theintrinsicperspective.com)
74 points by snewman 3y ago|104 comments
62.
by snewman 3y ago
Isn't the term for this "unfalsifiable"?
63.
by snewman 3y ago
Because AWS doesn't rent you chips, it rents you cores. If a chip has 50% more cores, that doesn't help you as a renter of cores, just means they get to rent out more cores. Of course it might give Amazon room to offer these insta
64.
by snewman 3y ago
> Graviton4 processors deliver up to 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than Graviton3. This seems ambiguous. Presumably this is 50% more cores per chip. What about "30% better compute perf
65.
by snewman 3y ago
Source? My understanding is that this can be true in some regions but requires fairly aggressive use of, not only overbuilt renewables (which may pose challenges in land use and siting), but also long haul transmission (also difficult to si
66.
by snewman 3y ago
HVDC lines can be integrated into a conventional grid; China is doing it, and NREL models for the US grid include scenarios where we do it as well.
67.
by snewman 3y ago
Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (t
68.
by snewman 3y ago
Have you run the numbers on this, or are you just imagining? In the 70s, solar and (to a lesser but still substantial extent) wind were still extremely expensive, impractical for large scale use. As were the batteries that are needed to smo
69.
by snewman 3y ago
The board's motivation may have been good, they may be "in the right" here (it depends on your view on AI risk, and also on a lot of details of what was going on that we still don't know). But unambiguously they executed
70.
by snewman 3y ago
Help me understand, what was gained by removing "co-founder and CEO"? The fact that readers can figure it out is not actually a statement of a benefit, it's merely an argument that the loss is bounded.
71.
by snewman 3y ago
Blowback was inevitable but the magnitude was not. The board absolutely bungled this, full stop. Maybe Altman had to go, maybe he didn't – I don't claim to understand the backstory – but the way the board handled and is handling t
72.
by snewman 3y ago
For renewables, most of the cost is up front, then they're cheap to run because they don't need fuel. (High capex, low opex.) Fossil fuel plants have more of a mix of upfront and operating costs. High interest rates make it expens
73.
by snewman 3y ago
And to be clear (for anyone who doesn't know, I presume parent does and simply didn't think it necessary to explain), this "carbon neutrality" argument is entirely bogus, because one molecule of methane has far more clim
74.
by snewman 3y ago
Good grief! At a guess, it is copy/paste from MATLAB marketing materials, intended as a sort of appeal to authority – "we used MATLAB so our results must be good".
75.
by snewman 3y ago
Bear in mind that grid electricity is getting cleaner over time. We need to skate to where the puck is going, which is 100% clean electricity. Now is an excellent time to be developing and preparing to scale technologies that work well with
76.
by snewman 3y ago
I'm honestly not sure what your point is. Are you saying that, if there was less cold quantitative analysis of the global CO2 potential from forest management, people would be planting more trees in their local neighborhoods? Absolutel
77.
by snewman 3y ago
Planting more trees (and, more important, preserving existing trees) is an important tool in the toolkit, but shouldn't be overestimated, and I don't think the word "easily" is warranted. Project Drawdown estimates that
78.
You're Invited to a Colonoscopy(dynomight.substack.com)
2 points by snewman 3y ago|0 comments
79.
by snewman 3y ago
Related: robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks just wrote up an incident where a Cruise cab he was riding in stopped suddenly in the middle of an intersection, nearly causing a bad collision: http://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehi
80.
by snewman 3y ago
The development of better power technologies is ~necessary, but not sufficient, to eliminate coal (and other carbon-emitting energy sources). There are all sorts of friction effects which can delay a migration to clean power even when the e
81.
by snewman 3y ago
[author here] > And AGI doesn't need to completely destroy the earth to be really bad for humans. Just taking over a lot of the resources we need would do the trick. Agreed. I am not arguing that AI could not become superhuman, or c
82.
by snewman 3y ago
This excellent tale has appeared many times on HN; here's dang, in 2021, listing some of the past threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213472
83.
The AI explosion might never happen(amistrongeryet.substack.com)
43 points by snewman 3y ago|48 comments
84.
by snewman 3y ago
Unfortunately you can't really rely on this sort of comparison between numbers obtained from different sources, except in the most unambiguous circumstances, which rarely arise for a complex topic such as sector emissions and cost of m
85.
Doug Lenat has died(garymarcus.substack.com)
550 points by snewman 3y ago|173 comments
86.
by snewman 3y ago
In this scenario, it's nothing to do with the cloud provider. Migrating a live production system is inherently difficult. You can make a reasonable analogy to moving houses – say, with two kids who are in school, and while you and your
87.
by snewman 3y ago
It's not so much that EC2 Classic offered any features that were difficult to live without. It's just that migraine away from it means migrating, period. You need to move all of your systems, including any data stored on those sys
88.
by snewman 3y ago
Actually, I believe the claim in the article is precisely that spending more time leads to better posts and that this leads to more subscribers. Basically, the author feels that he achieves more (in readership growth, but also on other dime
89.
by snewman 3y ago
If you have very wide error bars, shouldn't your estimate of impact probability be much lower than 3%? Most trajectories within your error bars will not intersect the Earth.
90.
by snewman 3y ago
Actually the definition of 'grok' is discussed in the book; you can find some relevant snippets at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok . My recollection is that the book says the original / literal meani

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