The media seems hellbent on torching AI. My news feeds are nothing but stories about the evils of data centers, how useless AI is, and how much everyone hates it.
The media is hellbent on torching it, and on propping it up against all reason too, both things can be true. HN is no exception. It's another noisy room problem where the distortion in dialogue is rapidly leading us into a distorted reality. https://thenoisyroom.com/
For people who are actually interested in reality, participation in the mainstream discourse either way is a strategic error. The best thing to do is to check out from all of it, actually read the literature and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge, and stop reading the pro/anti marketing noise from the media or corporate PR
> and listen to the technical heros who are working at the edge
that's terrible advice. those guys dedicate their lives to the advancement of this field. there's no way you will get a tempered, balanced answer from them. none of them will gravitate towards "yeah, maybe we should stop or slow down for a while".
Again you're probably thinking of the forum discussion / booster blogs / executive interviews that I'm suggesting you should leave behind. Papers are the only place left where nuance is even allowed and might actually be encouraged. Just try it, you'll be surprised. Depends on the research but.. a lot of it is kind of incentivized to align with AI skeptics actually because it leaves many things open for invention, study, and fixes
From AI companies’ perspective, it’s free press… why would they even think about stopping people talking about it!
This about it like this - if you were a CEO of a company that ONLY made garden gnomes, would you rather a) nobody ever talk about garden gnomes, or b) garden gnomes be in the news every day, people protesting because they’re losing their jobs because of garden gnomes, companies making billions and collectively investing trillions to making garden gnomes, people starting startups to support the garden gnomes pipeline, consumer electronics prices having huge variance because of the demand to support garden gnomes etc.
When you’re one of the largest garden gnomes companies in the world, you want garden gnomes to saturate the zeitgeist
Seems like a strategy that could backfire, if Congress passes legislation outlawing the manufacture, sale, distribution, possession, and admiration for garden gnomes. PT Barnum only thought there was not such thing as bad publicity because he was pulling up the stakes and leaving town before anyone woke up.
It drops compared to the immediate vicinity, but mountain areas in the hottest parts of the US can still be very hot, and even non-mountain areas in the coldest parts of the US can still be very cold, so perhaps we should just say the coldest areas.
AFAIK The USA is one of the most anti-union non-authoritarian countries for a very long time. In other countries people receive a lot more support and protections for the right to organize
Unions often exert more power at the state and local level. In certain states, they can consistently wield a lot of power.
Unions in the US tend to be much more aggressive than they are in other places, which has in part led to their decline. Americans historically have tended to hate unions at the times when they’re powerful, and love them at times when they’re weak. In other words, people like the idea of unions in theory, but hate them in practice.
It that’s true, why is union membership declining? why did Trump et al gut the NLRB? why do starbucks unionized employees STILL not have a contract years after forming a union?
They certainly have some big shoes to fill. But I'm glad they didn't die with their boots on, and got their foot in the door at this new opportunity. It certainly didn't help that they were running on a shoestring budget.
The problem seems to be that many people view government services as a jobs program. Unfortunately, you can't maximize the number of well paying jobs a program creates AND provide high quality service AND control costs.
This is what happened to me. I would guzzle orange juice. I couldn’t start a day unless I had a giant glass of it. Then I found out that it was just all sugar and not much else. I don’t think I’ve had a glass of the stuff in over a decade.
Well, there are some very important differences. 1) It’s super well known what’s going on with SpaceX. Every investor should know that there’s a lot of good stuff along with some steaming hot garbage. 2) SpaceX isn’t systemic to the economy. If SpaceX and all its subsidiaries shut down and its investors got nothing back, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.
On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.
I think you can argue that AI is going to explode and take over the economy, and it’s still a bubble.
I think one possible route is that cloud capacity just becomes totally commoditized and none of the hyperscalers will be able to extract the kinds of profit margins that would allow them to make a good return on their investment (model makers will fall victim to this too). Ultimately, what may happen is that market competition for everything explodes since AI and robots can do all the work, prices for everything (goods, services, assets) collapses, and no one is really any richer than anyone else.
Even if the AI frontier becomes "totally commoditized" it will still be reliant on a scarce factor, namely leading-edge chips. Chipmakers will ultimately capture that value, because competing it away would require expanding the industry and that's a very slow process involving billion-dollar expenses planned far in advance (multiple years, and that lead time can only expand further as the required scale gets even larger).
Rankine cycle efficiency can be up to 45%; monocrystalline solar panels ~25%? I suppose you aren't paying for the sunshine, but if cloudy days affected coal power, James Watt wouldn't be famous.
Luckily solar panels work for 30+ years while coal works for only as long as you burn it. You can also recycle solar panels, but try reversing entropy to get your coal back and you’ll see what’s up. Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage, etc.
"Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage,"
Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?"
But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
There’s the direct answer to your question, cost of installed grid battery storage are getting cheaper by the user and it’s completely viable option at present. It’s not some vague fantasy idea like power plants in space or something, just look at California’s energy mix during peaks that in just a few years has become dominated by solar+batteries.
For longer periods of low-sun in a climate like Ireland see the other renewable options he mentioned. Plus a couple natural gas plants for fallback that can comfortably sit idle until needed.
If some combo of renewables are used 90% of the time when possible, no one is going to be mad about modern clean-burning LNG plants compared to a toxic, expensive relic of the past like coal.
Current trends make it clear the future will be renewables, grid battery storage, and however many natural gas plants are needed for reliability based on local climate (plus keeping nuclear online if you already have it). And that “future” is pretty much here already in places like California.
I wonder how cheap one would have to make electricity to make up for CA's silly regulatory environment and confiscatory taxes.
Places like California, which is right up there w/ Tunisia as the best-case scenario for solar, will have so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills there to take advantage.
No one ever claimed CA would have “so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills”.
Your “concern” was that there is no non-fantasy means to deal with transient output of solar or other renewables, I showed you how that is being implemented in the real world as we speak to deal with CA’s notorious peak evening load without blackouts. And it will only become more cost effective over time thanks to economies of scale.
CA has just started bringing grid storage online in the last few years but it’s already making an appreciable difference during peak times that in the past years resulted in blackouts.
It shows the clear, achievable path to a renewable + battery (+ nat gas) future that’s 95% renewables and highly resilient. Grid storage isn’t a “10 years away” fantasy like anti-renewable advocates might wish and it’s the critical piece to make those plans possible.
What game are you playing, where the provision of electricity for industrial use isn't a goal?
Again-I have been hearing for 25 years about the infinite potential of solar energy in CA-and yet, even now, you need to play games as to when the cheapest time of day it is to charge your car from your residential address.
> there's no significant recycling of solar panels
There will be when it’s needed in a decade or two. Right now solar farms installed recently have years to go until they’re decommissioned. There’s already processes for it.
There’s no significant recycling of solar panels because they’re still in operation and don’t need to be recycled. Turns out solar panels last decades with only minor degradation so they haven’t needed to be recycled at scale.
They’re almost entirely glass and aluminium anyway. We know how to recycle glass and aluminium.
If you're going to make that comparison, you need to compare apples-to-apples and include solar efficiency in the coal too. After all coal's energy originally came from the sun. Plants converted the sunlight into energy at an efficiency of about 1%. A miniscule fraction of that energy went into the plant growth, and then a miniscule fraction of that energy was captured when the plant was converted into coal.
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