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180716106
comment
byhey!
6 @12:40PM
(#65962628)
Attached to: 99% of New US Energy Capacity Will Be Green in 2026
I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.
Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.
It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.
This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.
180715970
comment
byhey!
6 @11:54AM
(#65962552)
Attached to: The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong
Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.
But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.
As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.
It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.
And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.
180655794
comment
byhey!
@06:32PM
(#65948746)
Attached to: Gasoline Out of Thin Air? It's a Reality!
No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it
This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.
180653930
comment
byhey!
@10:22AM
(#65947928)
Attached to: NASA Confident, But Some Critics Wonder if Its Orion Spacecraft is Safe to Fly
It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.
Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.
The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.
While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.
180653870
comment
byhey!
@09:52AM
(#65947890)
Attached to: AI Luminaries Clash At Davos Over How Close Human-Level Intelligence Really Is
I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.
180640670
comment
byhey!
26 @06:04PM
(#65942994)
Attached to: Moderna Curbing Investments in Vaccine Trials Due To US Backlash, CEO Says
For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.
The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.
180576634
comment
byhey!
6 @06:10PM
(#65922448)
Attached to: EV Roadside Repairs Easier Than Petrol or Diesel, New Data Suggests
Had one last year -- a 12 v battery died and needed roadside replacement. Jump starts are still pretty common. So is overheating in the summer -- requiring coolant top-ups, even hose replacement can be done roadside. Some modern cars can go into "limp" mode because of faulty gas caps and you might have to reset the ECU in some cases to get home or to a shop. Those are just the ICE specific problems.
But yeah; ICE cars since 2000 have reached a level of reliability that would be unheard of when I started driving 40 years ago.
180570556
comment
byhey!
@06:46PM
(#65919502)
Attached to: Should AI Agents Be Classified As People?
...if we're hyping our company's Ai snake oil. We should absolutely *not* classify them as people for other purposes, e.g., legally: it wasn't my company your honor that did that bad thing, it was the AI.
Sixty years ago it would have been "solid state". Ten years ago it would have been "block chain". Ten years from now it will be something else.
180470413
comment
byhey!
5 @01:43PM
(#65886587)
Attached to: Google's 'AI Overview' Wrongly Accused a Musician of Being a Sex Offender
Whatâ(TM)s interesting here is that as a professional musician, this guy is a public figure and the âoeactual maliceâ standard for defamation applies â" a standard that was designed when defamation could only be done by a human being.
This requires the defendant to make a defamatory statement either (1) knowing it is untrue or (2) with reckless disregard for the truth.
Neither condition applies to the LLM itself; it has no conception of truth, only linguistic probability. But the LLM isnâ(TM)t the defendant here. Itâ(TM)s the company offering it as a service. Here the company is not even aware of the defamatory statement being made. But it is fully aware of their modelâ(TM)s capacity to hallucinate defamatory âoefactsâ.
I think that because the tort is based in the common law concept of a duty of care, we may well see the company held liable in some way for this kind of thing. But itâ(TM)s new law; it could go the other way.
180454181
comment
byhey!
025 @01:39AM
(#65881115)
Attached to: 'Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes'
The laborious, linear interface is of course another limitation of all kinds of tapes -- digital or analog. But getting rid of this also changes human behavior. People don't listen as much to long form collections; they don't even necesssarily listen to entire songs.
A mix tape is essentially a long format program manually and personally curated for you by another human being, unmediated and indeed untracked by any third corporate party. Losing the mix tape was a real cultural loss. Sure they didn't sound great, but they didn't have to.
I suppose every technological advance is potentially double edged. When people get books and literacy, verbal storytelling declines. That doesn't make books bad. the technical limitations of verbal stories -- say limited repeatbility -- are real limitations, but that doesn't mean something wasn't lost.
180377975
comment
byhey!
025 @11:48AM
(#65855913)
Attached to: Arkansas Becoming 1st State To Sever Ties With PBS, Effective July 1
PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.
What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.
By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.
180373011
comment
byhey!
5 @06:16PM
(#65854749)
Attached to: China Leads Research in 90% of Crucial Technologies - a Dramatic Shift this Century
Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.
180371817
comment
byhey!
5 @03:07PM
(#65854275)
Attached to: China Leads Research in 90% of Crucial Technologies - a Dramatic Shift this Century
Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.
It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.
180358703
comment
byhey!
2025 @08:37PM
(#65850123)
Attached to: Democrats Warn Their Party May Try To Unravel Any Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery Deal
Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.
So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.
That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.
180335653
comment
byhey!
5 @08:59PM
(#65844859)
Attached to: No Rise in Radiation Levels at Chernobyl, Despite Damage from February's Drone Strike
no problem.
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