Retric

It’s big.

That’s a function of the amount of processing power involved not the underlying architecture of decision making.

You can ask a model for output directly and stop, or you can recursively ask it to keep refining the output.

That seems to fit the fast vs slow model of human thought reasonably well.

That’s wildly inaccurate.

Millions of Americans working part time are struggling to find full time employment for insurance, but most such jobs are low pay. For livable hourly wages, substitute teachers positions are available in most school districts in the US for example.

High hourly wage semi retired thus part time positions are offered at nearly 40% of all US companies. Even among extremely overworked professions like doctors you’re find many people working ~20 hour weeks.

What isn’t available is part time work with the same potential for career advancement. But that’s the siren’s call of the hedonistic treadmill not some inherent requirement for employment.

Further, even at full time employment a strict 40 hour week while taking your annual vacation would be a massive step up for a large fraction of Americans.

The issue is there’s zero debate that something very close to QM applies to every single interaction between atoms. We glow in the infrared because of quantum mechanics so does a brick. Similarly chlorophyll works because of QM as does ATP, protein folding, etc etc.

The question is does any of the interesting counterintuitive QM effects apply to very large structures and that’s where humans being hot dense objects kills most of the more interesting bits of QM.

> didn't jump to conclusions

Thus people aren’t jumping to conclusions, QM itself is saying no here. For the effect people want to apply means QM itself must be wrong. That’s obviously possible but means you need a completely new theory of physics and evidence to support that.

Serfs had fewer incentives to work more hours.

Capitalism is optimized to produce products and services people want to buy which drives people wanting to work more hours. Which then drives up the costs of things that aren’t replicated endlessly like land and goods that are intentionally left scarce such as admission to elite institutions.

You can work dramatically less and still live well, but the sirens call is very seductive. Food, clothes, transportation, housing, etc all offer real value at minimal cost and little pushing you in that direction.

> That is not small.

There are 70 countries larger than Italy, Russia is more than 50x the size.

America the 4th largest country is still 20x the size of Italy.

Cutting out the “and maintenance” bit is misleading.

It’s commonplace for maintenance issues at non CANDU reactors to extend the “refelling” downtime. So no, CANDU can’t stay online for decades without maintenance and instead have similar downtime issues. The major benefit is when manufacturing plutonium due to shorter fuel cycles, but overall CANDU reactors are less cost effective which is why adoption fizzled out.

A large fraction of all nuclear power stations only have one reactor.

> maintain extremely good uptime

Not from a capacity planning standpoint.

Nuclear power plants need to be taken offline for multiple weeks to months at a time for refueling and maintenance over their lifespans making them a poor fit for base load without extremely costly redundancy in a small country.

That’s not a blank check to suddenly behave irresponsibly.

In Italy battery backed solar is going to win from a lifetime cost perspective and it’s only getting worse over the next 50 years here. The solution isn’t government subsidies it’s making nuclear cheap and safe without subsidies at the same time.

You’re underestimating what motivated thieves can accomplish.

Crackhead and electrician are not mutually exclusive categories.

You can’t assume behavior is unchanged when you change the situation.

In remote areas if you only guard at night they will go in the day.

24/7 coverage 365 days a year at 20$/h = 175,200$/year.

I’m familiar, the issue is IaC only works on a subset of system administration jobs.

Maintaining systems in a tunnel boring machine is a very different than an internet startup.

CI is really only significant on the programming side of things. Networking, systems administration, hardware, etc often don’t have that workflow.

The energy density of specific compost heaps varies by several orders of magnitude it’s not a single number. Volume, moisture content, internal temperature, external temperature, materials being composted, etc all play a significant role.

There’s often more ambiguity than that. “Died of a COVID linked complication with COVID and other issue that is also linked to that complication.” You can’t spend endless resources deciding if something is or isn’t responsible.

Systems use arbitrary buckets like if someone commits suicide in less than six months from coming home after a war might count it, while excluding every case after six months. That’s going to misclassify cases in both directions but means you don’t need to track millions of people for decades or look through mental health details.

Obviously people with more data to work with can make a convincing case you’re wrong, but higher levels accuracy get expensive. In the end we know more than 1 million Americans died of COVID for example, how many more isn’t precisely known but ~1 million is plenty useful for decision making around the next pandemic.

People have multiple motivations at the same time. Many OSS contributors have moved on after LLM’s and that’s completely consistent with their motivations.

Some of the major OSS licenses require attribution when someone copies the work in question, AI companies fail to do so. People getting annoyed when others break the social contract has nothing to do with any other motives they can always benefit the world by doing something else.

You may prefer someone continue maintaining infrastructure you use but they could be just as happy delivering food to the elderly. The desire for people to continue helping you is little more than entitlement here.

In theory sure, in practice programmers are often making a large number of such decisions because nobody else in the org is as invested in the specifics.

Being unsustainable isn’t the same as breaking within the lifetime of the people making the decisions. The average US senator is 66, and that’s young compared to the current Supreme Court or the sitting President.

Being realistic is the opposite of being off.

As the article points out fire is a real concern here, which is one of many reasons making salt caverns so appealing. But it’s also a major driver for distance between each above ground tank, you want to isolate risks so a single failure doesn’t propagate across the facility.

You can’t tile circular objects at 100% efficiency and you definitely don’t want these tanks to touch.

You further need space between them with each other and the edge of your property for a host of other reasons such as being able to inspect and paint each tank. Thus looking at actual facilities is going to give you vastly more resources options than just looking at the footprint of each tank.

EV adoption removes demand for oil as does replacing home heating oil with heat pump etc.

Many uses for oil are based on existing infrastructure, build different infrastructure and demand falls.

Ion thrusters allow satellites to stay in low orbits with significant drag, providing significant protection from Kessler syndrome.

Global trade means domestic prices move even when you’re a next exporter of a commodity.

What’s important is total profits. Video game prices fell because distribution costs tanked and there’s vastly more people playing video games so cutting 20% on the price upfront means far more than 20% extra profit.

Amazon prime was costing me 20$/order so I cancelled it a while ago. Which made many sites competitive with Amazon on shipping.

As to delivery times, many things could take 2 weeks to show up and I wouldn’t care. The range where I can wait 18+ hours but can’t wait ~1 week just doesn’t cover that many of my purchases.

From a cellphone’s perspective a crash = extreme acceleration with different vectors vs a dropped phone, they can also listen for broken glass etc. So even with GPS off that’s detectable.

iPhone 14+ and Android 12+ https://en.androidsis.com/How-to-activate-automatic-accident...

Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably and no longer exist.

There’s levels of R&D required for many technologies where the question goes beyond could this be profitable to what are the risk vs reward that this specific project will succeed.