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Kaiser has been working with Stanford for years, to train different models, especially with images. A good use-case could be for diabetic retinopathy. There are more and more diabetics and this can affect vision over time, if not properly diagnosed.

Kaiser has ramped up and now takes more and more eye pictures to check for diabetic retinopathy. But it is a slow and manual process, requiring optometrists and ophthalmologists to seat and careful check pictures one by one (takes about 20min per picture). It is just possible to screen as many as we should screen. Here AI could really help, and pre-scan pictures for special attention, and be able to screen order of magnitude more patients.

I guess at the end it might be something like should we just screen 10 patients with a doctor, or pre-screen 10,000 in that same time, and have the doctor still see 10 patients ?

All good questions on land use, and competition between food and energy (being corn/ethanol or solar).

My understanding is that US produces way too much corn, and it costs taxpayers ($2.2 billion in subsidies per year, source: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...). Maybe instead of artificially propping up the corn industry, we could use few solar farms instead ? That might incidentally help with the US diabetes (55lb of high-fructose corn syrup per american per year, the highest in 42 countries study, source: https://news.yahoo.com/countries-greatest-high-fructose-corn...)

Funny, when I was maybe 10yo, I got scared when I realized that given the number of notes is finite, the number of different melodies would be too, and so we would have one day to put new lyrics on old melodies.

I agree it works both ways. I just wanted to remind that electric transportation is a small part of the overall electricity consumption (0.02 Quads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit)), while industry & commercial accounts for 13.3 Quads, 3 order of magnitude lower.

In "Transportation", there are a lot of non-electric consumption (in US in 2022: 89.45% oil, 5.7% biomass, 4.69% NatGas, only 0.08% electricity, and other) because only few trains and individual cars are using electricity the rest like boats, planes, and most trains in US runs on oil.

So, yes it is good for electric vehicles to charge during the day when solar produces the most. But the vast majority of the electricity consumption (in US 99.9%) is from the Industry, Commercial and Residential while the transportation is only in US 0.1% (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...).

Most of the Industry, Commercial and even Residential needs electricity at night, and storing that kind electric energy (48.57 Quads per year... that is 9,246,178,571 barrel of oil or 0.2 barrel of U235) is currently difficult.

Lots of energy is consumed by the industry and some industries do not sleep at night. Blast furnaces for instance need a huge amount of energy (https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-energy-us...) continuously.

Last month I was traveling in Sri Lanka, and seeing all the tuk tuks zipping around, using those sub-optimal combustion engines, I thought that it would be little revolution when one would start selling EV rickshaws. Those vehicles are light, and do not do long drives (smaller battery needed), can charge once a day.

It would have to change few habits, but combined with a swapping battery all Gogoro for instance, it could be a nice solution for public transportation.

Yet still based on GE J85 turbojet https://www.hermeus.com/chimera

> Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily...

Shein and Temu shipping all through planes.

Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great. But the amount of trash that it would generate is staggering.

It feels like it is a massive transfer of trash from one country to the rest of the world... done in individual packages... sent by plane. I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it.

Car dealership in US are in their own league. Coming from Europe it is difficult to appreciate at first. But when you see headlines like: "Roma was purchased last month by Texas car dealership magnate Dan Friedkin, who is worth $4.1 billion."

Yes, that a Texan car dealership buying the AS Roma (soccer team, Italian capital).

When I came in US, I had no car, I saved money, went to dealership (Toyota) and pointed a used Matrix, test drive it, and said, I will buy it. The guy started to show me a long form (like 3 letter pages long form)... I said I do not want to make a loan. He looked at me like I came from another planet. I want to buy the car. He said that he can only accept a bank check. It was close to noon on Saturday, I asked if he could drive me with the Matrix to the nearest bank quickly, he reluctantly said yes. Maybe he thought I was going to scam him or something. He did stay in the car, while I asked for a bank check. He drove me back to the dealership. Unfortunately I had to leave the car, so they do a final inspection and prepare some papers. I came a week later to pick up the car.

Clearly the sales guy seemed a bit puzzled by the transaction. But there was no way I was going to drag a car purchase process like describe in https://github.com/kutinden/buyingacar/blob/main/README.md (13 steps !?)

Now I see the why Tesla sells online. US dealerships have been fat cats for too long.

Are we blaming Waymo now for letting one car driving through a busy street ?

It does not warrant to set the car on fire.

Indeed it looks like a low hanging fruit.

Do we know where officially Waymo is on the SAE J3016 scale ?

I used Waymo in San Francisco, and to my not-expert eye, it did perform very well already.

Maybe we should not use so much water (for agriculture) in a desert area at the first place. Feels like we are putting fixes on top of fixes.

"A Saudi Arabian company grows alfalfa on farmland in Arizona and California and sends it overseas to feed the country's cows. These legal farming operations extract groundwater in Arizona and water from the Colorado River across the border in California, experts say." source: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/news/article/koch-discusses-saud...

Maybe if we stop exporting Colorado water packed in alfalfa and other agri-products, we would have enough water ?

Exporting water through alfalfa to Saudi Arabia who indeed banned alfalfa fields in their country because it was consuming just too much water, is one of the problem we should fix before installing PV and batteries in the desert, and dump concentrated brine somewhere.

> If needed, in sure we could get off oil in a matter of a decade or less...

I would be less optimistic as 80% of the energy used is fossil fuel (source: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...).

Everything that we wear (plastic) or eat (fertilizers, and farming, trucking) comes from fossil fuel. Oil is everywhere. It is going to take a while to withdraw from our addiction.

> We should have been off oil in the 80s or 90s after the crisis in the 70s...

Oil is a fr(e)aking miracle. It is virtually free (just drill), it is energy dense, easy to transport, it makes fertilizers which allowed to fed the planet with less fields, it makes plastic, etc.

The countries fortunate enough to have some in their underground, have a natural printing money machine.

But, it is a limited resource, and using it at the scale we have been doing in the past 100 years, is impacting the environment.

> but instead we just paid off powerful men in the Middle East with weapons and kicked the can.

I agree that we kept kicking the can. But fortunately (or unfortunately if we are not prepared) it will eventually come to an end. It takes million of years to produce oil, and we consume it faster and faster. There will a time, where we would not find the easy oil, and it would become more and more expensive to find. If we are not prepared, then chaos will follow (wars as the last countries that have access to oil will keep it for them, economies will collapse as worldwide trade will break, etc.)

Clearly the past 100 years have been golden thanks to oil. We need to build a future where oil would be less abundant and more expensive.

It might not be voluntary decided, but it is more a less happening. renewable is used more and more, and nuclear is getting more interest lately.

Lots of countries are putting incentives to electrify their economy, which is a necessary first step to later switch to renewable and nuclear (and ditch coal or gas).

The global economy is addict to fossil fuel. So fossil fuel like any powerful drugs that is in limited supply (limited resource), it is threatening the global economy, if we continue to use it OR if we stop to use it.

We need a withdraw plan. Where we shift usage from fossil fuel to other energies (hopefully less damaging for environment, and more sustainable).

People asking to cut the production without a plan are as dangerous than people who are asking to keep using fossil fuel.

As of now, fossil fuel is crucial for national security. The whole economy runs on fossil fuel.

But fossil fuel has 2 main drawbacks:

1. Contribute to global warming

2. It takes millions of years to produce, and few days to consume (aka limited resource)

So, we need to adapt the economy to those 2 drawbacks. Even if one thinks that global warming is not an issue, then the fact that it is a limited resource is going to eventually kick in (coal, oil and gas peak).

In the current economy, any drastic change of fossil fuel price would end in chaos. That is the threat. The sooner we minimize our dependance on fossil fuel, the better.

In some industries, we would need fossil fuels for a long time as it is difficult to replace them (e.g. fertilizers, plastics). in some other industries (transportation, heating), we can substitute fossile fuels with other energies (e.g electricity generated using renewable or nuclear).

So, yes it is a matter of national security, and that is why we need to adapt our economy to use less fossil fuel. And obviously we need to extract fossil fuel, as long as we can, during that transition.

"no one wants nuclear" is not exactly the conclusion of the last COP. Several countries agreed to triple the electricity produced by nuclear.

But you are correct, that some EU countries lost their source or natural gas (Nord stream 1 & 2 blowed up in 2022) and cannot transition on a whim and so needs gas (liquefied since all previous pipes are not working).

I agree this is armchair debate.

The article is made by a business journalist on an Australian report, with a catchy title. It is a complex subject.

The question of the mix is interesting, and probably more complex than it looks as we might have to take the "electrification" of industries, transportation, heating, etc. over time into consideration.

If EV become more popular, if trucks and trains start to use more electricity, if heat-pumps become more popular, etc. the demand for electricity would grow over what the country is currently using. So new capacity would be needed, and electricity would be even more critical and would require to be more reliable than ever before.

That is why nuclear has a part to play to make the grid stable and reliable, on top of renewable deployment.

No one.

We did not say that there is no wind at night, but it is possible to have no wind some nights. And since at night there is no sun, that is why the price of electricity would go up, if there were not nuclear (or gas/coal) to run during those nights.

Is comparing nuclear and renewable like apples and oranges ? One can run anytime, and the other depends on weather, time of day.

If we only had renewable the price of electricity would go up at night, when there is no sun or wind.

Unless to compare the GWh they included batteries for renewable, it is difficult to compare to nuclear.

He seems happy with his choice of life. He might enjoy his life, even without internet, modern music or technology. Interesting experiment for sure.

Wondering if AI is going to lower the bar for him. Instead of tapping on screen, clicking on a mouse, or typing on a keyboard, we could soon just talk to a computer. Most of modern careers are basically learning how to communicate to a computer. AI could make some of those skills obsolete letting more people to communicate to computers.

Surprised to not see Arnault (LVMH, US$240.7 billion in April 2023, according to Forbes) and Bettencourt (L'Oréal, Bettencourt Meyers is worth $94.9 billion, Bloomberg estimates) in the list.

With "up to 10,000 new items on its website daily" (source: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1204983212/shein-america-fast...) Shein has really accelerated model compare to H&M. Not that H&M is good at the first place.

As long as the piece is durable, it should be fine. I might be extreme, as I prefer fewer stuff of better quality, that last years. Like a pair of jeans that I can wear every day for years.

It might hit a wall, but it is supercharged right now. It does not look like a sustainable model for the planet for sure. Feels like they build items that are used few days, and then end up in landfill.

Not 100% sure, but it look like with "Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily" (source: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1204983212/shein-america-fast...), it is H&M and Zara on steroids.

The expiration date on clothes is so short that now transporting it by boat is not too slow, and they have to take plane.

(writing this post, while wearing 4yo jeans, and 5yo t-shirt)

:) maybe as a personal challenge, will see.