Lonestar1440 (u/Lonestar1440)

Lonestar1440 commented on US AI Action Plan ai.gov/action-plan... · Posted by u/joelburget

The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount.

If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.

And then we're worse off in several different ways.

Lonestar1440 · 5 months ago

There are a great many assumptions in this argument, and I'm not sure they stand up well to examination.

1) "We're out of easily extractable oil" maybe, but I've heard it before and technology does have a way of marching forward.

2) "Rest of world's oil demand will drop" is possible but certainly not happening today and far from certain.

3) "Then Oil prices will plummet in the US Domestic market" is far from a sure thing even if 2) comes to pass. How do the other producers - who don't have large domestic markets! - react? What happens to global petrochemical demand? And what sort of Industrial policy could shield our markets, even if this happens globally?

At the end of the day, we have a continent full of oil (and Uranium! which I prefer!) and an energy-hungry population.

Lonestar1440 commented on US AI Action Plan ai.gov/action-plan... · Posted by u/joelburget

softwaredoug · 5 months ago

Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point.

It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter.

We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy companies to pursue bad strategies, letting them avoid transforming their business. In 10-20 years they'll be bankrupt and the US will probably have to bail them out for strategic reasons.

Lonestar1440 · 5 months ago

Overall US Energy production has been expanding, faster, each recent year. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/. This is all before you factor in the recent attention to Nuclear, which could come online within the next decade.

The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.

Lonestar1440 commented on Half-Life filfre.net/2024/12/half-l... · Posted by u/dmazin

TrackerFF · 10 months ago

Tried it when it was release, then bought it myself in 1999, after I finally had managed to purchase a new PC - can't remember if it was a Nvidia TNT2 or 3dfx Voodoo 3 card I bought with it. But it was the first time I could play the game without it being sluggish and looking like crap. We had bought a family PC 4 years earlier, which had cost a fortune - but by 1998/1999 it was woefully outdated. Also, a thought: Imagine purchasing a PC today for $5k, and it being unusable for games in 3-4 years.

One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6

On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.

Lonestar1440 · 10 months ago

> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding.

I'm generally skeptical about the use cases for current-gen AI, but very hopeful that it can help us get back to this golden age of game Modding.

I think many people, like me, got lost in all the polygons and shaders soon after Half-Life 1. But if AI tools can make it easier to express Modern game outcomes, the way we could make a funky HL1 mod with the IDEs back then; it could be swing things back.

Lonestar1440 commented on OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/lukebennett

LASR · a year ago

Question for the group here: do we honestly feel like we've exhausted the options for delivering value on top of the current generation of LLMs?

I lead a team exploring cutting edge LLM applications and end-user features. It's my intuition from experience that we have a LONG way to go.

GPT-4o / Claude 3.5 are the go-to models for my team. Every combination of technical investment + LLMs yields a new list of potential applications.

For example, combining a human-moderated knowledge graph with an LLM with RAG allows you to build "expert bots" that understand your business context / your codebase / your specific processes and act almost human-like similar to a coworker in your team.

If you now give it some predictive / simulation capability - eg: simulate the execution of a task or project like creating a github PR code change, and test against an expert bot above for code review, you can have LLMs create reasonable code changes, with automatic review / iteration etc.

Similarly there are many more capabilities that you can ladder on and expose into LLMs to give you increasingly productive outputs from them.

Chasing after model improvements and "GPT-5 will be PHD-level" is moot imo. When did you hire a PHD coworker and they were productive on day-0 ? You need to onboard them with human expertise, and then give them execution space / long-term memories etc to be productive.

Model vendors might struggle to build something more intelligent. But my point is that we already have so much intelligence and we don't know what to do with that. There is a LOT you can do with high-schooler level intelligence at super-human scale.

Take a naive example. 200k context windows are now available. Most people, through ChatGPT, type out maybe 1500 tokens. That's a huge amount of untapped capacity. No human is going to type out 200k of context. Hence why we need RAG, and additional forms of input (eg: simulation outcomes) to fully leverage that.

Lonestar1440 · a year ago

No, we have not even scratched the surface of what current-gen LLMs can do for an organization which puts the correct data into them.

If indeed the "GPT 5!" Arms race has calmed down, it should help everyone focus on the possible, their own goals, and thus what AI capabilities to deploy.

Just as there won't be a "Silver Bullet" next gen model, the point about Correct Data In is also crucial. Nothing is 'free' not even if you pay a vendor or integrator. You, the decision making organization, must dedicate focus to putting data into your new AI systems or not.

It will look like the dawn of original IBM, and mechanical data tabulation, in retrospect once we learn how to leverage this pattern to its full potential.

Lonestar1440 commented on The EdTech Revolution Has Failed afterbabel.com/p/the-edte... · Posted by u/obscurette

Lonestar1440 · a year ago

I took about 60 credits - ~8 hours per week each school semester - of Computer Science courses back in the mid 00's at a top state school. Besides the 101 Course, heavy on Java syntax; and Software Architecture where one learns the dark art of Swing, we used pencil, paper, and white boards (even a few chalk boards!) for the rest.

I use concepts like Dijkstra's algorithm and the Turing machine regularly in my job. They are very real to me - more real than any programming language - because I sat for hours taking paper notes off a whiteboard while some OG Computer guru discussed the topic.

If I didn't need tech to learn Computer Science, kids definitely don't need it to learn Algebra.

Lonestar1440 commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba

consteval · a year ago

This isn't true. Harris has talked about fighting inflation many, many times. The issue is nobody listens, ultimately republicans have been able to support the lie that they are the "party of economics". Past that propaganda piece, nobody cares.

Lonestar1440 · a year ago

I did not hear this, and neither did the median voter. Perhaps that is down to our choice of media diets, but we should take such things as constants when considering political outcomes.

I did hear Trump loudly, constantly, inaccurately talking about Grocery prices.

Lonestar1440 commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba

consteval · a year ago

Trump's economic plans are extremely inflationary, and even a freshman economics student can point that out. It's just that nobody really cares, they just like Trump and will fill in the gaps to justify it.

You can't put extreme tariffs like 200% and expect prices to come down.

The reality is post-covid was an inflationary period because of hyper consumerism. Demand shot up, extremely quickly, and supply was still lagging due to covid. There was really nothing anyone could do. It's unfortunate, but voters don't consider these things. They just see the prices, see a blue president, and go from there.

Lonestar1440 · a year ago

Trump talked about inflation, and his desire to fix it, constantly.

Harris did not.

Once again, Republicans Show Up and they win by default. Yes, his "plans" are nonsensical, but the opponents decided to forfeit the match!

Lonestar1440 commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

l33t7332273 · a year ago

Do you think people with Green eyes are more or less compensated than people with blue eyes?

Lonestar1440 · a year ago

Eye color, unlike Race or Gender, is pretty evenly distributed over the obvious confounding variables like "Age" or "Preference of staying home with children". I'd expect it to be +/- 10%, though probably not "equal" enough to keep "disparate impact" folks from calling it out.