apendleton (u/apendleton)

apendleton commented on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 oneusefulthing.org/p/thre... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

Every time I see an article like this, it's always missing --- but is it any good, is it correct? They always show you the part that is impressive - "it walked the tricky tightrope of figuring out what might be an interesting topic and how to execute it with the data it had - one of the hardest things to teach."

Then it goes on, "After a couple of vague commands (“build it out more, make it better”) I got a 14 page paper." I hear..."I got 14 pages of words". But is it a good paper, that another PhD would think is good? Is it even coherent?

When I see the code these systems generate within a complex system, I think okay, well that's kinda close, but this is wrong and this is a security problem, etc etc. But because I'm not a PhD in these subjects, am I supposed to think, "Well of course the 14 pages on a topic I'm not an expert in are good"?

It just doesn't add up... Things I understand, it looks good at first, but isn't shippable. Things I don't understand must be great?

apendleton · a month ago

I think they get to that a couple of paragraphs later:

> The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems: some of its statistical methods needed more work, some of its approaches were not optimal, some of its theorizing went too far given the evidence, and so on. Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more subtle, and often human-like, concerns.

apendleton commented on Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage? volts.wtf/p/can-second-li... · Posted by u/davidw

cyberax · 2 months ago

Regulation is not a problem, and even the construction costs are not terrible. We can take the Rooppur NPP as a base, it produces reliable energy at 6-7 cents per kWh. The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products, the Western countries don't have a pipeline for NPP production.

For comparison, utility-scale solar with 16 hours of storage is 21 cents: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/higher-renewable-energy-cos...

Just raw solar without storage can be as low as 2-3 cents per kWh.

apendleton · 2 months ago

> The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products

But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.

apendleton commented on Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage? volts.wtf/p/can-second-li... · Posted by u/davidw

epistasis · 2 months ago

And these are not new issues, they've been known for more than 40 years, but never addressed. From the 1983 Led

> But even though radiation damage rates and heat transfer requirements are much more severe in a fusion reactor, the power density is only one-tenth as large. This is a strong indication that fusion would be substantially more expensive than fission because, to put it simply, greater effort would be required to produce less power.

https://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Tro...

apendleton · 2 months ago

In terms of cost of materials to build a reactor, sure, that seems right. But most of the cost of fission is dealing with its regulatory burden, and fusion seems on track to largely avoid the worst of that. It seems conceivable that it ends up being cheaper for entirely political/bureaucratic reasons.

apendleton commented on Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage? volts.wtf/p/can-second-li... · Posted by u/davidw

pfdietz · 2 months ago

High temperature superconducting magnets are not a panacea for the problems with DT fusion. Those issues follow from limits on power/area at the first wall, and the needed thickness of the first wall; these ensure DT reactors will have low volumetric power density, regardless of the confinement scheme used.

With HTSC magnets, a tokamak much smaller than ITER could be built, but ITER is so horrifically bad that one can be much better than it and still be impractical.

apendleton · 2 months ago

Oh for sure, I'm not claiming that CFS (or Tokamak Energy or Type One or whoever else) will for sure succeed, or if they do, that they've already solved all the problems that will need solving to do so. My only assertion/prediction is that I think if they end up succeeding, when future historians look back and write the history of this energy revolution or whatnot, HTSC magnets will turn out to have been the key breakthrough that made it possible.

apendleton commented on Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage? volts.wtf/p/can-second-li... · Posted by u/davidw

epistasis · 2 months ago

There's currently no technological path for fusion to be cheaper than fission. It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined.

And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear. And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous rate.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in places with poor solar resources, like fission is now, but that's a very very long time from now.

apendleton · 2 months ago

> It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined.

Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).

Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.

> And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.

It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.

I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).

apendleton commented on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement wsj.com/business/airlines... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

peterhhchan · 3 months ago

Airbus had to move production from Quebec to Georgia (US)

apendleton · 3 months ago

It wasn't Airbus yet, so more like: Bombardier had to sale a controlling stake to Airbus to gain access to its Georgia production facilities.

apendleton commented on Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis utilitydive.com/news/texa... · Posted by u/walterbell

infecto · 4 months ago

I hear opinions like yours often but I am not sure it’s simple or that the reasons you’re citing are grounded in reality.

What is the alternative, have a state imposed monopoly with a single power company like PGE who I would not see as an ideal operator either. Same can be true for a lot of other similar generators across the company.

You’ll probably bring up the winter storm outage which is inexcusable but their neighbor to the north SPP had very similar failings in being prepared and only faired better because they have interconnects.

Texas has had some of the fastest adoption for wind and solar. It is far from perfect but I also think there is benefit to having multiple generation companies supplying to the grid. You have companies with different expertise and perhaps innovation.

apendleton · 4 months ago

> What is the alternative Other markets in the US are generally energy + capacity markets -- you get paid both for what you actually provide and for your ability to provide a certain level of power, whereas Texas is an energy-only market (EOM). It needn't be the case that that if you don't do an EOM, you have to have a monopoly.

apendleton commented on Navigating Starlink's FCC Paper Trail blog.apnic.net/2024/06/26... · Posted by u/DanAtC

Rebelgecko · a year ago

ULA/Tory Bruno has definitely given tours to YouTubers as well

apendleton · a year ago

As have Rocket Lab, Firefly, Astra (RIP probably), Stoke, Relativity, Spin Launch if that counts, and probably others.

apendleton commented on Stoke Space ignites its ambitious main engine arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/perihelions

cubefox · 2 years ago

> "I’ve been around long enough to know that any rocket development program is hard, even if you make it as simple as possible," [the Stoke Space CEO] responded. "But this industry is going toward full reusability. To me, that is the inevitable end state. When you start with that north star, any other direction you take is a diversion. If you start designing anything else, it’s not something where you can back into full reusability at any point. It means you’ll have to stop and start over to climb the mountain."

I wonder whether this is really true in the long term. Their current "Nova" rocket is projected to deliver only five tons to LEO, so I assume they eventually want to go bigger. The question is whether their current design can be scaled up to a significantly larger vehicle. Otherwise they will also need to "start over", just like the other companies that are currently working on partial reusability will need to come up with different designs once they go to full reusability.

apendleton · 2 years ago

The whole thing that differentiates this company from the dozen other seemingly-interchangeable new-space entrants is the novel technology they've developed to facilitate reuse. Even if it were the case that there isn't a market for five tons to LEO (and to be clear, Rocket Lab seems to be doing decent business launching a lot less) and all this was was a technology demonstrator, why would you build a technology demonstrator that doesn't show off the thing that makes your company interesting?

apendleton commented on ARC Prize – a $1M+ competition towards open AGI progress arcprize.org/blog/launch... · Posted by u/mikeknoop

zug_zug · 2 years ago

I have the exact same impression.

Imo there's no evidence whatsoever that nailing this task will be true AGI - (e.g. able to write novel math proofs, ask insightful questions that nobody has thought of before, self-direct its own learning, read its own source code)

apendleton · 2 years ago

I'm not sure the goal of this competition, in and of itself, is AGI. They point to current LLMs emerging from transformers, which in turn emerged from a general basket of building blocks from machine-translation research (attention, etc.). It seems like the suggestion is that to get from where we are now to AGI, some fundamental building blocks are missing, and this is an attempt to spur the development of some of those building blocks, but by analogy with LLMs, the goal here is to come up with a new thing like "attention," not a new thing like GPT4.