I like the formulation of 'the amount of information we don't know about a system that we could in theory learn'. I'm surprised there's no mention of the Copenhagen interpretation's interaction with this definition, under a lot of QM theories 'unavailable information' is different from available information.
Readit Newssuoduandao3 commented on What Is Entropy? johncarlosbaez.wordpress.... · Posted by u/ainoobler
I keep seeing people say you can’t stop progress (social, technical, etc.) but has this really been tested? There seems to be a lot of political upheaval at least being threatened on the near future, and depending on the forces that come into power I imagine they may be willing to do a lot to protect that power.
Tucker Carlson at one point said if FSD was going to take away trucking jobs we should stop that with regulation.
There are amistics - the voluntary non-use of technology once it's available - which all cultures engage in to greater or lesser degrees. All technology has a price and sometimes it's not worth it - see leaded gasoline for an extreme example.
But in the general sense, I think it's tautologically correct to say better models always lead to better predictions, which always give an edge in competitions on an individual or societal level. So long term I do believe learning trumps ignorance, not in all cases but on average.
suoduandao3 commented on Batteries: How cheap can they get? aukehoekstra.substack.com... · Posted by u/hoerensagen
Aside from it benefiting energy companies, is there any justification for such a law?
In South Africa we’ve had load shedding on and off since 2008. It’s becoming pretty standard for middle class homes to have inverters with batteries and optionally solar.
It does create an issue though that when a load shedding window ends, a whole lot of batteries start charging all at once (especially during non-daylight hours).
Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries. Ideally I would like my batteries to pretty much fully discharge over night with energy from my solar during the day, however, because load shedding is somewhat irregular here, I have it set to not go too low so it has enough energy to tide me over.
I'm sure benefitting energy companies is the real reason... but if everyone had a battery backup and they all started charging at the same time, I suppose it could make it harder to reboot the system after an outage.
suoduandao3 commented on The joy of reading books you don't understand reactormag.com/the-joy-of... · Posted by u/speckx
I don’t know if I’m taking Kafka too literally here, but the books that I read that bite and sting probably fall into two categories. Things that are cynically written in bad faith and things that are hopeless and callous. Torture porn bites and stings, reading hacky partisan politics bites and stings. Anything that makes me feel stupider after reading it bites and stings.
The things that I think that he wants to say, the inconvenient truths, the things that make me see the world in a whole new way, that challenge everything I believe in. Those things fill me with joy and wonder they are just so few and far between.
Maybe the thing he’s getting at is the existential dread? The truth that nothing you do is meaningful? The staring into the abyss? In which case maybe in moderation, but I fundamentally disagree.
in a sense I wonder, if this is what he means, what a weird way to view life, that those things that challenge you are negative.
The one book I recall that 'bit and stung' as I think Kafka meant to say was 1984. How would you categorize that work? Torture porn?
The author links to the somewhat dystopian blog where the email sender is quite proud of their work. Their words (or perhaps that of an LLM):
> Could an AI agent craft compelling emails that would capture people's attention and drive engagement, all while maintaining a level of personalization that feels human? I decided to find out.
> The real hurdle was ensuring the emails seemed genuinely personalized and not spammy. I knew that if recipients detected even a whiff of a generic, mass-produced message, they'd tune out immediately.
> Incredibly, not a single recipient seemed to detect that the emails were AI-generated.
https://www.wisp.blog/blog/how-i-use-ai-agents-to-send-1000-...
The technical part surprised me: they string together multiple LLMs which do all the work. It's a shame the author's passions are directed towards AI slop-email spam, all for capturing attention and driving engagement.
How much of our societal progress and collective thought and innovation has gone to capturing attention and driving up engagement, I wonder.
I do believe that commodified attention is the most logical currency of a postascarce society, so best case... quite a lot.
Note my 'best case' scenario for the near future is pretty upsetting.
I appreciate the sentiment, but territorial boundaries are enforced by violence among almost every species on the planet and we're not that much better than any of them. Law is something we use to put hard limits on violence and sometimes it's inadequate to ensure the obviously right outcome. I do hope that leads to a modulation of where the limits are placed rather than a loss of trust in the whole endeavor.
suoduandao3 commented on Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050 theregister.com/2024/06/2... · Posted by u/defrost
Because France didn’t over regulate the nuclear industry at the behest of the coal industry like as happened in the US? Or are you making a blanket generalization about France without knowing anything about their government because you’ve associated socialism and regulation and France in your head?
As for solar companies stock prices doing great, how is that relevant at all?
It's relevant because you challenged me to put my money where my mouth is, as I'm challenging you. And I have.
You say you haven't because of onerous regulations and it's true, I associate France with a heavier regulatory burden than most Anglophone countries. If it's the coal lobby that killed Nuclear's profitability in the US, I have two questions:
1) why are you attacking renewables rather than the coal industry? If you think Nuclear could compete on an economic basis with renewables, surely you could make common cause with my side of this debate to properly price fossil energy's negative externalities and let the market sort out the winners once that's achieved.
2) Why not build a nuclear reactor in Mexico and export the power to the US? Or in any of the other low-regulation countries with a neighbor looking to import power? If it's regulations that make nuclear unprofitable, surely nuclear investors could regulation-shop.
suoduandao3 commented on Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050 theregister.com/2024/06/2... · Posted by u/defrost
That’s such an uninteresting comment. Use your own money to get solar off the podium? Remember that solar received substantial subsidies to bootstrap via rooftop solar. And fission’s biggest problem isn’t necessarily funding but that there’s all sorts of regulations placed on it to stop it from being successful. So you can’t just go out and build your own nuclear plant.
If regulation is the problem, why is nuclear most successful in France?
And I've had solar companies in my portfolio for the last decade. They're a great investment.
suoduandao3 commented on Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050 theregister.com/2024/06/2... · Posted by u/defrost
The cognitive dissonance involved to say that nuclear needs public subsidies to pay for themselves when wind and solar need the same is pretty wild. And again - wind and solar, with all those subsidies, continues to fail to displace fossil fuels in the grid because the costs continue to ignore the batteries required to supplant baseload (or argue that baseload is an archaic concept with the alternative being a completely different grid which would require a massive replacement). By comparison, France which went all nuclear in the 60s is completely off fossil fuels for their grid whereas companies that continue to go the renewables-only approach continue to see fossil fuel usage continue to grow even if the percentages remain flat.
Then why are you here? If nuclear doesn't need subsidies, why aren't you just investing in the next great nuclear project and proving me wrong that way?
suoduandao3 commented on Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050 theregister.com/2024/06/2... · Posted by u/defrost
Battery prices are going down. Solar prices are going down. Wind prices are going down. Nuclear mostly is going sideways. This is also reflected by deployment, where renewables are on an exponential (logistic) curve and nuclear isn’t. Even in China, where nuclear is growing fastest, the curves look like this: https://www.evwind.es/2024/01/13/nuclear-energy-remains-far-...
TL;DR if fast deployment of low carbon sources is what you want, nuclear definitely is not the answer.
That discrepancy is not surprising, given iteration times and cost of failure. Nuclear has great potential in space exploration, but it's never going to be economical when there are other options. It's no wonder pronuclear activists clog up any discussion of renewable energy, hoping to get some of that public subsidy money for themselves - they know the reactors can't pay for themselves by selling electricity alone.