I’ve always thought the same thing with regards to early explorers. Being on a ship, sailing into the complete unknown, for months. How would you not go insane?
Wow, I would sign up instantly for such a voyage to Mars. I am probably too old but knowing why you are engaged in a heroic task makes one happy to tolerate all kinds of problems. Sure they might get a bit twitchy but gonna stay basically glued.
Every single risk he identifies as a concern regarding China is exactly my concerns with the US having absolute control. Literally the exact same concerns
Yep. Sick of reading stuff that operates under the assumption that America is the faultless good guy and the only one to be trusted with the most dangerous and capable technology.
Among many other things, the Trump presidencies (and, to a lesser extent, the presidency between them) are examples of the the highest levels of leadership being totally incompetent, and have destroyed the above assumption for the rest of the world.
I would argue that they actually don’t lack talent, they have an insane bench of really smart people. What they lack is any sort of direction and leadership. They are a ship lost in the ocean and up until now have been lucky to find a few treasures along the their way.
I truly think it’s because we are in the “Find out” phase and most people have very little hope (justifiably) in anything meaningful actually occurring that can prevent or mitigate climate change even a little bit.
It is also fairly disheartening to see a lot of proposed responses just quietly get shelved because it was economically not idea on the short term. A lot of them were fairly weak to begin with and even they couldn't hold.
I don't think it will be grim forever, this isn't "DOOOOMED, WE ARE ALL DOOMED!" but I am not holding out for the Frutiger Aero future of only a few decades back.
I was gonna say, this just puts more pressure to deliver ground breaking research with limited resources. And if history teaches us anything it’s that scarcity produces ingenuity.
> One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.
Right, and if you come up with an efficiency gain that makes scaling better, e.g. a 50% reduction in required compute. Or even asymptotic improvements e.g. moving from quadratic to linear. Then you're much much better off.
There is nothing about the bitter lesson that says just be dumb and pour money into a hole, you still have to invent the methods to scale well, and being under immense pressure with constraints seems likely to produce that research.
It reminds me a bit of the tyranny of the rocket equation. You can always scale your fuel to get a little more delta V, with ever diminishing returns. …but for something like a DEEP space/interstellar mission, it almost always pays to wait a few more years for a faster propulsion system because you’ll get there fastest by always delaying your launch and chasing better technology.
I’m not sure how well the analogy holds up, or if there’s anything to be learned from it though.
Certainly applies more general imho. Constrained by some resource -> invest resources elsewhere, and/or invest in reducing the constraint(s) encountered.
The implication here is that the only gains left to be had are from scale. That we are already maximally efficient. If that's true, then how has OpenAI repeatedly bragged about reducing the cost of their models by orders of magnitude? (And DeepSeek Flash even more so, of course.)
But we have not been maximally efficient, we keep gaining efficiency. If we keep gaining efficiency, why should we assume it is impossible to gain more?
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
For something like a battery backup that last decades that doesn't need maintenance, maybe you could bury it out of the way (like under a deck or lawn?), maybe even under the frost line.
Underground is a big problem with it comes to water permeation and flooding.
The other potential problem with a lot of energy systems that use things that have hydrogen in them is running power over the systems for long periods of time can start to leak hydrogen. You'll always want to ensure you have ventilation to ensure whatever is outgassing can escape the system. You'll end up with explosions, hydrogen embrittlement, or interesting corrosion in ways you didn't think were possible.
might need to be in some special containment at that size, depending on the technology -- some sodium ion battery implementations are very toxic / highly reactive / flammable.
I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.
And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.
And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...
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