Womble
@Womble@lemmy.world
- Comment on UK to lower voting age to 16 9 hours ago:
Given that in the 2024 election the two most left wing groups (lab+lib+green voting) were 18-24 women followed by 18-24 men, probably not.
- Comment on Chinese Scientists Create Cyborg Bees That Can Be Controlled Like Drones for Undercover Military Missions 4 days ago:
Why would you bother mind controlling bees in order to make them do the thing they would be doing anyway?
- Comment on Welcome to the Labour police state 1 week ago:
They are known to be bankrolled by James “Fergie” Chalmbers, American millionair heir, “communist” who by his own words “chants death to America every day” and is a supporter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has been on Russia state sponsored visits to the regions annexed byt Russia writing glowing praises of them.
It seems likely that at least Palestein action are useful idiots for the Russian state. Which isnt to say that banning them as a terrorsit group isnt massive overreach and completely undemocratic.
- Comment on Large Language Model Performance Doubles Every 7 Months 1 week ago:
If you are just talking transitor density I believe it still is, but even if not, my point was that it had exponential growth spanning over many decades.
- Comment on Large Language Model Performance Doubles Every 7 Months 1 week ago:
That said, exponentials don’t exist in the real world, we’re just seeing the middle of a sigmoid curve, which will soon yield diminishing returns.
Yes, but the tricky thing is we have no idea when the seemingly exponential growth will flip over into the plateuing phase. We could be there already or it could be another 30 years.
For comparison Moores law is almost certainly a sigmoid too, but weve been seeing exponential growth for 50 years now.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 1 week ago:
From historical data, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither are providing enough.
The difficulty there is that there are a lot of places where you frequently get multiple weeks of both solar and wind at <10% capacity (google for dunkelflaute) that would need an implausible amount of storage to cover.
The OP article is already talking about 5x overbuilding solar with 17h of storage to get to 97% in the most favourable conditions possible. I dont see how you can get to an acceptably stable grif in most places without dispatchable power.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 1 week ago:
97% is great (though that is just for vegas) but it is still a long way from enough. Its a truism of availability that each 9 of uptime is more difficult to get to than the last, i.e. 99.9% is significantly more difficult/expensive than 99%
Then get it from the sources that already exist.
The problem here is that you cant simultaneously say “Solar is so much better than everything else we should just build it” and “we’ll just use other sources to cover the gaps”. Either you calculate the costs needed to get solar up to very high availability or you advocate for mixed generation.
None of which is to say that solar shouldnt be deployed at scale, it should. We should be aware of its limitations howver and not fall prey to hype.
- Comment on Solar + Battery (covering 97% of demand) is now cheaper than coal and nuclear 1 week ago:
97% sounds impressive, but thats equivalent to almost an hour of blackout every day. Developed societies demand +99.99% availability from their grids.
- Comment on UK | Glastonbury’s Kneecap censorship has backfired 2 weeks ago:
Compared to
It’s easy when you’re an obscure band to bellow “kill your local MP” or bray “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”.
Yeah, pretty much. Very few people would argue against stopping killing Gazan civilians (even if they are not willing to back the measures that would result in that, like applying real presure to Israel), that makes it a fairly apolictial thing to say. Advocating killing MPs or supporting Iranian proxies is certainly a lot more contencious.
- Comment on This bill opens the door to scandal, abuse and injustice, disabled activists say after assisted dying bill vote (UK) 2 weeks ago:
And yet, the overwhelming majority of people in the UK, including disabled people, want this change in the law. So much so that literally every single constituency in the UK has a majority in favour of it, most with 2/3s majorities or more.
The people arguing against it are pretty much all religious groups, often with funding from the USA, who are being coy about their motives. They often dont anounce that the same groups protesting this are the same groups who protest abortion for example
And yet still you still people like the tanky replying on this page trying to make out that this is kier starmer (who did nothing to promote this bill other than vote in its favour) personally organising a genocide of disabled people for the profit of American pharma companies.
- Comment on Anthropic tested Claude's(LLM, AI Chatbot) ability to manage a physical “storefront” to mixed results, as the AI struggled with pricing strategy and inventory management 2 weeks ago:
I doubt anyone expected it to work completely, but it is interesting to see to what extent it worked and how it failed (halucinations and sycophancy)
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 3 weeks ago:
Except it isnt, because the judge dismissed that part of the suit, saying that people have complete right to digitise and train on works they have a legitimate copy have. So those damages are for making the unauthorised copy, per book.
And it is not STEALING as you put it, it is making an unauthorised copy, no one loses anything from a copy being made, if I steal your phone you no longer have that phone. I do find it sad how many people have drunk the capitalist IP maximalist stance and have somehow convinced themselves that advocating for Disney and the publishing cartel being allowed to dictate how people use works they have is somehow sticking up for the little guy
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 3 weeks ago:
You think that 150,000 dollars, or roughly 180 weeks of full time pretax wages at 15$ an hour, is a reasonable fine for making a copy of one book which doe no material harm to the copyright holder?
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 3 weeks ago:
The problem isnt anthropic get to use that defense, its that others dont. The fact the the world is in a place where people can be fined 5+ years of a western European average salary for making a copy of one (1) book that does not materially effect the copyright holder in any way is insane and it is good to point that out no matter who does it.
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 3 weeks ago:
Civil cases of copyright infringment are not theft, no matter what the MPIA have trained you to believe.
- Comment on DeepSeek accused of powering China’s military and mining US user data 3 weeks ago:
Gosh, its a good thing openAI and google dont thing for theUS government isnt it?
- Comment on Lime bikes dumped in canals and rivers 'posing pollution risk' 3 weeks ago:
There absolutely is, people break the disabling mechanism. I’ve had two go past me today with the obvious clack-clack-clack-clack of it.
- Comment on Some of your AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO2 emissions than others 3 weeks ago:
FWIW, a short query to a typical sized LLM takes about 1Wh of energy, there lots of variance on how big the model you are using and how long the input and outputs are but thats the correct order of magnitude. 1Wh is the amount of energy consumed by a 1kW electric kettle in 3.6 seconds or a 2kW hairdryer in 1.8 seconds.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 4 weeks ago:
HK has literally never been independent, it went from being a Qing fishing village to a British concession, to a British overseas territory and then to a PRC special autonomous region.
- Comment on YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed 4 weeks ago:
No, if another 100k Australians had come out and then kept protesting day in day out for months they would have got the aus government to back down and not support the war.
- Comment on Is Google about to destroy the web? 4 weeks ago:
www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I’m not a huge fan of Ed Zitron generally, he leans towards histrionic too much for my tastes, but he makes a compelling case here.
- Comment on VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website. 5 weeks ago:
Given that I torrent without a VPN and it had nothing on there, and it also got my location wrong by over 500km, I dont think I’m too worried.
- Comment on Sizewell C power station to be built as part of UK’s £14bn nuclear investment 5 weeks ago:
There are grid connection delays of 8 to 10 years for lots of renewable energy projects, as the grid wasnt designed to have many small inputs, so its not like there arent issues there too, and thats before you start getting into reliability issues once the percentage of non-dispatachable energy gets higher.
In general both need to be invested in heavily, and structural reforms done, if we have a chance of actually meeting climate goals. Thankfully that seems to be the plan.
- Comment on How Social Media Brings Out the Worst in Us 5 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure that in 100 years time people will look back at the current age of social media with the same kind of horry as we get looking back at doctors recommending ciggarettes for weight loss.
- Comment on Sizewell C power station to be built as part of UK’s £14bn nuclear investment 5 weeks ago:
If we’re not doing anything that the Tories mismanaged over the past 15 years the list of things to do is going to be very short.
- Comment on Russia is at war with Britain and US is no longer a reliable ally, UK adviser says 5 weeks ago:
That’s not really a fair comparison, Canada wasn’t a fully independent country in 1939, they were still a dominion of the British empire with foreign policy set from London (though otherwise self ruling).
- Comment on Former Meta exec says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry 1 month ago:
Because he’s speaking to a British newspaper about British policies. I’m assuming the second part as I don’t subscribe to the times so cant read the article, but there is currently plans in place in the UK to introduce an opt-out framework for people to remove permission for training on their work, with pushback from big names that want to charge rent on their old works, so I assume that is the subject…
- Comment on Former Meta exec says asking for artist permission will kill AI industry 1 month ago:
The bit you’re missing is that the choice isnt between killing AI and killing the music industry, its between killing AI in the UK or pissing off IP holders somewhat. Do you think china give a fuck who’s IP they use in training models, or that they will stop if the UK passes a law making artists default out of using their work as training data?
- Comment on Former Dragon Age writer says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur's Gate 3 prove 'what's possible when a game is given time to cook' 1 month ago:
I dont think his point is ‘These amazing games are what you get if you give devs tine’ but rather ‘you can only get these games from giving devs time’. Its no guaruntee by any means, but you are never going to get greatness from suits focus grouping decission and crunching out a game.
- Comment on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. 1 month ago:
Its a godsend when you have to use Windows for whatever reason and you can have a functional OS to do things with.
