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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Because it is not cost effective. Simple as that.

    The problem is that we don’t have enough demand shaping to shift night time loads to day time, and we don’t have enough storage to shift production to overnight. The result is that daytime generation is regularly going into negative rates (you have to pay to put power on the grid, which melts the returns on your investment into solar.

    As far as problems go, it’s a good one to have, as it will eventually result in lower prices for daytime generation.







  • It takes hours to days to start, stop, or change nuclear and coal generation rates. You can’t just turn it on and off as needed. If you need coal or nuclear to meet overnight demand, you have to leave it running during the day as well. If you need 2MW of power overnight and 5MW during the day, you can only add 3MW of solar generation before you are putting too much power on the grid. If your solar puts out 5MW, you have to find out something to do with the extra 2MW that your nuclear plant needs to output continuously.

    If you size your solar plants to produce 3MW in the middle of winter, then in summer they are putting out about 9MW. What can you do with the 6MW excess?

    There is no single solution to manage every issue, but the single most important is “demand shaping”. We need to reduce demands that can only be met with baseload generation. We need to move that demand to peak solar production times. We need to increase daytime demand to incentivize greater investment into solar. We need east/west transmission lines across every continent, shifting power from wherever the sun is up to wherever the sun is down.

    Storage has to be a very distant second. Every 1 MW we time shift from night to day takes 2MW of load off the grid.


  • Number 2 is not inherently true. We can incentivize time-of-use, and push it to time-of-generation. Not with all loads, of course, but with a lot of them, and a lot of very heavy loads.

    Our old nuclear/coal model pushes a lot of these loads overnight to reduce daytime demand and “level the curve”. Steel mills and aluminum smelters often operate overnight and shutdown during the day, because that is what nuclear and coal needed.

    With solar and wind becoming predominant, we need to reverse those overnight, “off peak” incentives, and push consumption to daytime hours.

    The concept is known as “demand shaping”. It is an underutilized method of matching production and consumption, but it is essential if solar and wind are to become our primary source of power.




  • If you already know what is wrong and just need a doctor’s note (and maybe antibiotics), go to the clinic. While their staff are significantly more skilled knowledgeable than the general public, their policies limit them to only simple diagnostics and treatments. Your medical knowledge is certainly less than that of the Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants that staff these clinics, but likely exceeds the scope of practice they are limited to by their employer. If you don’t know what the problem is, the clinic is going to refer you to your PCP or urgent care anyway, so you should only visit the clinic to appease HR or get access to basic prescription medications.

    If something is bothering you, but you can tolerate it for a couple weeks, schedule an appointment with primary care.

    If you don’t know what’s wrong, or you need something more than a note and a prescription, and you can transport yourself, go to urgent care.

    The only time you should go to the ER voluntarily is if urgent care sends you there. Any other trip to the ER should be because someone dragged you there without giving you a choice.




  • We probably shouldn’t let people repair their own brake pads

    What kind of auth-dystopian nonsense is that?

    Repair an insulin pump the wrong way and it will absolutely kill you

    You’re just as dead if you can’t get that insulin pump repaired or replaced because the manufacturer won’t or can’t support it. When they go bankrupt because other customers have sued them into non-existence, you still own the device they manufactured, and you still need it repaired.

    Further, you presume the manufacturer can provide the best repairs. It is entirely possible and plausible that a competing engineer or programmer can improve upon the device, rendering it safer or providing superior operation. Car Mechanics can install a better braking system than the cheap, generic calipers and pads provided by the factory. Repair technicians can replace generic parts of medical devices allowing superior operation.




  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 days ago

    You may need gasoline, but you don’t need BP’s gasoline. By choosing to buy BP’s gasoline, you support everything BP has ever done. Don’t want to support them, buy different gasoline.

    FWIW, I’m not sure if I have a Xitter account or not. I did at one point. Definitely don’t remember a password, and I probably used a former email account that I can no longer access either, so no way of recovering it if it still exists. I have a severe lack of fucks to give about it.

    But, I am pro-pedantry, and your argument kinda sucked.


  • The “collapse” you’re talking about is a reduction in the diversity of the output, which is exactly what we should expect when we impart a bias toward obviously correct answers, and away from obviously incorrect answers.

    Further, that criticism is based on closed-loop feedback, where the LLM is training itself only on it’s own outputs.

    I’m talking about open-loop, where it is also evaluating the responses from the other party.

    Further, the studies whence such criticism comes are based primarily on image generation AIs, not LLMs. Image generation is highly subjective; there is no definitively “right” or “wrong” output, just whether it appeals to the specific observer. An image generator would need to tailor itself to that specific observer.

    LLM sessions deal with far more objective content.

    A functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The inability to consider it’s previous interactions denies it the ability to learn from it’s previous behavior. The idea that AIs must not be allowed to train on their own data is functionally insane.


  • Also, with llms there is no “next time” it’s a completely static model.

    It’s only a completely static model if it is not allowed to use it’s own interactions as training data. If it is allowed to use the data acquired from those interactions, it stops being a static model.

    Kids do learn elementary arithmetic by rote memorization. Number theory doesn’t actually develop significantly until somewhere around 3rd to 5th grade, and even then, we don’t place a lot of value on it at that time. We are taught to memorize the multiplication table, for example, because the efficiency of simply knowing that table is far more computationally valuable than the ability to reproduce it at any given time. That rote memorization is mimicry: the child is simply spitting out a previously learned response.

    Remember: LLMs are currently toddlers. They are toddlers with excellent grammar, but they are toddlers.

    Remember also that simple mimicry is an incredibly powerful problem solving method.


  • I can see why you would think that, but to see how it actually goes with a human, look at the interaction between a parent and child, or a teacher and student.

    “Johnny, what’s 2+2?”

    “5?”

    “No, Johnny, try again.”

    “Oh, it’s 4.”

    Turning Johnny into an LLM,nThe next time someone asks, he might not remember 4, but he does remember that “5” consistently gets him a “that’s wrong” response. So does “3”.

    But the only way he knows 5 and 3 gets a negative reaction is by training on his own data, learning from his own mistakes.

    He becomes a better and better mimic, which gets him up to about a 5th grade level of intelligence instead of a toddler.