Chiming in as Australian with no context on European situation. AFAICT the key drivers of cost inflation are to do with reconfiguring the electric grid to transfer power efficiently and reliably from plants that produce renewable energy. However, the grid is set up to do so from non-renewable sources. And you want to do it while smoothly operating the network. This is extremely hard. Doing so quickly therefore elevates prices. That’s the rationale I could imagine being the case in EU markets.
It's not that simple. For example, in the The Netherlands, the use of electricity was stable for a long time. Mostly because all kinds of equipment (light bulbs, etc) got more efficient.
Grid operators predicted that with the energy transition, demand would rise, but politics wanted to keep prices low and limited investments.
So now, there is a big problem in the entire country connecting companies or new residential areas to the grid independent of how electricity is generated.
At the same time, the government is extremely forward looking and builds massive interconnection points on the North-Sea. Not a bad idea in the long run, but in the short run it does make electricity from wind on sea more expensive.
That said, the biggest hit to EU countries is that cheap natural gas disappeared. Coal is not cheap and extremely polluting. Natural gas was cheap for a while. Until it wasn't.
The European situation is a bit more complicated. It was very well known for a long time that Russia is a ticking time bomb in our backyard yet we made ourselves nearly dependent on their energy supplies and now combined with the push for renewables (which in my opinion is the right thing to do) we have a crisis.
Now there are also lot of countries in the EU with different priorities, so while in theory we could build long-range HVDC connections across borders, it is very hard to do.
Iiuc it wasn’t a comment about what the perfect lifespan is. It’s expressing a concern about how people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power.
Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.
> people in power might apply life extending technologies, like they do many other technologies, to exercise and entrench that power
Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.
Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.
That’s possible, I suppose. I think @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that. For example: labor camps.
> @btbuildem was expressing a personal distaste for other uses of power, and an avulsion to the technology because of that
Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.
> For example: labor camps
...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
Probably worth clarifying with GP what responsibility and accountability they’re referring to.
Where I live, if an engineer signs off on a bridge design and the bridge personally collapses, they are personally liable for harm done to folks on the bridge. As far as I’m aware software engineering does not have something like that.
For one - I’d say scoped API tokens that prevent messing with resources across logical domains (eg prod vs nonprod, distinct github repos, etc) is best practice in general. Blowing up a resource with a broadly scoped token isn’t a failure mode unique to LLMs.
edit: I don’t have personal experience around spending limits but I vaguely recall them being useful for folks who want to set up AWS resources and swing for the fences, in startups without thinking too deeply about the infra. Again this isn’t a failure mode unique to LLMs although I can appreciate it not mapping perfectly to your scenario above
edit #2: fwict the LLM specific context of your scenario above is: providing examples, setting up API access somehow (eg maybe invoking a CLI?). The rest to me seems like good old software engineering
> That’s exactly what it means to hit a wall, and exactly the particular set of obstacles I described in my most notorious (and prescient) paper, in 2022. Real progress on some dimensions, but stuck in place on others.
The author includes their personal experience — recommend reading to the end.
I did read to the end before commenting. The author alludes to a paper they wrote 3 years ago while self-importantly complimenting themself on how good it was (always a red flag). They don’t really say much other than that in the post.
I’ve read some blog posts by Geoff and there’s a useful idea here but it’s surrounded by so much storytelling.
To dig up the lede: LLMs are proving useful in some instances, consider staying abreast of developments here to find ways to do a better job as time goes by. The exact nature of “better job” and the timeframe along which that reveals itself are left as exercises for the reader
This is the answer; turns out that non-transformed links are the most generic data format, without any "compression" - QR codes or a third-party-intermediary - needed.
Deep fakes have always been horrible. The idea that someone - anyone - can take your image and represent you in ways that can ruin your reputation, is appalling. For example, revenge porn.
Having your likeness used to express an opinion that is the opposite of your own is nasty too. You can produce the kind of thing that has no courtesy, no grace, no kindness or care for the people around you.
The mass extraction and substitution of art has also caused a lot of unnecessary grief. Instead of AI enabling us to pursue creative work… it’s producing slop and making it harder for newbies to develop their craft. And making a lot of people anxious, fearful, and angry.
And finally of course astroturfing, phishing, that kind of thing has in principle become a lot more sophisticated.
It unnerves me that people can pull this capital lever against each other in ways that don’t obviously advance the common good.
