keepthepace

The Model card is fun to read and the idea is solid. Thinking tokens always striked me as unoptimized and a bit forced.

A/C is indeed not a solution for solving climate change. It’s merely a solution to survive the transition that we are trying to do. The solution is in how you produce the electricity, among others, to feed the A/C.

Additionally A/C worsense the heat outside of your house

There is some additional heat that an AC system will create, but the heat that goes out of the external block is not heat that was created by the system. It’s heat that was displaced and that would otherwise come through other ways in the atmosphere.

A theoretical perfect heat pump would not heat the atmosphere at all, despite having a heating part. The heating would be perfectly balanced by the cooling part.

It is a bit counterintuitive when you think about machines as creating heat or creating cold. A better way to look at it is in terms of energy evacuation.

A house without any AC will radiate heat because humans inside, machines inside, they do produce heat. So that heat goes out in the atmosphere through the walls and through the windows when the inside is warmer than the outside. An AC creates a sort of channel for the heat to go all through the external block and it blasts hot air at a specific place. But what you don’t see is that as a result your colder house radiates less heat and actually may to some extent cool the atmosphere around it.

Both effects balance each other out. There is a difference because a heat pump is not a 100% efficient system. So you do have additional heat that gets there as waste. But it’s not on the same level as what gets blasted out of the external unit.

An interesting philosophical insight is that we do not live inside reality, we live in the model of reality we create with our senses, our mind and… our culture, which video games are part of.

The bleu qualia of the sky is a construction of your mind. The Earth as a planet is something you know but you did not experience directly. Same for the pain of others or neurodiversity. Countries you have never been to occupy a similar place as fictional places in your mind. Normal people sort these things well into “existing” and “fiction” but similar mechanisms exist.

Fill this place of examples of criminality and self-centered egoism, and it brings a vision of the world. Fill it with benevolence and empathy and you get a different one.

It leads to very concrete consequences, like the strategy people would choose in a blind prisoner’s dilemma game.

but how do we encourage people to actually… move through that gateway instead of just staying at the entrance?

You empower them with tools. When I gave someone a cheap servo, a reaction I got was “Hey, it sounds like the robot in that movie”. And there, you realize that the components in that box can be robots.

Games like minecraft or Stardew Valley give a notion of how you can change a place. Or destroy a biome.

A friend who will have to install a solar panel soon asked me to dig into that and I am horrified. This report is the tree that hides the forest as we say.

Sure, this specific inverter, which by the way has a circuit that’s used in many other brands, has a vulnerability that allows anyone to basically destroy the local electrical installation.

But the so-called secured systems are almost all cloud-based because people want to see on their phone their consumption. And the easiest way to do that is to go through a server that’s usually hosted by the manufacturer in mainland China. Many of these systems will include ways to change the firmware with the ability to do the same sort of damage that was demonstrated by the CCC.

For a while I didn’t like the tone of the news release warning in a vague way of bad or in Chinese products. It really sounded like FUD. But now I am realizing that the backdoor is real and public. All of these products are cloud-based, including firmware updates, which is an extremely bad idea.

That’s really a domain in which open hardware should be more the norm, should be pushed by states as a matter of sovereignty and national security.

And my personal advice would be to not wait for the state to do its job and be careful what you buy. Maybe prefer simpler, more observable hardware that costs a bit more than something that asks you to pair your phone and to give access to a remote server to your hardware that can burn your place down.

Did you read the text between these two lines?

I thought it was just fearmongering, but it is now a demonstrated backdoor. And yes, other persons can exploit it.

I have been arguing that for a long time because most articles failed to provide a brand, failed to provide the detail of the attack and basically were just fear-mongering for any Chinese product.

Here it is different, there is demonstrated attack by a reputable source, the CCC.

So now this information I consider got upgraded from probably FUD to probably real.

That’s a real actual problem. China gets a kill switch on a major source of renewable energy.

What do you mean by “shaded”?

And I think the idea is to have several satellites taking turns at illuminating a given target. Your diesel generator (actually nuclear power plants where I live) will have to turn on anyway without these additional sources, but they lower the need.

Until they reach the endgame of being able to produce continuous illumination all night long.

That sounds like the logical next step for the space industry. Intermittence is a big problem for PV installations, this partially solves it.

When you make an urban park, you have to accept two things though. First, locally the city becomes more expensive. And second, it will occupy more space over potentially natural zones (over suburban area actually, that themselves will grow over peri-rural, that will push these, etc.)

If your goal is wildlife preservation or carbon capture, you probably want one more hectare in a forest rather than an hectare in a park inside a city.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted more trees when I was living in a city. But the choice is between livable big cities or trying to make the cities as small impact as possible.

Ze Germans.

Worth it

And also, water shortages have other causes, much more systemic, that I feel the datacenter scapegoat is a convenient distraction from.

You can cool chips with air, you can cool them with the sea or with non drinkable water. If they really get built in places where water is scarce, the problem is why the hell are they incentivized for that?

Water is plentiful and there should be no shortage of it. Where it is lacking it is either an environmental problem (desert areas should not be supposed to sustain cities) or a public infrastructure problem.

Seeing such a post upvoted on solarpunk gives me hope.

I don’t think the space race and space habitat is the way forward, but there is a future timeline that is sustainable and technologically advanced.

I am happy that some people still believe in it.

and save room for wild nature.

Arguably space habitat is the ultimate way to achieve that goal on earth :-)

Well, if you assume that the air recycling will be done by plants, you are going to have a need for a huge biosphere and probably for a lot of oceanic biome. If you plan on having an agriculture, if you plan on having pollinating insects, you are going to need a huge biomass.

You’re going to have far more nature than you will have humans.

This setting usually assumes that you have a fast transport network built in the core infrastructure. So being spread out is less of a problem, especially if you have free electricity through solar panel. That means that moving stuff around on electric motor is going to be basically free.

Actually, training a very big model on trillions of tokens using huge clusters is one way of doing that, but certainly not the only way.

Communities have been fine-tuning models on much smaller machines and on a budget of hundreds of bucks.

Right now, money is abundant and feeds even open on its models, so it would be stupid to not go in that direction. But when it dries up, it won’t be the end of models improving.

If you already know how typical heat pumps work, said video could be summed up by this illustration:

Interesting additional tidbit: theoretical coefficient of power is around 20 for this tech vs 3 for what we use. Problem: heat is absorbed and dissipated at the same place, so you still do need something that circulates it around, even if you don’t need a compressor anymore.

Then why think things depend on the moral compass on some people if you think there is an unescapable dynamics that’s at work?

I do think that open source community is winning that battle and it’s an important battle and the ego of this five psychopath is kind of obscuring that huge victory that’s won by hundreds, thousands of developers and researchers.

I don’t think GLM or Anthropic or OpenAI are “guys”, good or not. They are companies, you don’t anthropomorphize these, they are beings that only crave for profit.

Actual people with actual morality are the people who are deciding to work there or to quit there. There’s a reason why OpenAI is bleeding people. There’s a reason why people like Le Can accepted to work for a company like Meta but imposed that they continue to publish.

The five people that this article mentions are the trees that hide the forest.

The inescapable mechanic is that the most egocentric people capture all the spotlight, almost by definition, but they are not AI, they are not the developers, they are not the researchers, they are not the people who innovate there. They are the people who take working efforts and turning into a soulless profit machine that often drives moral people away.

I wish we were less blind to the actual dynamics at play and were spending less time on people trying to get artificial spotlight.

Why especially in this community assume that corporate closed AI are all that matters?

These five people are taking bad decisions regarding AI. Thankfully, there are dozens of others who work on open models and who want to keep things open.