eigenspace

People say this a lot, and part of me wants it to be true and hates this AI search stuff being shoved in my face, but this really hasn't been my experience.

Unless I'm searching for something very niche, I'm often quite surprised by how 'directionally right' Google's AI overview is, even if I retain a lot of the skepticism I had towards it.

This is really questionable advice. If an interface is good enough for your users to use, it should be good enough for you to use too.

Dogfooding your own interfaces where reasonable is also a useful way to find bugs, and learn about the ergonomics of your interfaces.

So in your imagined scenario here, are you saying that the models are purposefully bloated, using way more VRAM than they actually need?

Like do you think the only reason the models are big is so that they can't be run on consumer hardware, and there's no other benefit?

I doubt multi-lungualism is taking up that much space in the weights. Languages are systematic, and most of them share a lot of features and can be compressed into the same representation together.

The real problem is all the random facts about the world that are not easily compressible, and you want the LLM to know a lot of random facts.

I can see why one might intuitively think this, but actually this is just a bad take. For most practical purposes, the main value added by these batteries is not really the size of their storage capacity (afterall, their capacity is tiny relative to the grid's needs), but their ability to quickly sink or supply massive amounts of power.

If these batteries had 10x the storage capacity, but 1/10th the power output, they'd miss out on their biggest advantage, which is capturing mid-day solar oversupply, and providing virtual grid inertia.

Long duration, lower-power batteries will have an important role to play once grids get further along in renewable adoption, but for now, short duration power-supply is the main value they add, and it makes perfect sense to quote battery numbers in terms of power. (not that I'd complain about providing capacity numbers too)

1 in 200 apartments in the building? You realize that the USA is one of the only car markets that has closed itself off to chinese cars, right?

BYD is the number 1 EV brand in the world currently by sales.

Renewable-heavy grids like Germany use overlapping layers of protection for this sort of thing.

Tier 1 is flywheels because they have the fastest response, and then response isn't regulated by software but instead is purely mechanical

Tier 2 is batteries, they can be made to respond to current or frequency faults in a response time on the order of miliseconds, and the flywheels give you plenty more time than that to make grid-wide orders for the batteries to respond

Tier 3 is gas peaker plants. The batteries are able to buy enough time that if there's a serious fault that could last multiple hours, you're able to spin up (or down) a gas peaker plant to adjust the grid frequency / current.

Intuition is much more adjustable than youre giving it credit for.

One can build new intuitions.

What on earth makes you think that?

The learning rate for a solar panel may be higher than a wind turbine, but when you include installation costs, it's no longer the case because the solar panels have become so cheap that the cost is installation-dominated, and installation learns slow.

Over the last 5-10 years, wind has been learning faster than solar.

So there's the hobbyist side of it, but I guess it's not totally clear why that matters to the people talking about the world's power mix.

But as I write that, I guess it becomes more clear to me that a personal interest in installing the technology makes one pay more attention to it elsewhere, and promote more conversations about it that get others involved.

Wind power scales with the turbine area squared, and the wind velocity cubed. That means there's massive incentive to make bigger and taller turbines (windspeeds are higher the further away from the ground you are).

For that reason, there is very little reason to build small wind turbines, even if there wasn't a down-stream loss of power from putting too many close together.

I find it continually strange how much more attention solar gets than wind.

Wind power has been undergoing a very similar rapid fall in cost, and rapid rise in installations, and is a fantastic natural resource (and also one that complements solar almost perfectly!), but it always feels like solar gets 10x the attention and conversation that wind gets.

That's a privacy claim which is irrelevant to the question of sovereignty. Even with zero-knowledge processing, they can still just close your account and stop providing any service after a phone-call from the US president.

Vital government functions cannot be allowed to run on this type of infrastructure, it's ridiculous.

It's especially funny that Microsoft has been swearing up and down that they can offer "sovereign" infrastructure in Europe, and yet the moment Trump comes calling they trip over themselves to implement his sanctions against the ICC.