teamonkey

Any amount is good if it reduces costs to the consumer and reduces the usage of fossil fuels.

Photoshop has had AI-assisted cutting and context-aware fill for several years now. These are things that professional artists use every day. By these standards the majority of posters, adverts and print media for the last couple of years will have used AI somewhere in their development.

We already do have a very good understanding of QCD, it’s a very successful model with 70 years of experimental results behind it. This proof may offer new insight but most likely will just be confirming what we already knew.

I don’t think that’s the same thing at all.

I’m not saying that people will just clone <large, established and popular software developed by large numbers of people, pre-AI>.

I’m asking why anyone would ever invest in a solo software startup, where the scale is necessarily small and achievable at low cost, and AI makes it feasible for many people or corporations to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.

Why would a solo tech startup even exist after automation? Any software that can be done by one person can be done by anyone with an AI subscription a moment after launch. Why would anyone risk investing in that?

Yeah, writing the engine was the point I think. They could have created a GI plugin or modified an existing engine’s renderer. He also created a whole new programming language to write the engine in, which is certainly the displacement activity.

> I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals

I don’t buy that. Even back then, as an indie developer, the only reason you build your own engine is because you want to build your own engine.

You have to be doing something truly technically impressive to need a new engine and The Witness wasn’t pushing the envelope.

The majority of UK homes are heated by gas-powered boilers that pump hot water through radiators in each room. Often hot water is heated by the same system.

Decarbonisation usually means replacing that boiler with a heat pump which uses electricity to heat water.

EV adoption in the UK is huge right now, heat pump adoption is happening (though could be faster).

Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.

AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.

The main things that will reduce our power bills is a) upgrading the grid to improve transmission and reduce curtailment; and b) adding generation and storage capacity, reducing the amount of high-cost peak gas generation we use.

These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.

Home batteries are much quicker to pay off than solar at the moment. This is largely due to being able to do strong arbitrage between import and export prices at different times of day, and some high guaranteed consumer export tariffs.

There’s no guarantee things will stay that way though, not least because the more storage added to the grid, the more those arbitrage opportunities get soaked up.

It isn’t banned.

Well, fracking kind of is, we stopped after we tried it and it caused ground tremors.

No, the town’s population has grown in recent years. Lots of house building.

In my town they ALL closed. We previously had 6; we now have a community centre where two different banks operate personal banking consultations for one workday a week each, but they only do appointments, they don’t handle cash or do any banking.

If I want to visit a branch I need to go to the next city.