I’ve been missing an alternative to Facebook that I can use for non-anonymous planning of events and communication in hobby groups etc. and I had never heard of any of the “Facebook-type” federated stuff before!

Now I just need to convince a bunch of people that this is viable to use without being the annoying guy…

I’m here to say that if there’s snow, skis win on practicality. Almost every winter, there’s at least one day when you will have some people skiing to work in Oslo, a city of 700 000 inhabitants, with a metro system. Because when there’s 10 cm of snow in the streets, skis are the quickest and easiest way to get anywhere.

I have to admit: If you (semi-)regularly use floating point comparisons in programming, I don’t know why you would ever expect 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 to return true. It’s common practice to check abs(a - b) < tol, where tol is some small number, to the point that common unit-testing libraries have built-in methods like assertEqual(a, b, tol) specifically for checking whether floats are “equal”.

If we’re able to make hydrocarbon-synthesis from CO2 efficient… we’re still going to need to source the hydrogen somewhere.

But if we do that using electrolysis (with renewables), and are able to create more energy efficient CO2 capturing processes, I could see synthetic hydrocarbons as a viable fuel option in the future. The thing is: They’re stupidly good at being stable, energy dense, energy carriers. We also have a lot of infrastructure in place to handle hydrocarbons already.

In principle, synthetic hydrocarbons could be part of a zero-emission cycle, where we capture CO2 and electrolyse hydrogen with renewable energy, and use the hydrocarbons as an energy carrier. But if we go that way, we’re definitely going to have to research efficient hydrogen production, and probably storage as well.

One of the advantages of hydrogen is that tanks and fuel cells can withstand a large number of “charging cycles” much better than batteries. Additionally, for ships, the amount of energy needed to move is so enormous that I fear we’ll have a hard time creating batteries that are feasible for long-distance shipping.

For short distance ferrying (including large, car carrying ferries) on the other hand, Norway has already implemented quite a few electric stretches. The major issue there is building the infrastructure to charge the ferries.

There’s a comment on another post with this article doing the math on this, and it seems like the net emissions (when you account for efficiencies) actually favour steam-reforming + fuel cells.

The Spanish Inquisition

I would argue that it is not the work produced by the AI, but the trained model itself, which infringes on copyright.

The model cannot be regarded as an artist, but as a product, commercial or otherwise, that has been created by stealing copyrighted work.

Of course, once the AI is trained, you can’t look at some arbitrary output and determine whether that specific output came due to some specific training data set. In principle, if some of your training data is found to violate copyrights you either have to compensate the copyright holder or re-train the model without that data set.

Finding out whether a copyrighted work is part of the training data is a matter of going through it, and should be the responsibility of the people training the model. I would like to see a case where it has been shown that a copyrighted dataset has been used to train a model, and those violating the copyright by doing so are held responsible.

I’ve thought about this regarding code as well: An AI is nothing without a training data set, if someone uses licensed code to train an AI, they should definitely be bound by the license. For example: If an AI is trained using copyleft licensed code, the resulting model should also be regarded as copyleft bound. As of now, I suspect this is to a very large degree being ignored.

Removed by mod

In addition to battery designs that scale better than Li-ion (e.g. redox-flow batteries), I’ve heard some places are looking at options for “mechanical” storage: When you have energy surplus, pump water back into reservoirs, and generate hydropower when you have a deficit.

The amount of energy that can be stored in existing reservoirs is massive, so this could make hydropower function as the “buffer” for other renewable energy sources. I think the idea sounds promising, the major issue is that it’s less viable (or not viable) for places with flat topology.

At first I was wondering why you were downvoted, then I read your second paragraph.

I’ve always thought of it as referring to the scientific leap that discovering quantum mechanics was: A massive leap that completely changed the ruling paradigm of the scientific world.

I don’t get why people are downvoting you? You’re literally asking for “devils advocate arguments” and saying your immediate reaction is to oppose this.

Come on people, be better than just downvoting a legitimate question from someone who admits to being uninformed.

Close, but not quite. One cubic meter of air at atmospheric conditions is about 40 moles, or 575 grams. Let’s say 600 g to be generous.

Wind moving at 250 km/h (cat. 5 hurricane) contains about 1.5 kJ of kinetic energy per cubic meter.

If all that energy is used to heat the same air, it’s temperature is increased by roughly… 3.5 K.

Now consider the fact that kinetic energy scales as the square of velocity: for a normal windy (say 15 m/s wind), we only get a temperature increase of 0.16 K, which is practically immeasurable.

For these calculations I didn’t even consider the building, which has a massive specific heat capacity compared to air.

In summary: Because the thermal energy required to increase temperatures appreciably is of a completely different order of magnitude than the amount of kinetic energy in the wind, the fact that a building isn’t heating up is not a solid argument that only a small portion of the kinetic energy in the wind is being lost when it hits the building. In fact, even if all the energy was lost, you wouldn’t even notice the temperature change, unless you were in a cat. 5 hurricane, in which case the building is probably already gone.

I can’t help but point out that smartphones (with the apps typically found on them) are essentially on-demand dopamine devices. Pretty much any game or social media app you can install has as its primary goal to get you addicted. That’s their business model.

Very little can hope to compete for a child’s attention against such a device. In fact, I think even the fact that we are allowing children to be exposed to this when pretty much everyone agrees that they should be protected from drugs (alcohol, nicotine, etc. included) is kind of crazy.

This just illustrates the major limitation of ML: Access to reliable training data. A machine that has no concept of internal reasoning can never be truly trusted to solve novel problems, and novel problems, from minor issues to very complex ones, are solved in a bunch of professions every day. That’s what drives our world forward. If we rely too heavily on AI to solve problems for us, the issue of obtaining reliable training data to train future AI’s will only expand. That’s why I currently don’t think AI’s will replace large swaths of the work force, but to a larger degree be used as a tool by the humans in the workforce.