aFiercePancake
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User ID: 4111
aFiercePancake
14d ago
Earlier this year for my house, I estimated it at about $24k to install and then $3k/yr effective revenue. You break even at 8 years and then by the end of the life (we’ll call it 24 years for nice numbers), you’ve made 3x returns. That’s about a 4.7% interest rate, which is higher than high yield savings account equivalent, but less than you would expect from the market (though it’s untaxed since it’s avoided spending).
Some things that will make your model different:
- What level of sun does your property get based on weather and shade?
- How high are your electric prices and what is your outlook on how they will move in the future?
- Does your locality require utility companies to buy excess power you generate? Do you get any state-level incentives now that there’s no federal ones AFAIK? Without these my estimates would be way worse.
- How many of your utilities are electric vs fuel (eg gas heaters, stoves, dryers, etc)? Especially important if they don’t have to buy your excess power generation.
- How long do you expect to be at the property? You’ll need time to recoup the cost. If you move early and sell the house, I wouldn’t count on the buyer valuing the panels at the same amount you would.
- What condition is your roof in?
I decided not to do it, and it wasn’t particularly close. That rate of return is only ok and I would much rather have the liquidity. I also have a low appetite for hassle, and my experience is to count on significant home renovations to always be a hassle in one way or another. If you’re in a place with favorable weather, mostly electric utilities, expect energy prices to go up, and like the idea of self sufficiency seems like a good deal then. Panel prices will probably continue to drop but installation labor costs will probably rise. I would expect overall price to go down in the future but maybe not a lot.
aFiercePancake
3mo ago
My guess is their LLM over indexes on the recent search history and what you click on. So likely WhiningCoil vaguely described the incident with perhaps incorrect info and with the low information query Google returned bad results. He clicked on them to see if they were the thing he was thinking of and the LLM got that irrelevant stuff stuck in its context. I have similar issues when using OpenAI models professionally and personally.
aFiercePancake
4mo ago
STOP DOING THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
- FAKE THINGS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE DISCUSSED SERIOUSLY
- MILLENIA OF HYPOTHETICALS yet NO REAL WORLD USE FOUND for discussing made up scenarios
- Wanted to talk about something that hasn’t happened for a laugh? We had a tool for that. It was called GUESSING.
- “Yes please give me A WORLDWIDE VOTE USING A SET OF BUTTONS THAT HAVE THE POWER TO INSTANTLY KILL PEOPLE BASED ON WHAT BUTTON OTHER PEOPLE PRESSED.” “Please give me A TRAIN TRACK THAT FORKS IN TWO, SOMEHOW IS UNABLE TO STOP, FOR SOME REASON FIVE PEOPLE ARE TIED TO THE TRACKS AND ONE PERSON TO ANOTHER ONE, AND FOR SOME REASON YOU HAVE A LEVER TO CHANGE THE TRACK THE TRAIN IS ON BUT CANT JUST UNTIE THE PEOPLE” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
LOOK at what Philosophers have been demanding your respect for all this time, with all the books and charts we built for them.
This is REAL philosophy done by REAL philosophers (and internet wannabe philosophers)
Chinese_room.jpg
Violinist.jpg
Veil_of_ignorance.jpg
“Hello I would like to talk about what I think I would do in an entirely impossible imaginary scenario”
They have played us for absolute fools
aFiercePancake
6mo ago
Math professor Daniel Litt discusses the challenge here.
Summarizing, these are unpublished lemmas from math professor’s own work. Lemmas tend to be minor theorems or helper results used as little pieces to help prove larger more interesting ideas. So at least somewhat novel (supposedly), but not grand theorems or crucial results. Litt says that in his field, figuring out what lemmas to prove is the hard part, and then proving them is typically much easier. He said that overall proving results like these take up a relatively small fraction of his time, but a tool to automate their proofs would be very helpful.
As for the problems themselves, Litt said they vary greatly in difficulty. Two of them, including two of the 5-6 that Aletheia got right, apparently had nearly identical statements already proven in the literature. Another one had the proof sketched out in literature, but no model managed to fill in the details.
What most interests me is reliability. Litt writes that overall a lot of garbage was produced, and in a ‘real’ scenario where no one actually knows the answer that is a serious problem. Both Aletheia variants didn’t answer 4 of the questions, either because the model said “I don’t know how to solve it” or it hadn’t finished in the allotted time. I couldn’t find the breakdown from a quick skim, which is a shame - I would be very impressed if the model said it couldn’t solve it rather than giving a wrong proof. Still, it seems of the 12 solutions submitted by the two variants to 6 problems, 3 were considered substantially incorrect, for a ‘precision’ of 75% and a ‘recall’ of 45%, given the problems that it didn’t give an attempt for.
Overall, I would say this is better than I would have expected (not that I have any particular insight to the problems themselves), but still seems like it will pose an immense difficulty when these tools are applied to actual problems where the solution isn’t known ahead of time.
aFiercePancake
7mo ago
Sorry if you addressed this elsewhere in the thread, but I’m curious your thoughts on birth rates and its long term impact.
If you tried to reduce a whole country into a single metric of greatness, I think you can argue over whether China or the US is higher, but I’m sympathetic to the argument that the derivative of this metric is clearly greater for China. What about the second or third derivative though? The biggest thing that makes me think the US’s might be higher is birth rates. According to the UN as summarized by Wikipedia, the US is substantially below replacement at 1.6, but China is at 1.0, which seems catastrophic to me. Indeed, there’s news article from this week saying China now has more deaths than births (a cursory search shows this is not the case for the US after a bit of die-off of elderly people during the peak of the pandemic). If these numbers continue to hold (or decline at the same rate) then 2 generations from now the American cohort will be larger than the Chinese one. My sense, though this could be Western propaganda, is that the US is also more attractive to and welcoming of immigrants than China (averaged over a few presidential administrations anyway) and the US has relatively high fertility religious subgroups that are still compatible with modernity like Mormons and some Jewish sects (does China have any equivalents? I honestly don’t know. I suppose the Uyghurs might have been).
The result is that I could see China overtaking the US on a number of metrics in the next couple decades, but then slinking into economic and cultural decline as the younger Chinese generations become smaller in relative and absolute terms compared to the US. Some on this board may believe that will be irrelevant due to AI and robotics, but I’m skeptical of that and certainly wouldn’t bet the farm on it if I were in the Politburo.
But I also grant I have a very siloed information diet on the topic - is there something I’m missing? Maybe population size doesn’t matter that much? After all, during the US’s period of unquestioned dominance it had a much smaller population than China. Still, I think the birth rates point at something important, and China is definitely doing worse in that regard at least.
aFiercePancake
8mo ago
Almost embarrassed that this is what pulled me out of lurkerdom, but when duty calls…
First, if you want to play Skyrim without actually playing Skyrim, try Enderal. It’s a free mod that changes it into an entirely new game with improved mechanics and good worldbuilding. I enjoyed it maybe more than Skyrim itself. There’s a few areas that you can tell were left underdeveloped, but it’s overall polished and has few bugs (for me at least).
For actual Skyrim, I last played a few years ago. Bethesda has continued to update the game by incorporating Creations into the official release, so no idea if these still work. Here’s my top few:
- Ordinator is a perk overhaul that makes things much more interesting than “expert level spells use less mana.”
- SkyrimSouls makes it so that opening a menu doesn’t pause the game (you can configure which menus). Prevents the classic cheese wheel spam (or at least forces you to bind it to a hotkey and make combat more reactive)
- Apocalypse and Summermyst add a bunch of new interesting spells and enchantments, respectively.
- SkyUI is the UI that should have shipped with the PC version, rather than just porting over a console-friendly UI
- Genuinely Intelligent Soul Trap is a small but massively nice QoL improvement.
- Inigo is a fully voiced companion that is fun to travel with.
There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back. Obviously a lot of jank involved and there can still be latency issues, but it looks very cool. Mantella was the first big one, CHIM seems to be the most developed currently, and SkyrimNet is a promising up-and-comer. I haven’t actually used any, so do report back if you try them out.
I saw that a typical residential installation is on the order of 10kW of panels and costs about $3/W installed, for $30k. I subtracted a little for some incentives and assumed something a little smaller than average, arriving at $24k. A quick google suggests $3/W is a typical residential installation cost. If you say 130kW plant costs $24k that’s $0.18/W, more than an order of magnitude cheaper. Maybe you’re somewhere muuuch cheaper, or maybe rooftop solar is just really expensive/inefficient compared to just putting them in a field.
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