mr_bailey
17d ago
The sulfate aerosols are released in the stratosphere, the whole point is that they tend to stay up there as there is very little mixing with air lower down in the atmosphere which is what allows the whole thing to work. The amount that drifts down (as we can see from the natural experiments with volcanic eruptions) would be barely detectable against background levels (<1 point to the AQI scale), if you live near even a modest sized city you already breath much more of the same compounds from diesel exhaust (and you used to breathe a lot, lot more if you were alive before 2010 when the finally switched to ultra-low-sulfur diesel in the US).
High altitude Sulfate aerosols. All serious cost estimates I've seen come in at <$20 billion / deg C / year of warming averted (and the cheapest options are more in the ~$2-3 billion range, depends if you use existing commercial aircraft as a base or develop a new higher altitude aircraft). Combats the warming part of climate change (which also combats the sea level rise part), there are some other aspects of climate change that would not be ameliorated (ocean acidification, plant growth would be harder to predict but is likely a wash, couple percent less sunlight may have a some effect, but we already see a pretty large opposite effect from CO2 fertilization, and the more politically fraught is that some hard to exactly predict changes in weather / drought patterns would be expected), but it would probably avoid a lot of the potential harm. We have high confidence this would work (see ocean shipping, volcanoes (esp. some larger historic eruptions), etc.) without causing a lot of unrelated problems (again see volcanoes). The main risk is some changes in weather/drought patterns (not that we don't see those with the status quo global warming). Even let's us somewhat target the cooling (limited, but we could vary how much cooling we see in the polar regions (where it's more needed/effective) vs. the world as a whole). Plus and minus is the effect is temporary (half life of a couple of years), that means you can adjust pretty quickly, but it also means if you are doing it to a significant amount and suddenly stop for some reason (war with the AIs?) a lot of built up averted warming could happen very quickly.
mr_bailey
25d ago
America not winning doesn't imply that Iran is winning. Both are losing. The winners are anyone still shipping oil (Saudis are making bank, UAE too since they also have a straight bypassing pipeline and were never completely shut out like Kuwait etc., and other oil exporting dependent economies outside the middle east). Parts of the US are winning (frackers, and especially refinery owners, the spreads are huge right now) and larger parts are losing (farmers, fishermen, everyone else).
Some of this seems off to me.
"Diesel and gasoline are still stymied, but, mostly, because Iranian exports are being blockaded by the US." I don't think Iran has ever been a significant exporter of refined products (if anything historically it's been a significant importer do to lack of refining capacity though I think pre-war it was improving in this measure). Damage to refineries in Saudia Arabia / UAE and logistics disruptions or the like would seem more likely?
I'm surprised the oil is flowing so well, a lot can change, but it was only 10 days ago that Saudi Arabia declared Force Mejure on some of it's European contracts and said it wouldn't be able to make October deliveries (some Saudi fed European refineries with longer term contracts are slated to get 0 barrels of their contracted oil delivery in October). This is the kind of thing that's keeping prices (and prices of refined products) high. The Saudi East-West pipeline is still only at 50% after being hit and shut-down a few weeks ago (sounds like repairs are going faster then expected, original reporting was that it might be as much as 6 weeks to get things flowing again, so maybe the Europeans will get some of their Oct. oil after all). This kind of vulnerability though is keeping folks nervous.
I don't think the Iranian government is unified on the issue (indeed this has been part of the problem with the previous MOU etc.). Some parts of the Iranian government want peace now, others don't.
I think he means the memory is for the coding agent workflow, not the apps generated. I.e. it is for the AI chips, but coding agents (and agents in general) generally require much more memory on the AI server doing inference then chats with users and have grown in usage a huge amount in the last year. The AI coding agents tend to operate with much longer context then your run of the mill chatbot talking with a user (even a chatbot that's doing some thinking). Memory requirements for the KV cache on AI inference server scale linearly with context length, a 500K used context agentic coding session (not hard to hit at all, context length limits for paid plans can reach up to 1m tokens, equivalent to a book 2500 pages long) is going to use about 50 times as much memory in the KV cache on the AI inference server then a chat conversation that maybe (if you're really chatty) reaches 5-10k tokens
More options
Context Copy link