The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed).
Even decently smart, interested teens won't "grok" anything after you taught them those formula sheets. They'll need hours and hours of working with/thinking about the matter. They'll need examples, they need to manipulate the thing in their heads and on paper themselves. Hell, starting from scratch you'll need years just for them to "grok" what equations are, how the symbols are manipulated. Half of them won't really get it, ever. Proving theorems? Most people can't even do that after 12+4.
I think you hang out to much with the top quintile of the population, and you/they underestimate how much they where shaped through learning by osmosis during those "inefficient" 12+4 years.
Could/should the first 12 years be more efficient? Yes, but only for the smart/motivated third of a class. I personally think we should push those kids towards a proper classical education instead of cutting the time in half. The rest? They need to be taught by osmosis, and that takes forever. Both groups should do a lot more music and team sports as part of their daycare, I'd just make both mandatory.
That's the 12. As for the +4? I'm not denying that there are extremely expensive (time, resources) literacy verification and conscientiousness verification degrees. But the hard stuff can't be taught any faster. Engineering (yes, maybe excluding software - half a decade of commits on open source projects are superior to a BA). Medicine. Bio/pharma. Law. Basically, if you can get a post-grad degree and get a well-paying job outside of academia with it, it's probably because the jobs can't be done without the education.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.
Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Can you elaborate?
Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your problem, but the technical side of wood carving seems to be one of the more accessible art forms - since (modern, western) wood carvers like to write books about the topic. With 3 or 4 books, you'll get a broad overview on techniques and tools that will take you thousands of hours to master. If you want your first one hundred hours to be accelerated, wood carving courses seem popular enough that most larger cities will have one. If you can't get to one, there's a million youtube videos for beginners, seeing the motions in real time might beat books during those first one hundred hours. /r/woodcarving has some in their wiki.
This obviously will still get you nowhere close to making those Chaozhou wood carving masterpieces you linked, but (also obviously) chances for you to get to that level weren't very high in the first place, with or without a master mentoring you.
If you're really exclusively interested in historical, East Asian wood carving techniques, you will have a harder time, but I'm sure there are foreign language books about the techniques. AI translators will make those more accessible than ever before. A strong foundation in western wood carving will not hurt working through those books, so you might push that project a few years into the future.
Again, you (and your cited paper) are running away from the issue of scale, and comparing proposal requirements versus production prospects.
I don't think that's entirely fair, both the paper and I are aware of the immense scale such a project would have. Are the numbers optimistic? Perhaps. Maybe even by a factor of 2 for less ideal countries (like Germany). But not by orders of magnitude.
Existing solar generation projects in the US are, by the nature, where it is most economical in the US to build the systems for the people they would support. A lot of that is in or near US deserts. Most of the global population does not live near within US deserts, or even within the US. Nor does most of the US population. Nor it is economical for even the US to transmit electricity 'merely' from the productive deserts to cities far away.
Fair. But look at population density maps next to solar potential maps. The vast majority of people live where it's sunny. The US is better suited in this regard than other countries (ironically, especially China has a big mismatch, the coastal cities don't have much solar potential - but the Chinese will just plop down another 10 HVDC lines across the country), but there's lots of potential globally.
Moreover, these are already occupied good sites.
Come on, not really. The country is huge. There's lots of space left in the deserts. There's lots of roofs in decently sunny areas without panels yet. There's even lots of shitty grazing land east of the desert where another solar farm wouldn't impact the rancher in any meaningful way (except make him money).
You can CTFL-F all the most relevant global producers of minerals, and none of them will show in the report, let alone an assessment of how much they can feasibly increase production.
I'm an optimist here. There was a big lithium scare a few years ago. Today, lithium is about as cheap as it ever was. Capitalism is good at fixing supply problems. What minerals worry you specifically? Personally, I hope lithium battery development makes cobalt cathodes obsolete, but that's more for humanitarian reasons than actual supply problems. Other than that? If the Chinese go to war with the west, we might have to pay for rare-earth-free electric motors. But those exist for basically all applications, they're just more expensive (or bigger, which would require a redesign, which is the same thing as expensive).
The real problem with geopolitics is that we really need the Chinese factories making solar panels and batteries. Losing access to that already existing capacity would throw the west back a decade. But that's par for the course when we fight China, we actually need so much more stuff from their factories, panels and batteries aren't special in any way here.
Heck, it doesn't even raise the issue of transmission loss between countries.
I mean, the report suggests building 30 TW of new generation capacity. (Not running away from the scale issue...) Transmission losses are a rounding error here. So what if you lose 10% of power when you move some Spanish solar power to Germany? Just build 10% more panels in Spain.
Translated into even plainer english- this proposal is not so much about building a new and far more capable power transmission network than already exists, but ripping out the existing one and replacing it with Something Better.
I actually liked the fatalism of that part, the real politic of it all. Building new transmission lines is incredibly unpopular with NIMBYs and bogs you down in court for years. So don't do that. Put new transformers in your substations, and reconductor existing pylons with carbon fiber composite core high voltage cables. Those exist, at scale. You might even get some copper to recycle out of the deal.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Yeah, the Nordics/Baltics are pretty much the worst case scenario for solar+batteries. But it's a bit of a global outlier, if you look at a population density map, basically all local maxima pole-wards of 55° are there. Luckily, they have lots of wind, hydro and nukes. Also, it's less than 30M people. If they keep burning some gas in winter, it's not the end of the world.
One item to note about the waste heat figure, is that it is calculated based on the energy contained within the fossil fuel molecules that is ultimately expended as heat instead of being converted to electricity. This is setting the denominator based on fuel pulled from the ground, not as an efficiency metric of how much electricity is lost. The fair comparison for renewables would be the amount of wind/sun/hydro potential energy not converted to electricity after engaging with the PV module, wind turbine, or hydro turbine. I design solar systems as part of my job and even I think that is a dubious way to promote the technology.
I don't get your point.
Humanity's primary energy consumption is some number. 160 PWh per year. But most (80%+) of that is fossil fuels. Turning fossil fuel into heat is inefficient, so if we electrify everything, we don't actually need to make 160 PWh of electricity per year, less than half is enough (the power plants don't make waste heat and residential/low temperature industrial heating will be done by heat pump at 300% efficiency).
And sure, the sun is going to put much more than 160 PWh onto those solar panels. But the sun shines anyway.
pbmonster
3mo ago
But unlike Texas, Germany's grid is connected to French nukes, Spanish solar, Norwegian hydro and large (foreign and domestic) North Sea wind parks.
Add lots of batteries and a couple of dynamic loads, and even the rare Dunkelflaute won't be a problem.
pbmonster
3mo ago
we might be producing 8TWh of batteries across the world, but global energy usage is north of 20,000 TWh each hour. If you want a reasonable ride-through of a mere 90 minutes, you would need 30,000 TWh of storage assuming no added losses. That would be over 3,000 years of production going just to grid level storage. Sure, that production will ramp up, but so does energy consumption.
There's several white papers crunching the numbers in detail, I have found the first half of Masterplan 3 to be the most concise of them.
Yes, if you want to run the world on solar cells and batteries, you need two ramp industrial capacity, hard, for at least the next decade.
But that's the thing: we have been doing exactly that for the last 5 years, successfully. We "just" have to keep adding capacity, we just need to keep the curves curving up. Capitalism will do the rest, since it's most likely cheaper (if we extrapolate current learning curves under standard conditions of the industry).
It's not as utopic as most people think. Even with current global growth rates, we actually don't need as much energy as people think (a lot of our primary energy consumption ends up as waste heat - you get that for free if you electrify everything, because efficiency).
Well, they also have to pull the mountains of lithium and other rare earths out of their asses as well, if not the ground.
Lithium shortage is currently not a problem. The world economy has simply ramped up production given the forecasted reliable demand. Look at lithium prices. They've dropped to a point, where sodium battery companies are closing their doors, because their only business model was "batteries when lithium is scarce". It isn't.
Rare earth metals is not a problem for lithium batteries. I'm not aware of a cell chemistry that would need any. Electric motors and wind turbine generators, yes, but not lithium batteries and not solar panels.
One form is that all the batteries being used for power system load storage are, by mutual exclusion, not being used for any other battery purpose.
Current annual global battery production capacity is exceeding 8 TWh, several hundred percent above demand, enough to put a 50 kWh battery in every single vehicle built this year. Since we're not doing that (EVs are not that popular), there's lots of batteries available for grid storage. This is, of course, only because the Chinese have built an absurd oversupply for batteries.
The second form of opportunity cost is that a battery-premised grid balance plan has to plan for significant overproduction of energy generation to work 'well.'
The rate of solar development is not slowing down. It's just to cheap. We'll end up with a large oversupply most of the year, because cheap panels are economical even if they only sell power some of the time. Batteries make this calculation even more favorable because less power will be curtailed.
And all of that runs into the geopolitical reality that the country that has cornered the rare earths extraction/processing market as the input to these renewable-battery strategies is... China.
Yeah, the geopolitical risk is high. But it's high for both sides, the Chinese really want to sell their batteries and solar panels.
pbmonster
3mo ago
the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them. But it's Germany we're talking about here, so this will take time. Getting permission to connect a boatload of cheap Chinese batteries to the grid will take them a couple of years. Still, I'm optimistic they'll manage by 2030.
Because once you add serious battery capacity to a renewable grid, it gets more stable very, very quickly. It also gets cheaper. Texas and California have been doing that, and the results are immediate: "In 2023, Texas’ ERCOT issued 11 conservation calls (requests for consumers to reduce their use of electricity), [...] to avoid reliability problems amidst high summer temperatures. But in 2024 it issued no conservation calls during the summer." They achieved that by adding just 4 GW (+50%) of batteries to their (highly renewable in summer) grid.
pbmonster
3mo ago
Sorry for the confusion, Tiny11 installs Windows 11 and modifies it before and after the install, to get the benefits in my last post.
Since this (a widows 10 user finally upgrading to windows 11) is what Microsoft wants, the licencing issue is as smooth as possible. If you have any valid windows licence, it will work. And since a windows 10 license can be stored in the bios of most modern boards, it retrieves that license for maximum convenience.
Installing windows 10 ltsc is not what Microsoft wants, so a windows 10 home licence will not do. They actually want to see money.
pbmonster
3mo ago
you can bypass almost all of the relevant hardware checks, either by hand with a registry edit from the install environment, or by using programs like Rufus that will do it (as well as disabling some telemetry and enabling a local user) with a single checkbox when burning to USB drive an ISO you can download from Microsoft.
Or if you're really lazy like me, @No_one, you can just google "Tiny11" and get that installer that does everything for you. Gets the correct ISO, bypasses the hardware restrictions, rips out all the adds, AI, telemetry and MS account bullshit (it even rips out Edge, so put a Firefox installer on the stick) and it just grabs the Windows licence that's (most likely) stashed in your BIOS anyway.
pbmonster
4mo ago
Probably a lot of free variables in that problem. Press reports on climate modeling usually don't mention the gigantic error bars their predictions come with (especially for exotic long-horizon events like AMOC).
Also, -4°C was the average yearly temperature across the continent for a AMOC collapse. That doesn't contradict -20°C in winter in certain coastal regions (probably those most benefiting from Gulf stream heating right now) in the case of a full AMOC reversal.
But yeah, -20°C would be the end of agriculture. Let's hope for a worst case that is closer to... British Columbia.
pbmonster
4mo ago
I think a total AMOC collapse would result in a 4°C reduction in temperature in Europe - which nicely matches the total increase due to global warming! So I will go ahead and pretend that we (eurotrash) are safe, and in the perfect spot to ride out the climate catastrophe. Might even get a decade of good skiing out of it!
pbmonster
4mo ago
That one seems pretty straight forward: no smoking in public, ever. Throw in tobacco while we're at it. Done.
The French (of all people) pretty much did just that.
pbmonster
5mo ago
Yeah, there's several theories like that. It's also possible he counted including wisdom teeth - because women are statistically more likely to never have (some of) their wisdom teeth break through.
The point is, he (and his followers across the centuries) evidently never just counted the teeth (or the tooth gaps) of people.
This confusion is kind of my point. The lipostat hypothesis is still a bit controversial after 80+ years. If a "set point" for weight truly exists somewhere in the system, it's still not clear what raises this set point, and why lowering it again seems extremely difficult.
There's plenty of studies that indicate that once the set point has been raised, it can't be easily lowered again. This is, funnily enough, contradictory to your 1965 study (unless the 400 lbs -> 200 lbs guy was short, and 200 lbs was still obese). Or maybe only more modern food additives raise the set point permanently? I don't think we know, and almost nobody (relative to how important those questions are) seems to actually test things on large groups of people.
pbmonster
5mo ago
Yeah, the entire field of dietary science always reminds me of the factoid that Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women - and then the entire "scientific" establishment believed that for several centuries without ever just... checking.
Hopefully, it'll turn out that we can just measure this. Take a couple of hundred people on a retreat and count what you feed them.
At least with gemini, it should just use patents.google.com
Also, that would be many, many millions of tokens.
No, not all of them, not all the time.
Each local fire department has a big, public summer party here, for fundraising and to say thank you to the volunteers. Those parties are never at the same weekend, and all firefighters visit each other's parties.
Also, after big exercises, sometimes a wild keg appears...
Still, everybody jokes that you could burn all the fire departments down to the ground as long as there's a summer party somewhere in a 50 mile radius. It's probably true.
pbmonster
5mo ago
Yes, because this process is the source of 90% of the problems self checkout machines create (the other 10% are alcohol purchases), and an employee has to come and fix those problems.
In my casual survey of self checkout machines across cities and countries, I've come to the conclusion that only supermarkets in extremely low-trust cities use the scales. For everybody else, it's just not worth it, since you can literally increase the machines/employee ratio by 10 if you don't need to use the scale functionality.
My local supermarket doesn't sell alcohol ind is in a high trust region. Tens of self checkout machines are running without employee oversight, if there's a problem the store manager comes to deal with it.
who have asked recent LLMs questions in your area of expertise, how accurate are the responses? What is your field and what models are you using?
For "frontier tasks" in physics/electrical engineering, it's bad. It just doesn't work, even as a search engine.
My most recent request was "Find me patents about the application of concept X at high magnetic field". Should be easy, patents are public by definition. Searching google patents has worked for decades. There's proprietary patent databases with curated keywords. Perfect training data, easy to search.
But all the current reasoning models with web search just give me results at extremely low magnetic field (which is the standard application, there's many patents like that. That's the reason I'm asking an LLM, I don't want to sift through those by hand). So I specify: "Keep in mind that milli tesla and micro tesla are low magnetic fields. Please exclude patents that use those units from your search". I'm already disillusioned, I shouldn't need to do this. A nerdy highschooler would know better. But it doesn't work. It just ignores the request, appologizes, and keeps spitting out patents with those units in the abstract.
Also, I still need to paste every single patent it spits out into my patent database tool, because literally 50% of the results are hallucinated. The patent number is a completely different patent, and the title it prints doesn't exist.
One core weakness of the current models seems to be things that don't exist (as might be the case for the patent I'm looking for). Another example for that is requests like. "I'm using Oscilloscope Y, and I want to change the color of one of the traces on the display. How do I do that?" For my oscilloscope, the answer is "you can't, those traces have their colors hard-coded, fuck color blind people." But the LLM will automatically read the correct manual (good!), link it, and then proceed to hallucinate itself into psychosis. Just flat out invents entire menus and setting dialogs every time I press it harder.
pbmonster
5mo ago
My volunteer fire department is currently not accepting more people to their wait list!
There's many small reasons for that, among them: people think it's cool, it's fun training/working with heavy machinery, they party extremely hard, among the best local networks/old boys clubs available, looks good on CV.
There's also more material incentives, like they pay for your trucking licence (so you can operate the heavy fire trucks), power boat licence and things like first-responder medical licences - but in the end, nobody quits after getting those perks.
If what you're saying were true, doing homeschooling successfully would be much easier than it actually is, and it would be much more common. But the opposite is the case. I have yet to meet a single homeschooled kid I'm impressed by. And those kids certainly did more than 3 years of learning.
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