That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • This is the kind of thing that makes me support use of extra-judicial methods (at least in a temporary and limited context) against global oligarchs and senior lackeys.

    The host then followed up with, “Do you think we can meet AI’s energy without total blowing out climate goals?” and Schmidt answered with, “We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it — and the way to do it is with the ways that we’re talking about now — and yes, the needs in this area will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it and having the problem if you see my plan.”

    This is outright malicious. How exactly would AI “solve the problem”? Later on in the article (I am not watching the propaganda video) alludes to “AI … will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better” but he clearly just made that up on the spot. And at any rate, even if “AI” helps discover a method to make (all?) energy generation 15% more efficient that would still require trillion-dollar investments to modify current energy generation plants using the new technology.

    Who is Schmidt to say that the returns of using the total spend in the above-mentioned scenario wouldn’t be better used on investing into wind and solar?

















  • I was curious about their methodology for counting “internet shutdowns”.

    I live in Ukraine and I have not experienced government run internet shutdowns since the full scale russian invasion. We do block russian resources (pretty easy to overcome via VPN), but that’s understandable as they spread genocidal propaganda.

    The internet does go down for some providers when there are longer brownouts, but that’s related to the russians targeting the energy infrastructure. To my knowledge even frontline towns (i.e. 10km to the front) still have internet if there is capability to provide it. I believe towns ~20 km from the frontline are actually exempt from planned power shutdowns when there is too much load on the system (due to russians destroying ~60% of our electricity production capacity).

    So I looked into their dataset (direct google sheets link).

    And low and behold, this is what I found:

    They do explicitly state that “Shutdowns were imposed by external parties in Palestine and Ukraine”, but it seems strange to include such cases considering this is different from the approach used in India.















  • It really is exciting to see alternative battery systems beginning to see wider commercialization.

    I am not aware of sodium-ion batteries for home use, I believe it’s mostly for industrial-scale battery systems. I could be wrong though, would be interested in learning more.

    In an apartment setting, IMO the current gold standard is LiFePO4 (Lithium iron phosphate) batteries.

    I live in Ukraine and we have constant problems with electricity supply (thank you dear russians). At times you have 1-2 full charge/discharge cycles per day on a 1 Kilowatt-hour battery system. Several LiFePO4 systems in my extended family seem to work close to baseline even after 1.5 years (not used daily though).

    I have not seen any options for sodium-ion batteries for home use, but this maybe a local thing.

    In a more rural/suburban setting, generators work as backup power supplies for most people. Typically only the well off get a high capacity LiFePO4 systems for house setting.