EU, UK, Switzerland, Norway have huge government innovation funds. Unfortunately they are mostly given to manage to politicians who are loyal, but not very bright, and possibly corrupt.
Now would be a perfect time to take advantage of the stupidity of Trump and channel these government investments into building European infrastructure providers (cloud and AI), but I very much doubt this will happen.
Without goverment support there is just no way in Europe to raise the capital that is required to compete with the American big tech.
EU assigned as commisioner of Startups, Research and Innovation a bulgarian politician called Ekaterina Zaharieva. Bulgaria is the poorest member of EU - shows you how much EU values startups, research and innovation.
On top of that Zaharieva is a member of the political party Gerb, well known for corruption. A few years ago somebody took pictures of their leader sleeping in his bedroom, surrounded with gold bars and stacks of euros. An ex-financial minister from Gerb is sanctioned for corruption under the Magnitsky Act.
My guess is the battery will come with some sort of remotely controlled switch that disconnects the house from the grid, before the battery starts supplying power.
This is an interesting idea and I wish you a good luck building a profitable business around it.
Before starting to apply voltage to a home electric gird, I guess you need to disconnect it from the central grid - how do you do that? Or do you detect when the grid goes down and comes back up?
"Change is inevitable. You can’t stop the railroad as they used to say. It’s going to kill some jobs but not all of them."
I personally don't worry about jobs. AI is progressing very fast (there are a lof of smart folks working on it, there are a ton of money invested and there's a lot of demand from businesses, governments and individuals). Human inteligence stays the same. I think it's likely that sometime soon AI models will become more inteligent than an average human. And then more inteligent than the smartest human. And then more inteligent than the whole human race combined.
Let's say some worms 600 million years ago could think. And they consider should they kill all mutants and stay forever the pinnacle of evolution as they are or allow some of them to evolve into fish, and then mammals and eventually inteligent humans. I think we are in a position like this - we are currently the pinacle of "creation" in the known universe - do we want to stay this way - by blocking AGI progress, or do we want to allow minds far greater than us to evolve from current LLMs at the cost of probable human extinction eventually.
Boeing has been very slow at raising salaries and contract rates in the last 15 years or so. That lead to a lot of the best engineers, managers and technicians leaving.
It's a pervasive problem among all gov contractors. Most don't pay as well as private market, and you have the added downside of needing a clearance in a lot of positions, so they try to make it up with "job security". That means, when times are tough, instead of letting people go they freeze or cap raises, often below inflation. Good people wind up leaving.
If half your best people leave every few years when the gov hits its next debt ceiling, your company is gonna have a bad time.
Apparently a few CF customers got emails last week saying that CF is investigating a customer data leak. Wonder if it has something to do with the lack of response from support.
DDR5 has a bit of ECC built in, but yeah - one of the major problems that Intel created is using ECC RAM support as a feature to sell their Xeon line of processors and so living 99% of the desktop users without ECC.
For me the most important aspect of ECC is not making the memory reliable. It's telling me the RAM is becoming unreliable, which you know because the number of errors detected and corrected is rising. DDR5 ECC does not provide that information.
Once you start seeing ECC RAM errors you know it might be the cause of system failures you see. Knowing a specific piece of hardware might be failing is far better than a random crash that might be caused by memory, or the CPU, or a software bug, or PCI bus failure and a zillion other things.
HDD SMART is the same thing. Once you see errors from a drive rising you know it won't be long before it fails. One of the negatives of SSD's is you don't get the information, so they fail without warning.
That aside, DDR5 ECC is not end to end. It might not be the RAM calls that are failing. It might be getting the bit to the pins on the chip, or the connector, or the memory bus, or the CPU RAM interface. CPU ECC covers all of that.
Running locally has a lot of advantages - privacy, getting to learn how to run LLMs, not having to deal with quotas, logins, outages.