I only understood it after reading some of co_king_5’s other comments. This is Poe’s law in action. I know several people who converted into AI coding cultists and they say the same things but seriously. Curiously none of them were coders before AI.
Interesting that the right margin seems very jagged despite this. I would have like smaller margins on the phone, and possibly narrower text and justification.
For reasons I don’t understand, American cities seem allergic to installing new municipal steam or hot water utilities, even though things like cogeneration were an obvious use case for it, and now things like solar heat storage.
Steam and hot water pipes are extremely expensive to install, far worse than electricity, fibre, water or sewage.
You need to be more leak-proof than cold water pipes, because loss of pressure with steam and hot water is much more of a problem than with cold water and cannot easily be solved by just adding more cheap water. Pipe materials have to be more resistant to corrosion because higher temperatures and pressures make them corrode so much faster than with cold water. Closed hot water/steam circuits also mean that there won't be a protective limescale coating on the inside. You need insulation that you can bury and which will last for at least 40 years, which is even more expensive than the pipes. And the insulation will double the pipe diameter. And the insulated pipes have a larger keepout area that needs to be kept free of rocks, other pipes and mechanical strain because the insulation is soft and sensitive to those things. Since usually the pipes aren't operated in summer, and since generally thermal variance is far higher than with cold water, thermal expansion needs to be taken into account, so you need expansion corners, sliding sections, different valve constructions that are tight in all temperatures, etc.
And even with perfect insulation, you will loose approximately 30 to 40% of heat in your piping. So all of this is only viable if you don't care about the cost of the heat, your consumers can (be forced to or persuaded to) accept at least 30% higher prices per kWh compared to their local boiler, not to mention the capital cost.
There are only some areas in Europe even, where those kinds of installations take place: Densely packed inner cities with largely rented-out flats in appartment buildings. There, the landlords/owners avoid the cost and risk of a local boiler and don't care about the running cost of heat, because they don't pay for it. In smaller towns, like in the example, mostly public buildings like schools use those kinds of district heating systems, because the municipality doesn't care as much about cost of the heat, and more about cost of maintenance of a hundred local boilers vs. one centralized system. And in the end, it's taxpayers' money, so they don't actually care that much, headlines and opening ceremonies are more important than that.
Individual home owners usually do have their local systems, which can be run cheaper than what district heating will charge you. And since city density is lower and home ownership is more widespread in the US, district heating is even less competitive there.
> And even with perfect insulation, you will loose approximately 30 to 40% of heat in your piping.
At least here in Finland the norm is losses in the range of 5-20%, with the upper end of the scale for smaller scale networks with smaller diameter piping and low flow rate. In the larger cities losses are closer to the low end of that scale.
In the summer when the consumption is very low (essentially only hot tap water production) losses can rise up to 50%.
lots of industrial processes produce waste heat that can't easily be turned into energy, so the comparison isn't to a boiler, but to not having the heat.
It is true that the heat can be used if it is there anyways. But usually not in a big city-wide network. Instead a more localized, larger consumer is far better, because running the hot water network is far too expensive. For example, large producers of heat like data centers, dairy processing or chemical plants around here deliver their heat to public swimming pools, schools or greenhouses that are intentionally built nearby.
Even the grandparent's article says so if you read carefully: "A large portion of the town’s own buildings, including the municipal school, town hall, and library, are connected to the district heating network.". They didn't even attach all of the public buildings. Not to mention about the rest of the town.
That's exactly what I was thinking of. Cogeneration plant goes up right next to datacentre, and then various municipal services are built near that - including other factories, high density commercial and high density residential that can take advantage of cogeneration and use district heat. In particular commercial and industrial uses actually do need heat in the summer.
In some areas, natural-gas fired cogeneration only is really necessary in the winter during dark months/cold weather - which is an ideal situation to be producing district heat.
There are district heating and cooling in cities where it makes sense, both Minneapolis and St Paul, plus the University of Minnesota all have district heating and district cooling systems. The Minneapolis and U of M systems are operated by Cordia Energy and the St Paul system is operated by Evergreen Energy.
This is the coldest large metro area in the lower 48 states, so it’s economical to do district heating and cooling here.
These heating districts don't cover a very large area. It's impressive in its own right, but if you're using them as an example, it just shows that it only works at very specific scales.
Agreed, you need a fairly dense concentration of buildings with heating and cooling requirements in the tens of millions of BTUs per hour for it to make economic sense.
hot water also have pretty high losses, because you need to keep it cycling constantly to keep the heat up (you don't want a case where opening a tap in the morning means letting up the hot water from the 30m length of pipe from the street to your house).
So paradoxically, if your heat is not "free" (cogenerated with electricity) it might be far more efficient to have a boiler in each house (and definitely a heat pump), than to push the heat that far away.
no - some of what you see is the place holders when framing it - I did read a stuff from - The Practice - Blue Team Field Manual - Linux Hardening - UNIX and Linux System Admin - now the the grammar is clean up is slop by Ollama Llama 3 - I framed into a gui
I keep telling it will be the second coming of how Netbooks went down, but people are too busy praising Valve for translating Windows APIs, instead of actually building a gaming ecosystem on Linux technologies.
The same kind of technologies that power Android NDK, and to lesser extent PlayStation Orbis OS, with its FreeBSD roots.
AAA Game studios don't see a reason for directly supporting Linux and if Valve is willing to do that for free, even better.
That means.. this benchmark is just saying o3 can write code faster than must humans (in a very time-limited contest, like 2 hours for 6 tasks). Beauty, readability or creativity is not rated. It’s essentially a "how fast can you make the unit tests pass" kind of competition.
That's the second time I read this comment and I still don't believe it: it's listed as a "dedicated root server" (usually billed by the month) with no mention of typical cloud offers.
No, they switched to per-hour billing for their dedicated servers a while ago. I also tested this last week when I cancelled a dedicated server we had with them and they did indeed only charge for part of the month.
There's a difference in being charged a partial amount for the month vs an hourly amount for something you need for just 2 hours.
I have a dedicated machine with Hetzner, and AFAIK they charge me the full amount regardless of whether it's on or off. If I cancel on day 3 of the month, it makes sense to be charged for only those days' hours. However that's different to "turn it on for 6 hours" kind of hourly pricing.
Either way... it's a mess. They added hourly billing for dedicated servers six months ago, there's not much excuse for still having contradictory information hanging around.
Yes, the GEX130 has a *one-time* setup fee. And yes, it is possible to cancel it on an hourly basis in most situations. For example, if you only had it for 3 days of a billing period, you would pay the hourly rate. We are currently in the process of updating our billing systems. There are a few situations where the 30 day to the end of the month policy still applies. For most situations the current cancellation process is more generous and flexible for the customer. And for the rest, it has stayed the same. If customers want to stop paying for a server, they need to cancel it.
We have a number of products that do not include setup fees, including our Server Auction dedicated servers and our cloud servers.
To be frank, after reading your reply I'm still not 100% sure what the policy is. What are the situations where there are 30 days of notice? How does that interact with hourly billing? If I'm a week through the second month and cancel, does that mean I get charged 2 months 1 week plus the setup fee in total?
I'm a big fan of Hetzner and have used it off and on for ten years now, including auction, dedicated and cloud. I've had very few complaints over the years. But I stand by my post above - the information on your site is not clear and contradictory, and really needs to be cleaned up.
We are currently in the process of updating our billing system. A big part of that process is already done, but there are still some changes to come. That is why we have not yet updated our terms and conditions. The new policies are more generous to the customers, and for the most part allow to cancel most products on an hourly basis, including dedicated servers like the GEX130. --Katie
"an ability previously thought to be unique to humans".
This sentence.
I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I should correct my assumptions and assume that, in the end, we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.
The general sentiment is spot on - animals are amazing, complicated, sophisticated, and we will continue to be "humbled" over and over again, but maybe you've gone too far.
A few candidate "unique to humans" characteristics:
- surgical replacement of defective organs. I wouldn't be surprised if some animals have processes for amputations - especially insects - but I'd be pretty surprised if there are any kidney transplants going on.
- written language systems for durable information passing, phonetic alphabet systems. As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us.
- haircuts. This one is super plausibly wrong, but I don't think that any animals do this, and its a good example of something that they could do but just don't.
> As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us.
A bit of an aside, but I'm a bit puzzeled by this statement. There are many phonetic alphabets invented through history of course. Are you saying they all have the same root or inspiration?
> A bit of an aside, but I'm a bit puzzeled by this statement. There are many phonetic alphabets invented through history of course. Are you saying they all have the same root or inspiration?
I think you're thinking "alphabet", which indeed, has been independently invented multiple times. The most widely used alphabet is the one derived from the Phoenician script. Other alphabets that were independently invented include the Brahmic scripts and the Hangul script.
Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells
Make music - I know that birds sing, and a quick Google search shows whales and seals seem to make "music" as well
Theorize - Depending on what you mean of course (but I agree with you about e.g. scientific hypotheses to be tested), but as an example apparently birds "theorize about the minds of others", again by Google search
Writing - Definitely a stretch here (and so I agree with you) but animals do leave chemical markings for others
> Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells
You show me one outfit, I raise you an entire textile, clothing, and fashion industry allowing us to show our features in displays of status all the way to enabling us to walk in space.
Both degree and kind. While hermit crabs and other animals who wear garments do very little manufacturing (they use something as is or do some “minor” fashioning), the techniques and kinds of clothes we make are of a totally different sophistication. Our clothes allow us to enter ecosystems and hostile environments, for example. Our clothing is both functional and cultural. Etc.
> Were we less human when we couldnt yet replace defective organs?
Over time, humans have demonstrated a vastly more impactful ability to manipulate our environment and ourselves than any other living organism we have encountered.
There aren’t many fundamental unique differences between an 8086 and a M3 Max.
But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities.
At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences.
Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.
You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.
However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes.
Elephants and whales can communicate over vast distances via sound. Bats can see without eyes. Salmons and pigeons can find the point they have born without even trying. A dog can smell history of a place, plus get much more information from a single smell.
Humans can do none of these things without tools.
Also, in electronics, there are accelerators which are much simpler in transistor count and architecture, but which can do much more than a more complex counterparts. GROQ inference cards and FPGAs come into my mind.
So neither capability, nor capacity in numbers is a valid measure for intelligence or capabilities in practice.
Just because a bee has less neurons than a chimp doesn't mean it can't have some kind of comparable intelligence when you compare the things they can accomplish.
Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.
> You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.
Intelligent is not a synonym for “have amazing capabilities” but rather the ability to process and adapt to new information and transform their environment.
No other life form comes even close to humans in that regard. Our abilities (for better or worse) are godlike compared to other animals. There is a reason this epoch is called the “Anthropocene”.
This isn't so correct. Humans in isolation aren't so vastly superior from other animals, if you observed primitive humans and your typical troop of chimps it wouldn't be the slam dunk you're singing about. The truth is we're just enough better to develop and use written communication, and the majority of human progress beyond that has been trial/error and imitation with successes preserved through writing. Transmission of the written word enabled humanity to become a collective intelligence of sorts, individually we aren't that smart.
Our communication and experimentation was sufficiently far ahead of other advanced mammals to cause mass extinction events long before writing came into play. (It's debatable whether some fairly advanced civilizations even had "writing" in the sense of general symbolic communication)
"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.
I think the argument in this thread is more between people thinking animals have 'zero' ability, it is just instinct, or some other mechanism different than what is taking place in a human. And the group that is saying, animals are using the same mechanisms as a human, just humans are scaled up. Abilities between Humans and animals is a sliding scale.
They are wanting to argue that Humans have a singular ability that does NOT exist anywhere else, kind of a 'divine' argument. And animals are doing something different.
"comes even close" is indicating, it's a scale, might be a big scale, but it is the same scale.
>You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.
>However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes.
Which, yes, like your other examples, is an impressive feat, but not an impressive feat of intelligence. Perceiving one or another part of the spectrum isn't intelligence. Neither is hardwired responses. In contrast:
>Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.
That would be a feat of intelligence. But you're lumping all impressive feats into "intelligence", regardless of what's responsible for them.
> You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.
While bees thrive in their ecology by using intelligent behaviors like dancing, counting, navigating, remembering colors and scents, and making decisions using a process that resembles cost-benefit analysis, the sheer scale and complexity of human intelligence is unparalleled in teh animal kingdom. Our neocortex facilitates advanced cognitive functions, including our capacity for reflection, conceptual thought, and technological innovation generally puts humans at a higher level of cognitive complexity.
It’s a common trope that “we are no different from animals,” but this is not true. Of course we are.
Far more interesting than the fact that animals “can” ape behavior is how they do - and how that differs from humans.
Check out the work of Richard Byrne [1]. Our best theories suggest that the way primates share behavior is through literal parsing and replication of sequences. A chimp is able to watch a fellow chimp complete a complex maneuver to open a nut, and can replicate that sequence. But the sequence can contain odd moves that obviously have no effect, and those moves too will be replicated. This signals a lack of understanding. Primates use an advanced copycat mechanism, which makes innovation very slow.
The way humans learn and transfer behavior is vastly different. We watch another complete a task and develop an explanation for how it works. Our reproduction isn’t us following a literal sequence, but using our understanding/mental model to solve the task. For example, if I watch a complex sequence to open a tricky nut, I’ll have developed a model for the physics of the nut, weak points, ways to get leverage, etc. I might memorize and repeat your sequence, but I might also get creative with my own method, knowingly or not.
And, of course, we can do this one-shot.
It’s the difference between a parrot mirroring words and a person retelling a story they heard.
We are super different than animals, and denying that fact will hide important secrets about knowledge and creativity.
The "extremely complex" problem solving in this study, for chimps, was putting a ball in a draw, and then closing it. Would you have assumed that training a chimp to do so would be impossible before this study? Or that it would be impossible for other chimps to ape him, so to speak? In other words, is this study actually shifting your assumptions in any way? Or is it just the arguably grandstanding language being used that may be swaying you?
So for instance I think it's pretty well known that monkeys in Bali have taught themselves how to steal from tourists and then exchange the goods for treats. [1] And that was entirely self-learned/taught. That, to me, seems somewhat more impressive than putting a ball in a drawer, yet didn't really leave me with any awe beyond what one would normally have when interacting with monkeys. And such things leaves me decidedly unimpressed with chimps and a drawer, and even more cynical about the language used to describe it.
My assumption is that difference is not that something is missing but just in complexity of things.
It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.
I believe the one truly unique thing humans can do is imitate complex actions with high fidelity. When we evolved this ability it lead to an explosion of behavioral complexity simply because imitated behavior satisfies all the criteria for evolution (s/o Dawkins).
We’re not unique in our ability to imitate, but we are unique (for now) in our ability to imitate well enough that imitated behaviors are stable enough to evolve.
There are of course some Australian birds that famously spread fire, so partial credit IMO.
Also, figuring out how to make fire is pretty hard. I’d argue it isn’t something “humans do” in general. It is one of the earliest examples of something that somebody figured out, (or maybe it was figured out independently in a couple different places) but mostly it is a taught skill.
Teaching and long distance running are our special abilities. In both cases other animals might do the thing, but we’re much better at it than they are.
IIRC that's more like a Australian media stunt from one single source, never verified or replicated.
There's this one guy trying to explain why there's wild fire and it's not any human's fault, which inadvertently caused a great debate "animals can utilize fire".
> I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking.
Cooking is to apply heat to transform raw ingredients into a different, often edible form. Bees make honey by collecting nectar from flowers, storing it in their honey stomach, and then regurgitating it into honeycomb cells. During this process they add enzymes to the nectar and fan their wings to reduce the water content, transforming it into honey. Bees transform raw material, but not by heating it.
Eagles can 'see' better than humans. No one is is up in arms about how wonderfully unique human eye-sight is, how Eagles are using 'just instincts'. Humans are divine in how complex their sight is, that it could never occur in other animals or machines. Totally impossible that we would ever have a machine that can 'capture images'.
But there is laundry list of features that some animal does better.
Humans on whole do everything 'ok'. Humans have a lot of features, and for each feature they aren't the 'best', but on aggregate they do them all together on average better. They are one animal that combine total features better than any single animal.
Guess my point, is when it comes to 'mind' people are still thinking humans are divinely 'exceptional'. But really, it is one more 'feature' that the human animal does best, but that does not mean other animals don't have the same feature, but scaled down.
Seems like people complaining that 'bees' aren't intelligent are just trying to keep humans propped up on a pedestal. When really, it is one more feature that is scaled.
Does it effectively keep the humans on a pedestal to consider our traits as fundamentally different?
I think it is all on a continuum, humans are animals. But putting us on that continuum makes all the animals look like absolute garbage, intelligence-wise. If we want to put humans in the game, we’re going to be absolutely dunking on, like, every animal in terms of ability to abstract and teach concepts.
Technically humans are dunking on all other animals. We're killing them all rather handily.
I'm arguing against the group that think humans aren't animals, that they are imbued with some extra metaphysical secrete sauce that we are incapable of understanding.
This group usually come out strong against any of these studies that hint at some continuum that includes humans and animals on same scale. Even if humans are on far end of the scale.
Didn't Kubrick prophesy this? I'm thinking of the first act of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where one advanced primate learns how to use the femur of a tapir as a tool, then teaches the other primates in his tribe how to use bones as a weapon and how to walk upright (though we are not shown the teaching or knowledge transmission process).
At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)?
As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.
> At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)?
I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.
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