Renewable PV is the cheapest way generate electricity during daytime at appropriate latitudes.
Notice several caveats: electricity, not heat; daytime, not nighttime; only for some places on the globe.
Most energy use doesn't use electricity. It's one thing to replace an average-16%-efficient internal combustion engine with electricity and another to replace a 96%-efficient condensing boiler.
We could take all suburban United States off of fossil fuel heating with solar heating. But that would require planning up front and cost some powerful people money, so we can't.
By heat I think the parent mostly means industrial process heat, which is mostly supplied by natural gas now. Coal is still used in metallurgy.
Electric heat is rare since it’s inefficient (thermodynamics) and thus expensive but it’s used in applications where you need precision temperature control.
Of course if solar and batteries got cheap enough you could just say F it and use electric resistance heat everywhere. Time your peak production to coincide with mid day when solar is at peak.
Good article. Would have liked to see them create a minimal test case, to conclusively show that the results of math operations are actually incorrect.
We grew up with 24 hour cable news. Same thing, different medium.
Remember how they manipulated us into believing in weapons of mass destruction? They would have done it with the genocide in Gaza, if it wasn't for the ability of people to share uncensored information through social media.
> Naturally, trains already have track-based location systems, but they are usually based on a train being within a “moving block”, so their accuracy is down to metres rather than centimetres. If you want to monitor track conditions, the more accurate the location of the suspected fault, the less time staff spend repairing it.
Agree in principle though, is this extreme precision really needed?
Track defects tend to be quite small, so yes, for track maintenance monitoring the extra precision is the difference between "somewhere in that rail, and you'll have to use expensive equipment to find out where before you start work" and "that's the bit that needs to be fixed."
> their accuracy is down to metres rather than centimetres. If you want to monitor track conditions, the more accurate the location of the suspected fault, the less time staff spend repairing it.
Considering the tracks are linear, I would estimate the additional time needed to locate a fault within two meters as compared to two centimeters at "negligible".
On the alternative assumption that the faults are too small for humans to detect and we just need to replace the affected track... I would also estimate the additional time needed to replace two meters of track, as compared to two centimeters, at "negligible". It doesn't actually take less time to cut out a specific 1cm strip (containing no visible indications!) from a piece of cloth as to cut out a 1m strip that includes the 1cm strip somewhere.
Do they repair track cracks? I'd expect they replace the entire track section - both rails - as long as they are there. Get within however much they can do in a work shift and good enough.
My general thought as someone who doesn't know how rail maintenance is done is that rails should not crack in normal operation. If there is a crack that implies either the rail is end of life anyway and you replace it, or there is likely a manufacturing problem and you want to replace all the rail from that branch. Either way rail is manufactures in long sections (20 meters is my guess, but that is slightly educated guess that I won't stand by), so you would only need within a few meters to find the track section in question.
However I don't know how track maintenance is done. It is entirely possible that they grind/cut out the crack and then fill in (either cast in place, fill with weld, or just replace a a few cm) and in that case you would need to know within a few mm (though maybe inspection could find it if you are within a few cm).
Again, I am not a rail expert here. This is a place where I want to know and thus would like an expert to say. (though likely no experts are reading this...)
Yes, I believe the paradigm shift will be to not treat the code as particularly valuable, just like binaries today. Instead the value is in the input that can generate the code.
The money argument is IMHO not super strong, here as that Mac depreciates more per month than the subscription they want to avoid.
There may be other reasons to go local, but I would say that the proposed way is not cost effective.
There's also a fairly large risk that this HW may be sufficient now, but will be too small in not too long. So there is a large financial risk built into this approach.
The article proposes using smaller/less capable models locally. But this argument also applies to online tools! If we use less capable tools even the $20/mo subscriptions won't hit their limit.
reply