Literally perfectly relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Brilliant hahaha

Because the AI act was mostly written to address issues with ML products and services. It was mostly done before ChatGPT happened, so all the foundation model stuff got shoehorned in.

Speaking as someone who's been doing stats and ML for a while now, the AI act is pretty good. The compliance burden falls mostly on the companies big enough to handle it.

The foundation model parts are stupid though.

>Because the AI act was mostly written to address issues with ML products and services. It was mostly done before ChatGPT happened, so all the foundation model stuff got shoehorned in.

It's not an excuse. Anybody with half a working brain should've been able to tell that this was going to happen. You can't regulate a field in its infancy and expect it to ever function.

>The compliance burden falls mostly on the companies big enough to handle it.

You mean it falls on anyone that tries to compete with a model. There's a random 10^25 FLOPS compute rule in there. The B300 does 2500-3750 TFLOPS at fp16. 200 of these can hit that compute number in 6 months, which means that in a few years time pretty much every model is going to hit that.

And if somebody figures out fp8 training then it would only take 10 of these GPUs to hit it in 6 months.

The copyright rule and having to disclose what was trained on also means that it will be impossible to have enough training data for an EU model. And this even applies to people that make the model free and open weights.

I don't see how it is possible for any European AI model to compete. Even if these restrictions were lifted it would still push away investors because of the increased risk of stupid regulation.

> If anyone thinks Cuba is better off in any metric now than they would have been in that alternate reality, I’d love to hear why.

I mean, pre-Castro Cuba was basically a playground for the US rich. Like, the whole revolution was about kicking those people out.

Personally, I think that's morally justified, but I don't agree that what the US has done to them since then is morally justified. Obviously people differ on their opinions of this stuff, but collective punishment (which is what the US embargoes are) is generally regarded as a war crime.

> Obviously people differ on their opinions of this stuff, but collective punishment (which is what the US embargoes are) is generally regarded as a war crime

The definitions really keep mutating on the left don’t they. Economic sanctions are a “war crime,” “silence is violence,” etc.

> 2019, the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute adopted an amendment to the definition of war crimes applicable in NIAC detailed in article 8(2)(e). The new article (8(2)(e)(xix) prohibits the intentional use of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including the deliberate prevention of relief.

Fuel for cooking food and providing heat is necessary for survival; deliberate prevention of this aid from reaching Cuba is a war crime.

This is why starting a war with Iran right now was a bad idea.

Yeah, I emotionally disagreed with this article, because I like the Culture, mostly.

That being said, it's possible that AI is helping here.

Mind you, given the sycophancy of current models, it's also possible that commanders are making worse decisions based on the results of these AI outputs.

Finally, if the US manage to get what they want without completely destroying the balance of power in the Middle East or sending oil to 150 a barrel, then I'd be much more likely to accept the authors speculation.

I think it's safe to say that whatever products the military is using are vastly different from what's available to and designed for everyday consumers. DARPA may be past its heyday and certainly the private sector has caught up in a lot of ways but I don't doubt for a second that they have been investing heavily in weaponizing AI for some time.

> I think they should be allowed for cultural reasons but only if cut by hand like we did when I was a kid :)

Me too! That was a lot of work, and surprisingly hard to stack.

And turning it would cut your fingers to shreds! But it was great if the weather was fine.

Thank you both for the imagery here - quite beautiful, in its way.

This has made me remember having to go out to the coal shed and fill up a brass bucket and then come back in all covered in coal dust.

I've not thought about That Smell in years!

Did you have one of those ubiquitous brass boxes beside the hearth?

No, we had some antique brass bucket thing that I'd invariably have to drag in, accompanied by complaints that I was doing so, because obviously I'd put way too much in, so I didn't have to go out later to get more...

Which it almost never was :/

Its really, really, really expensive to build.

And people are (mostly irrationally) terrified of it, which matters in democracies.

> It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.

To be fair, there's a large (~300mn) agricultural population in China who don't use developed country levels of energy. Nonetheless, this is still good.

Rural areas do not use much energy but Chinese cities are also more energy efficient per capita because of density and use of public transportation, walking, or electric mini scooters.

> Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.

The only part of your bills that could be regarded as virtue signalling is the carbon tax, which is driven by government regulation. The vast increases in energy costs were driven firstly by Russia (when they invaded Ukraine) and the US (when they attacked Iran).

And this hits me too, I have (unfortunately) oil heating which has gone from about 500 to 800 over the course of the last week. Fortunately we filled up last month, but it's really worrying.

Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.

A LNG terminal would help. Lots of bad infrastructure decisions have left us extremely exposed to those external shocks you mentioned.

An LNG terminal would not help for the current high prices. Europe is experiencing a gas price shock precisely because LNG is easy to store and transport. Asia gets half it's gas through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently experiencing troubles. This means Asia is willing to pay a lot of premium for LNG, which in turn means that Europe has to match this premium otherwise LNG will go to Asia and not Europe.

Being dependent on gas is equal to being exposed to global shocks, unless you can cover your domestic needs purely with domestic gas extraction.

Europe was getting cheap gas from Russia. It makes a big difference, the US gas is much more expensive.

American energy exports are turning around in the mid-atlantic to go somewhere else instead because Europe is getting outbid.

"My energy prices are high" because you are getting outbid. You can't stop getting outbid by building more transport infrastructure. That terminal will go unused.

An LNG terminal wouldn't help with cost (it would probably increase it a bit, if anything, as the cost of building it would have to be paid back). It's desirable from an energy _security_ perspective; as it is we are very dependent on a pipeline to Britain.

Actually it should help with both, because a on-island terminal would also provide LNG storage capacity which would buffer short-term price fluctuations. We have zero such storage.

Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.

A lot of it relates to the planning process, they do keep trying to build things. One could argue that this is also their fault (and I do!) but there are good historical reasons (cough ray burke cough michael lowry) why we've ended up with such a bureaucratic, byzantine planning process.

Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.

As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.

Yeah, even though I voted (happily) for the Greens, I was very disappointed in them not building an LNG terminal, purely for energy security reasons. I'd be super happy if it never got used, but it's a cost worth paying just in case.

An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers.

> An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers

This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.

> Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.

I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?

You need significant storage capacity before you can become isolated from world events. Until then, you need power generation that you can bring online on short notice: coal, gas, hydro, etc. Traditionally, gas was used for this because it's easy to store, quick to get going and gas plants can also burn coal if needed.

Unfortunately, the nice properties of gas (easy to store and transport) mean that it's a global commodity. It will go where they pay the most, which means that far away events can cause a price in gas prices globally.

> I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?

Battery technology is really, really getting there.

And in the absence of any more improvements here (unlikely) you integrate your grids with other countries. That's harder for Ireland, but it's still worth doing.

Does this battery technology grow on trees in Ireland, or does it exist in a foreign (and perhaps one day adversial) nation, like China?

The sheer number of people in this thread saying, "we need renewables to be independent!", from countries that don't actually manufacture anything, is astonishing.

Is Ireland going to burn the batteries after they buy them from China? If China says "Do what we say, or else no more batteries" then...nothing bad happens. Ireland's batteries continue to work.

Coal or gas on the other hand...anyone can cut off Ireland anytime.

There's at least as much battery production of batteries in Ireland as there are viable coal mine sites.

And crucially batteries aren't fuel they're storage.

Also all these economies do make stuff, they just don't employ huge numbers of semi-skilled workers to do so. Most of the factory jobs are gone, but the factories are not. I live in a port city, about a century ago this city had loads of jobs crewing ships and loading cargo but today more work is done by a tiny fraction as many people.

Carbon taxes are huge, and they are 100% politically imposed.

And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.

I believe in climate change, and I believe in doing something about it. But being disingenous with the public is only going to create resentment and resistance to Net Zero.

> And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.

There’s nothing unreasonable about this: fossil fuels have huge costs associated with them that are invisible to the consumer. They’ve just been getting pushed off onto other people forever.

> externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbine

Solar panels can be recycled, so eventually they will need very little mining.

Have you ever recycled gasoline? Have you ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon?

I think you're being disingenuous while accusing others.

You haven't made any.

Unless you manufacture it locally, with a fully local supply chain, wind and solar are still susceptible to world events.

Is someone turning off the wind and sun? Once the infrastructure is installed it produces energy for years. Solar panels aren't burned to make energy, like oil or gas are. And you can recycle them.

You need tons of oil to lubricate wind turbines.

Sure you do. You need more oil to lubricate wind turbines than you do for gasoline, diesel, engine oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid...totally believable. And coal and natural gas turbines don't need any lubrication whatsoever.

> You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand.

The tricky part here is that energy is an input to basically everything. It's a major (through fertiliser) input to food, and then all of transport and stocking of said food which tends to be how energy changes influence downstream inflation. So I think you'd probably need a deeper analysis to tease out these issues.

That's only in-region. Ireland imports all sorts of stuff so just look at imports if you want to exclude the energy impact on everything else.