I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.

Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.

Turns out energy is getting more expensive, especially when places like the US aren't diversifying their energy and are relying on dead dino juice.

That doesn't explain how Silicon valley powered, owned by the city of Santa Clara, can provide electricity at 18c/kwh while the next city over PG&E charges 48c/kwh

Has Santa Clara diversified their energy and Sunnyvale did not?

Where’s that guy who always posts about all the solar in Texas when you need him!

That's generation

How do you explain increases in the cost of distribution?

I guess it depends how you fund the system then. If there are not 'profits', how would additional infrastructure and upkeep be done, without just raising rates higher to pay for it? And who would loan them the money? The government? Oh, so back to taxpayers.

"Taxpayers" are the public.

The infrastructure is for the public.

Why shouldn't the public get to pay for its own infrastructure without a middleman trying to make a buck?

A middle man that can bail out of consequences for free, while the public can never bail out of obligations and needs. There was something in game theory about such sequential games where one side can only loose if it plays.

Some use a lot more electricity than others (think companies and industries)

Public utilities receive unfair advantages like preferential financing, tax exemptions, and government infrastructure grants in your definition of subsidies, public utilities frequently receive some form of government support. (unfair as in not apples to apples comparison)

> Some use a lot more electricity than others (think companies and industries)

Okay sure, and if the utility is public, the public should get to set policies accordingly.

> Public utilities receive unfair advantages like preferential financing, tax exemptions, and government infrastructure grants in your definition of subsidies, public utilities frequently receive some form of government support

Unfair to who? Somebody who wanted to profit off the public? As a member of said public, excuse me for not being the most empathic towards people trying to make a buck off me.

How are roads maintained and upgraded?

Huh? Profits are outside capital improvements. That is the nature of profits. There are arguments for private utilities but this one makes no sense.

> Say a business could make 8% margin by cutting corners and applying only short term thinking, but the same business could make 6% by not doing these things.

Sure there is, market forces quickly push the person making 6% out of business, because the one making 8% can lower their prices, or use that extra capital to buy up more resources.

Why spend excess to train when you can do it somewhere else for a lot cheaper? Cheap energy subsidized often by taxpayers is the real issue, and instead of those subsidies helping those paying for it, it's just moved capital upwards.

That's not how the market actually works. One company could lower prices. Or they could keep their prices high to condition their customers to higher prices, and maintain the higher margins.

Indeed, the last decade of business has been all about businesses preferring higher margins over more efficient markets.

At home this is super easy, use one of the multiple TTS models out there and provide a clean clip of Morgan Freeman's voice. Typically around 10 seconds will do. I just run a python script to daily scan my FreshRSS sources, compile my news and generate a 'podcast' that's about 10 minutes for a morning listen. Currently using F5-TTS, but there are lot's of other models out there as well.

> Currently using F5-TTS

Thanks for listing the model you're using, I've not really done any TTS stuff and this sounds like a fun thing to spin up.

I think under Lemonade you can do that, especially with AMD systems, using the models that allow for hybrid operation. Prefill happens on the NPU and token generation happens on the GPU. Not sure if this is faster or better than just doing it all on the GPU side.

It's slower but more power efficient. I think only some form of onyx models are available and I couldnt get anything to run on the first gen NPU's in the 7940HS cpu.

I think that's the 'push/pull' problem though. Information dense UI that takes months or years to learn, or something that may be less information dense, but a monkey can learn it in minutes.

For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.

So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"

Wouldn't that be like a calculator saying 'pull out a math book' when you try running calculations?

It's like doing the calculations yourself (with whatever tools you want) and knowing what you're doing, steering the process yourself, rather than begging someone to give you the result so you can then show it off like you did the work. I can understand and explain what my calculator is doing and I'm not offloading decisions to it. Using a language model to shit out projects that you can't fully understand the structure of yourself is insane. Ceding control of any design decisions to a language model is insane. They're fine as second-order autocomplete and semantic search engines. Humans should be handling design and implementation entirely, making things for other humans. An LLM running in a loop can't build humane systems.

> Humans should be handling design and implementation entirely, making things for other humans. An LLM running in a loop can't build humane systems.

I tell the LLM what to do in its loop. It builds it. I tweak it until it is perfect. I care a lot about UI.

I'm mostly building my own UIs lately, but I find no problem with the development loop. I'm building much better UIs, because it's way easier to test things, and scrap things that I thought would work, but don't. It all happens in a matter of minutes.

Humans should use more llms.

I think even with family and friends that live far away, screens are often an excuse as well. Well sorry we aren't going to be able to visit gas is just too much, we can FaceTime instead! And I think it's ignoring the bigger problem, is perhaps you talk to your family members once a week, but do you have your community around you that you talk and do things with 'off screen'? Its easy on the internet to say you do, but the reality is most people would rather doomscroll than be bothered with trying to know their neighbor.

Before screens you visited even less. Well if you compare the 1960s to today - but the 1960s had the phone as well. Compare 1700 to today and you realize quickly that "visiting your sister who married just one village over is a big deal and it couldn't happen often".