Substantially smaller than building and running gas peaker plants

Good thing lithium is transportable, eh?

Ah, I see, you don't mind the planet being destroyed as long as it's not in *your* back yard?

> resistors that reduced incoming electricity

Resistors used like that are notorious for being both large, and getting hot when used. Both things that are tricky to cram into a small handheld device.

You also have to wonder what the point of doing all this faffing is. Mobile phone batteries are optimised for energy density above almost anything else, which comes with tradeoffs, include much more rapid natural degradation overtime that can’t be reduced or limited by gentle charging cycles. A phones battery is basically guaranteed to be unhealthy after 4-5 years regardless of what you do or don’t do.

Just because two batteries have the same basic chemistry (Lithium-ion of example), doesn’t mean their behaviour is the same. There’s a lot of possible customisation and tweaking within that single chemistry envelope.

You can kill a battery much faster than 5 years if you don't treat it right.

My personal experience is that modern devices are far better about battery management, my phones used to wear out much sooner than 5 years back when smartphones were a new concept and Li-Ion was new and fancy tech. So all that "faffing" seems to be doing something useful, because even my quite old and forgotten tablet that I forget to charge seems to be doing quite well.

There’s probably a significant element of consumer batteries being so good, so easy to setup, and so cheap to buy. That it actually ends up being more economical to take this approach, than build dedicated utility scale battery storage.

With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus. If the cost of those units is low enough, that reduced operational burden starts looking very attractive, especially if you want to scale up your battery capacity across your network very quickly.

>With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus

I highly doubt it. You can reasonably expect one hard drive to operate just fine for years, but data centers have to constantly replace failed drives, and that would still be true if they they put each one in a different building. It would just cost a lot more to do.

If you’ve validated the Jev scores, then it means you’ve built and run the evals. The exact thing the author is arguing needs to be done if you’re using Jev.

So they’re not dunking on that, they’re dunking on the idea that you can just trust Jev confidence scores without actually doing any validation.

> That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with building good ai engineering systems in areas where it works magically.

Without the evals, how do you know it works magically? I think that’s the entire point of the authors article, people are using AI tools, and trusting the AI own evaluation of its performance, without making any attempt to validate if the AIs confidence actually correlates to anything meaningful.

From what I’ve seen, the result tends to be very exciting demos, followed by incredibly mediocre results when deployed into a real environment. The lack of critical evaluation then provides a double whammy, because it takes longer than it should to realise the system isn’t actually working correctly, and then the team lacks the skills and understanding needed to improve the system they’ve built. You just kinda have to hope that the next model release is going to magically result in better performance for your particular scenario, which won’t be able to measure due to the lack of evals.

You need a set of Evals, which catch enough of the mistakes your llm makes following your baseline prompt, so you have an equal or lower error rate than humans.

This can be determined by offline benchmarks if you build a system that takes small sequences of actions, and requires live ab test for long sequences of actions.

The more your human ops team work from documented standard operating procedure, rather than tacit knowledge, the less you need Evals except to capture edge cases

Yes, and understanding the effects of a medication is different to understanding how the medication has that effect.

The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

> The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

I don't think this is quite correct. I mean many practitioners of medicine will have the attitude of ... "if it works, it works". And that's perfectly reasonable.

But if you understand the mechanism of action of a drug (or other treatment), it (often) makes it easier to improve a drug.

So ... some sectors of the "medical field" understandably care only about empirical results. But other sectors would prefer to understand what's going on.

>The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

This is nonsense. Most, if not all professionals are interested in mechanism of action, but without Ms Frizzle, it is extremely difficult and expensive (time and money wise) to figure that out. So while the labs run the experiments with the very limited funding they have, we make do with using the second best thing we have, which are statistics.

> For truly difficult problems, it’s entirely possible that humans are simply incapable of comprehending why a solution is true. But ultimately the practical value of applying that solution to the real world is going to eclipse our need to understand it.

This is hardly new or novel, you’ve just described huge chunks of existing engineering disciplines. There is still no complete model that explains why airplane wings work, there are lots of very useful models, but all of them have fundamental flaws where their behaviour completely breaks down in certain very possible scenarios. Notably scenarios where airplane wings don’t spontaneously either stop working or explode.

We also built the entire commercial airliner system decades before we even had computers capable of doing the aerodynamic analysis of airplanes, but none of that prevented us from creating huge engineering disciplines around the empirical data we did have, and slowly chip away at the underlying theories as maths and computing improved over time.

So we’ve always lived in a world where we extract value from systems we fundamentally don’t understand. But that’s never stopped us from working to understand them anyway, and deriving even further value from that improved understanding.

You and the other commenters are all absolutely right, but that’s not really what I was pointing at.

So far our solutions were more or less understood thru some models of reality that we’ve constructed (on our own), which may or may not reflect reality perfectly, and even if most of us never bothered thinking about these models, some people did and they understood them on a very deep level.

But we may be getting to a point where the problems we need to tackle become too difficult for humans to model, or even to notice their existence, like asking an ant how a Boeing 747 works.

Maybe this was always the case but now it seems like we might have a shot at making these solutions useful even if we have no idea what they’re even solving.

Not entirely sure what European A/C regulations you’re referring to. Europe doesn’t have A/C because historically it’s not been needed, and when you have cities that are hundreds of years old, often filled with buildings that are designed to passively keep cool, it’s a right pain in the arse to retrofit everything.

As a result Europe doesn’t culturally expect A/C every where, and has been slow to adopt it. But obviously climate change is forcing many to reconsider those cultural norms.

>...In the Swiss canton of Geneva, installing an air conditioner requires an exceptional permit demonstrating “real need” (such as a doctor’s certificate). During the recent energy crisis, Spain and Italy barred public buildings from cooling below 27°C—hot enough to dull your cognitive powers by 5 percent. In the midst of the current deadly heat wave, my own city of Ghent is officially advising people to “avoid air-conditioners”.

>The resistance is baked into European regulation. In many countries a conventional air conditioner lowers your building’s energy rating. The result is entirely predictable: owners and landlords decline to install units, or rip out the ones they have. Those left without built-in cooling fall back on drafty, inefficient portables that can scarcely make a dent in the temperature. I own one myself—a wheezing box with a fat hose shoved through a rickety fabric covering the window. It is the thermodynamic equivalent of mopping the floor with the tap running, but that’s simply the direction in which Europe’s regulations have nudged me.

https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-w...

They're trolling, and doing a poor job of it. Downvote, flag, or ignore. Don't feed them.

Yeah, I don’t think you have any understanding of how the crown interacts with the rest of the UK government.

There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.

> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.

You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.

> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.

No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.

> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.

You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.