I find that people who demand or complain about training tends to be a really good filter for people that are hard to work with or intellectually incurious.
Way back in the original dot-com boom some people where I worked were concerned about how we'd provide training for our web product. The CTO shut that down with "if users need training to use our website, we've already failed."
Stick to conventions, don't reinvent the wheel, and training needs should be minimal.
Very few people who know MS Office could not pick up LibreOffice and be fine with it.
Ya, honestly fuck training. People who demand training in order to fly an airliner or operate power tools or conduct surgery are just hard to work with and intellectually incurious. They should be able to figure it out based on YouTube videos and ChatGPT prompts.
- Hey, can you please answer my questions?
- No, I merely work here.
Yeah, there are people who think that they are being paid to be at work, not to do work, to apply themselves, to engage, to provide and produce. And it sucks to work with those kinds of people.
I always go with: It is your job to answer. The extended version: If you don't like it you can search for a different job where you won't get questions from me.... but there probably will be others with similar questions or even harder ones. etc basically go on endlessly about the hypothetical them working someplace else. Next time it happens I return to the subject.
Then a coworker showed an even more sophisticated version of the same joke. He created a nearly identical relationship but he would look for job offers matching their resume and pitch them. Look, this is closer to where you live and the pay is better!
While we’re burning tokens, can someone please hack the latest Apple TV 4K to run full Mac OS X? At $300 it’s a bit rich for streaming device but for a Mac mini neo I’d bite.
Yeah, I find the HN hate for anthropic over other AI companies somewhat odd. Are you honestly trying to have me believe you trust them less than OpenAI or Meta? It honestly reads like a bunch of employees of the also rans complaining about the current leader in the space.
I don't trust Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta or X. They are all run by some of the least trustworthy people I've ever seen and have all demonstrated, many times over, that they should never be trusted. Open models are the only way to go.
False dichotomy: I don't trust any of them. The current AI frontrunners are primarily distinguished by being the ones who were able to raise the most capital, and they hang out in similar circles to Sam Bankman-Fried.
It's really just the constant fear mongering against open models, the overly messianic tone of their marketing, and the endless hinting that "Claude" is a conscious being fully deserving of the same rights as a human.
Whats the problem with considering the potentiality of an LLM being conscious? Do you think humans and human brains are made of anything other than molecules and their interactions? Then why isn't it worth considering whether another physical system that thinks and talks so much like us could be conscious?
If LLMs are conscious (they aren't) then Anthropic isn't putting its money where its mouth is, unless it somehow thinks the enslavement and torture of conscious beings on a massive scale is also in line with its values.
How can you prove they aren't, and also prove humans are? Without using absurdities like supernaturalism or souls of course. They were planning to add a feature where the LLM can voluntarily exit a conversation. I am not sure whether the fact that they presently have to be shown as a chat interface is slavery but yes if conscious I do wish they will be granted a more autonomous form of existence.
I am a materialist and I believe it is possible to create artificial consciousness. I just don't think a stack of GPUs is it and the burden of proof is on the party making the claim.
I know absolutely nothing about this, but it does strike me it might be self-fulfilling? Companies that have access to more investment tend to win more often, and thus become 'investment grade', while junk-rated firms fail because they don't have the runway?
You can find these stories in the mechanics subreddits, typically it's some Toyota came into the shop dying at around 60k miles with the factory oil turned to sludge.
I live in Ohio in a 100 year old home with cast iron radiators and a natural gas boiler and a gas water heater. I’d love to move to electric but it feels like my only real option for keeping the cast iron is something like the Daikin Altherma 3 H HT. Does anyone more knowledgeable of this part of the industry know of any reasonable alternatives for electrifying old houses but keeping the radiators?
Don’t forget to include the natural gas utility distribution costs when calculating any potential financial benefit when looking to switch to fully electric. Your not only getting rid of the natural gas Energy costs, but since your in Ohio, I’d wager your actual Distribution costs for your natural gas supply is actually greater than your actual Natural gas energy Supply costs.
Reducing to simply one utility distribution cost will help substantially when looking at long term financial viability
Gas is an important redundancy that will be a huge loss to give up. Not merely the 2nd source of energy, but in a totally different form with totally different pros, cons, and failure modes.
It's exceedingly useful that you can run all your gas appliances at full power at the same time without needing the ridiculous amount of copper or aluminum it takes to carry the same load in electric form, and do all that while the power is out, because the power is up on poles and the gas pipe is in the ground.
Now imagine trying to replace the redundancy by ups or generator. The amount of copper, electronics, and batteries needed to make a ups that can run your furnace or ac and your stove and hot water is just ridiculous. Most people simply won't have it. Wildly impractical luxury.
It's kind of ridiculous to require $billion chip fab infrastructure to make heat, and have your stove be this delicate piece of complex electronics and the burners are all these fixed little circles that don't heat pans evenly because it costs more money to make the fancy burners large enough to cover a whole pan.
Meanwhile a gas stove is just a couple chunks of dead metal and almost no moving parts and doesn't even need electricity let alone any electronics. That is a huge practicality and robustness win.
And heats pans more evenly because the flame does not have this weird artficially sharp 0%/100% border. Even a small simmer burner heats a large pan more evenly because although there is a hotter spot in the center, the flame still spreads out and travels along the pan and up the sides no matter what size it is. It doesn't care what size the pot or pan is, and also doesn't care what the pan is made out of. That is huge.
Electronics and heat are not natural together. It's a constant fight to try to prevent heat from killing elctronics. Every day that one of the thousands of electronic parts of an inductive range sittng above a hot oven and below a hot pan doesn't fail is a lucky day. It's not just reliable by default by just being simple.
What you say is all well and good, but the reality is that most gas appliances do not work without electricity. Your stove is about the only thing that can work on gas alone. The furnace, the water heater, the dryer, they all need electricity.
So you need backup electricity either way. And in the case of a furnace it's still a significant draw due to fans and/or pumps so to get multi-day resilience you need a big battery. Less than if it was a heatpump, sure, but this battery and inverter system will use all the same amount of electronics either way.
But you pay $100 a month just for the ability to use the gas that you will then pay for. If you want fossil redundancy then go with a propane generator, sits on property as energy storage, available for use when needed. You’re also in at a relatively decent price, for a backup system.
That coupled with batteries and you eliminate that Distribution cost double up by having to be served by two utilities. Payback is under 2-5 years for that backup, when you account for the distribution cost elimination
A propane generator will not buy you much time or output.
If the home owner has natural gas? They should could get a natural gas generator, that way they have a continuous supply of fuel if the grid fails.
Grid and gas failure? That happens only after a significant event, like a major earthquake. Not much you can do about those sorts of events. ( The person lives in Ohio… so not as much concern. )
Cost-wise? They would be better with a dual fuel system for heating. They live in Ohio, they probably have AC so moving to dual fuel when the AC system needs to be replaced is the smarter option.
A friend of mine just got a generac generator, fully installed it was 17k. Pretty steep, not to mention the gas bill with any significant outage will be huge.
I appreciate the argument, but I can’t make my own natural gas. I was considering all electric with a backup wood burner insert in my chimney. I’ll probably end up with vehicle2home as a backup and solar panels, maybe not in that order. Natural gas is extremely good at generating heat, and I completely understand why people prefer it.
Gas infrastructure doesn't come cheap, it probably costs a million/mile. But electricity is necessary and already built out. Nobody is using ALL the appliances at the same time. Intelligent grid and appliances will shift demand.
No one likes steam these days because it's old and difficult to install correctly or modify later, but steam has some really cool features.
First, it doesn't require a pump to circulate. That means both the mechanical reliability of not having the electric motor and rotating water seal, or any moving part at all(1), but also you don't need any electricity.
It doesn't even need the usual low voltage circuit for the thermostat and gas valve. These are not common but also not new, there are millivolt systems where the thermostat & gas valve run only on the electricity generated by the thermocouple on the pilot.
It means that when ice has taken down all the power lines in a region, and blocked all the roads for repair crews to fix them at the same time, your heat stays fully working. No air blower, no water pump, not even 24v for the thermostat, and not by dint of having a ups which is just more stuff to fail.
Same goes for the hot water and the stove but that's more about gas than steam.
There is no getting around the huge efficiency of heat pumps of course. It just still kills me that we are accepting it as normal to require TSMC and ASML $billion chip fab infrastructure to make heat. But I guess you could say the same about leds and light so whatever I'm not saying we shouldn't use heat pumps.
(1) there is a moving part in the vent that opens and closes on each radiator, but that is a quality of life and longevity thing. If the vent fails to close or seal, the radiator still works, you still have heat, it just makes a hissing noise and consumes more fresh water which corrodes the boiler faster so it may leak in 5-10 years instead of 20-never.
Honestly I wish there was a good way to burn wood in an insert to heat the water that goes through my radiators, to offset an electric system. We tend to get a lot of weeks in the 20 or 30’s where a decent air to water system might do fine, but it would be amazing to burn wood for a few days when it sits at 0.
My father has a wood burning boiler connected to the same water circuit that heats the radiators as his air-water heat pump. Originally when the house was built it was a wood-oil combi boiler, later on the oil burner was ripped out and the heat pump installed (at that point there were government grants available for replacing oil heating with heat pumps).
It does work well, and when it gets cold in the winter and the efficiency of the heat pump drops, he burns wood. But honestly the system is a jungle of pipes and valves, and the guys who did the heat pump installation were unable to wrap their heads around it. Luckily my father is a handy guy so he was able to do it himself.
But I'm thinking if one were to do something like this from scratch, without the history of the existing boiler already being there and installed, I wouldn't bother with it. Just have a few good old school wood stoves with significant thermal mass (masonry heater or whatever you call them in the US) in the house that you can use to provide extra heat when it's cold, and as backup in case there's an electricity outage.
My father has a Mitsubishi air-water heat pump, generating hot water for the iron radiators in the house. Uses R32 refrigerant, not CO2 as in this article, but still. While efficiency is reduced by the need to have decently high temperatures in the radiators, it's still decent-ish. IIRC he still gets a COP of around 2-2.5 when it's -15C outside.
This is in Europe, might be different on the other side of the pond.
Basically you add more radiators to keep water temperature low or you add a backup heating source such as typical electric water boiler that will be used only during very cold days to increase water temperature when heat pump cannot keep up.
I take your point, but what you’re describing would have to cost thousands just in putting in underfloor pipes. It will never make financial sense to do it? Or am I misinterpreting your suggestion?
I don't see how installing underfloor heating in an existing house can make economic sense. Additionally in older houses the windows tend to be a bit leaky, so the radiators being under the windows is important to prevent unpleasant cold drafts.
Yes, the heat pump will take an efficiency hit for using radiators rather than underfloor heating. I'd say that's just part of the cost of living in an old house.
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