- you'd also need a maintained /24 of IPs with good email reputation
- unless you want to only use an email client, you need to do lots of testing on the web editor part for how the formatting gets interpreted in other clients, how to render weird emails correctly, how to protect the privacy in external resources, and lots of other things
Even with an LLM that's both a multi-week implementation and an infra management project for life. Their users in general can't do that. (There's a handful that could)
There's likely some spare solar capacity that will help. Currently the peak of solar is almost counterproductive, but converting that to storage is good for both the consumers and the power plants. (Less feed in during the day, lower evening peak)
Technical detail question: if all of those batteries were on connecting allowing feeding back to the grid, would they be able to synchronise the frequency/phase? What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?
It can be done, but it would requires additional equipment. Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on. The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.
But there's no reason that has to be your frequency source. Any single battery installation on its own is perfectly capable of making up some frequency, which is why home power banks with island-mode AC output are a thing - or even just a traditional UPS. Doing the same with thousands of individual battery installations across the grid? You'll need some way to get everyone to agree exactly on frequency and phase, which in practice is probably going to mean getting them to agree on time to within a few microseconds, which could be done (albeit not very sabotage-proof) using GPS.
> Batteries are traditionally grid-following, so they'll just follow whatever frequency the grid is already running on.
Is there in theory an amount of batteries with inverters where enough energy is created to "not notice" the spinning generators going away? I.e. everyone is trying to follow the frequency that's already flowing therefore everyone sees some frequency flowing? Or would it be like talking with echo/delay where they start slowing down by always being behind until everyone stops?
> The frequency itself is then provided by the rotational inertia of "spinning metal" power plants.
This might or might not be true. I used to live near a large plant that took HVDC from a power plant several states away and transformed it into AC. They used electronics to provide the grid frequency, not spinning metal. All the other local peak power generation was run in grid following mode.
Grid Forming Batteries are a thing - but since it's not free to implement of course such a provider would like to get paid, not give it away, whereas both a conventional thermal plant or a hydro plant unavoidably has spinning metal, their stability comes free with the electrical supply.
The risk vs reward isn't great. If you made your country's 10GW grid work with only batteries for 15 minutes to show it's possible, maybe you get one half page in a "Electricity Weekly" industry newspaper. But if anything goes wrong and ordinary people notice - now you're on TV News for a week.
I'm under the impression that most grid scale batteries are owned by the utility which in turn cares about this. And the rest are only going to be bought if a utility \ grid gives them a contract where again those who care will give better terms of they need it.
My home battery might participate without the above but in to small to matter.
> What's the threshold/requirement for that to happen?
The RoCoF (rate of change of frequency) must be low enough that the inverters can form the grid without letting out the magical smoke. Having inertia is what slows this rate down.
> This would mean that you lose some ownership year by year.
What's the problem? It's not like you'll have to sell over 50%. Even then the are schemes for non-voting shares. But when close to 1% of population works for Amazon, maybe forced sharing of ownership isn't a bad idea.
We've seen what happens when people decide to confiscate wealth with promises of good living standards for everyone. It has never delivered on those promises, always lowered median living standards, and usually led to lots of deaths. I can't think of a single example where recovery from a confiscatory regime has taken less than 40 years, except arguably Cambodia, and most of them are still ongoing. Do you want Democratic Kampuchea as a best-case outcome?
> We've seen what happens when people decide to confiscate wealth with promises of good living standards for everyone.
This is how taxes work. I'm not sure why you jumped from one extreme of the US to the other extreme of Cambodia, ignoring the quite normal end successful middle.
Taxes generally do not promise good living standards for everyone. Usually they come with promises of public infrastructure, some kind of safety net, and some other benefits. How did wealth taxes work out for Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Sweden? They also didn't promise good living standards for everyone, yet still found that wealth taxes were worse than not having them.
> Most of that wealth is tied up in assets offering services for americans (servers / warehouses). It would be much worse if the rich decided to spend all of that on consumption rather than keep reinvesting it in assets.
Why would that be worse? What online services are so important that it's better to have them than to lift some people above the poverty line? Rich people spending is the next best thing after taxing them - it distributes their money and provides jobs. It would strictly improve the society if Bezos spent lots of money and folded his servers and warehouses - in so many different ways...
I personally would rather have next day delivery and not waste my time shopping and driving from store to store.
What jobs do you think it creates? You really want all our labor pandering to billionaires? Why would anyone give attention to middle class if the billionaires were forced to spend all their money? How expensive would your life get if the billionaire class redirected all of their wealth toward frivolous consumption.
Whatever jobs are needed to fulfil the spending of billions of dollars. You can't drop that kind of amount of new demand on the existing system without some expansion.
> You really want all our labor pandering to billionaires?
It already is (not all but there's a big impact and political influence), without benefits. Just spending money for products and services would be an improvement.
> Why would anyone give attention to middle class if the billionaires were forced to spend all their money?
Why (for example) Tesla producing both budget 3 and taking millionaires money for Roadster? Because addressing both markets works.
> How expensive would your life get if the billionaire class redirected all of their wealth toward frivolous consumption.
Probably cheaper for higher quality goods and same otherwise. But also nobody is talking about all of their wealth - that's unrealistic. Some more vs hoarding in assets would be still good.
Some prices. It's not like billionaire spending will influence the local carrot prices. They're unlikely to overlap at all with most day-to-day spending for normal people.
I'm not sure why you think so. We know that very local brain injuries can result in personality changes, sometimes dramatic ones. And that's in a system evolved to deal with constant damage and rebuilding. With LLMs trained to achieve the opposite of that (minimal redundancy, maximum performance), the effect is similar but more extreme.
I just don't know if "similar" is good enough. We know what thinking is based on biological brains, so if we are to conclude it happens in machines, the experiment should have identical results, or it's more probable that it's something completely different.
The way around this is to have a predictive theory of how thoughts work, and if that is proven true, then use that to analyze the LLMs. So far we have no such theory so I think the only tool is to look at the exact behavior match.
> We know what thinking is based on biological brains
All we know is that it’s a bunch of neurons activating until the person that is thinking describes what they are thinking of.
The same way a thinking AI model activates a bunch of “neurons” - and with newer thinking models utilize a hidden latent space also not understandable - to think before describing what it’s thinking of.
It’s likely thinking can work in many different ways. It’s likely consciousness can also arise through many different pathways, even if evolution led to biological animals having similar consciousness/thinking pathways. But that would be the result of a common ancestor and the tremendous evolutionary advantage thinking and consciousness gave the specific species.
It wouldn’t indicate that’s the only way thinking and consciousness can occur.
> We know what thinking is based on biological brains
That's a big claim. Do we really?
> so if we are to conclude it happens in machines, the experiment should have identical results
Why? Same idea can have multiple different implementations with very close effective result. Both humans and spiders can walk and both use legs, right? But the details are entirely different.
I should rephrase on the first one. We only have one source of reference for what thinking is and where it happens.
On the second one, yes there can be multiple ways that consciousness can manifest in wildly different systems, but what theory do we have that would validate these other different kinds of consciousness? Without that theory for validation the safer bet is to stick with what we already have a reference to, unless the claim is that consciousness is such an easy algorithm it can easily be stumbled upon by all kinds of systems, i.e. a bunch of matrix multiplications that doesn't even run in real-time (it executes prompts and then stops). I think that is not likely in my opinion.
- they provide a service, not software
- you'd also need a maintained /24 of IPs with good email reputation
- unless you want to only use an email client, you need to do lots of testing on the web editor part for how the formatting gets interpreted in other clients, how to render weird emails correctly, how to protect the privacy in external resources, and lots of other things
Even with an LLM that's both a multi-week implementation and an infra management project for life. Their users in general can't do that. (There's a handful that could)
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