mbgerring

If you want to come here and be racist, stop being a coward and say it with your whole chest instead of hiding behind “one particular nationality”

San Francisco is one of three cities in America where you can walk to things. A lot of people don’t value that, and that’s fine, those people should all leave

San Francisco is expensive because the competition for both technical talent and housing is fierce. The dynamics you’re describing existed from 2020-2022, and as a result it became cheaper to live here. Today, the rent is going up again, because companies are locating and hiring here again. San Francisco is not just magically an expensive place.

These layoffs are happening because the entire tech industry is sinking all of its free cash into AI capex. H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs. If you’re blaming immigrants for this, you are either doing so in bad faith, or you are embarrassingly gullible.

This is disappointing, I was hoping they were going to do something interesting with the display hinge to make it make sense as a touch interface. Can’t see it being useful as is.

> I have honestly given up on humanity

No you haven’t

Correct, and the reason I work in climate tech is Amory Lovins’ famous observation that people don’t care where their energy comes from, they care about “hot showers and cold beer”

Clean energy hardware meaning clean electricity generation, energy storage, or energy management and arbitrage hardware that reduces the need for fossil fuel-derived electricity.

I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.

It’s really not, lots of people have been doing this work for a long time, if you want to understand what it’s going to take you can start here: https://drawdown.org/

I’m 38 years old, and I’ve worked in climate tech for the last 12 years. In my relatively short lifetime, and my relatively short career, I have seen the environment for political action, and funding for climate solutions, fluctuate maybe half a dozen times.

The physics, however, don’t change, and neither does the task in front of us.

I just spent ten months finding a job, the longest and most difficult job search of my career. It was hard because the macro environment is terrible, but also because I insisted on finding a role working on clean energy hardware.

At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.

We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself. The slow, steady work of transitioning away from fossil fuels is never going to be as profitable, as quickly, as the various forms of gambling and addiction that have driven the tech industry for most of my lifetime.

But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.

It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.

It’s so crazy that nobody wants a gigantic, loud, ugly building that raises their power bill and puts them out of a job in their neighborhood

No, they do not, they very clearly model the medium. Why do you believe otherwise?

Yes, we have been. Writing software was always the 21st century equivalent of being a skilled factory worker. Nothing at all like law, medicine, or real engineering, all of which require real credentials, licenses, and meaningful accountability for the practitioner if their work breaks something.

> We discovered a sophisticated recording device

did you though

State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.

Big picture, where this leads is a lot of physical stuff just getting unplugged from the Internet.

It's very easy to see how this goes — one side of the ledger is the cost savings you get from remote monitoring, remote control, automated cloud backups of access logs from employee badges, or whatever dumb reason this system was internet-connected in the first place.

On the other side of the ledger is the potential cost and probability of a shutdown from a cyberattack, whether that's from a belligerent state actor, a malfunctioning or maliciously deployed AI agent swarm, weird accelerationist hackers, or whatever, plus the cost of constantly defending and hardening systems against attack.

Chances are, the cost/benefit analysis will heavily favor just unplugging the thing from the Internet.

That’s correct, one of the many gigs I did during my 10-month search for a new full-time job this year was working 11 hours, 6 days a week, under the blazing desert sun, building solar and battery systems at Burning Man to take diesel generators offline. What were you trying to say about that here?

You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.

"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"

If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.

This is confusing. "Thinking" has been a hobby, a luxury reserved for the wealthy, for most of human history. "Thinking as a hobby" was the Renaissance — a large enough agricultural surplus enabled a small handful of people to spend most of their time just thinking.

> It's not clear what this fad of attributing everything an AI does to the human prompting it is supposed to accomplish.

It's meant to assign agency and accountability where it actually lies instead of mystifying it with anthropomorphic language.

Failing to do so has real and harmful consequences, such as enabling OpenAI to escape accountability for clearly criminal behavior.

I encountered this argument from EA cult recruitment literature back when it was written, and it seemed like bullshit then, too.

> many people are already focused on it, and it is therefore not an especially "neglected" area.

OK. Spend an afternoon reading about the current funding environment for decarbonization projects, vs the amount of capital available for AI, which is driving an increase in carbon emissions.

When I first encountered this argument back in the 20-teens, it didn't make sense, because there was effectively no forward progress on decarbonization. Much has changed since then, and the transition is moving, but it's moving in fits and starts, in punctuated bursts driven by reactions to long-predicted disasters actually showing up at the doorsteps of people with money (see, for example, the explosion in climate tech funding following San Francisco's "orange sky day" in 2020).

If we had an AI-data-center-boom-sized pile of cash to set on fire, we'd have completed the clean energy transition already. What's happening instead is that any hard tech company related to reducing emissions that hasn't already pivoted to some kind of AI-related marketing message is struggling to stay afloat, while losses at the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to accelerate, and everyone seems fine with that.

All the EA language around climate change is CYA bullshit. If this was true:

> Working on this issue seems to be among the best ways of improving the long-term future we know of..."

Then the above conditions would not obtain.

> AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware

No, it isn't.

A human prompted an LLM to build a software simulation environment for hardware design, enabling an LLM, when prompted by a human, to optimize hardware designs against constraints in the simulation.

A battery will replace your generator and you are too late to stop it.

Site last modified in 2015

Lots of us working in clean energy read this book, and everything that’s happened since it was published makes the projections here useless

Right, as long as you specify “without energy storage”, renewables “can’t work alone,” even though energy storage is included in most common sense definitions of “renewables”

Thankfully, energy storage is being deployed worldwide, so this is a moot point, and renewables can and will replace fossil fuel electricity generation.

“According to my paranoid fantasy derived from internet fan fiction, worrying about currently-occurring real-world harm doesn’t make sense”

We are living through an ongoing mass extinction event of non-human species. There is a very well understood risk to the stability of human civilization resulting from global average temperatures reaching and sustaining 1.5deg above the historical average. The higher the temperature goes, the greater the risk of social collapse. We are already seeing it, and it is almost certainly going to get worse.

EA cult members do not take this very real, measurable, non-speculative danger seriously. Consequently, I don’t think they should be trusted or consulted on any subject of any importance.

They literally cannot. They can detect the user’s intent to do math, and then use a different tool to do math, hopefully with the correct inputs. The LLM is not suited to giving deterministic answers to math problems.

Times have changed my friend.