robomartin

Sounds like you failed English Reading and Comprehension in school.

The part you are missing is that these people are going to Latin America and paying for care, not using socialized medicine...which isn't the best at all.

Socialized medicine is another fantasy that has infected the minds of those who have never had to actually live under such fantasies.

There should not be anything of note between you and the doctors and services you choose. The layers of complexity and interference in our system a both nonsensical and costly, both in dollars and lives or outcomes.

I have over the years become a believer in the first payer concept. When I pay for goods and services, I get better goods and services. It's that simple.

We should, of course, help and support the less fortunate (weather that means for financial or health reasons). That should not mean that you screw everyone else to the wall with a disaster of a system that causes such distortion that you can actually find yourself at a doctors office in the US that is worse than a third country clinic. I have seen it with my own eyes. That's just insane.

> The reality is that if Obamacare didn’t exist, I would be uninsurable. Yes that might bring your price down.

There's nothing whatsoever wrong with covering everyone by having everybody contribute a bit more for those who might need more care. I am 100% for that.

That does not mean that a family's health insurance costs should TRIPLE or more. That's theft. Particularly when you barely use it. A couple hundred bucks a month, sure. Triple or quadruple? No, that's just wrong. Take that extra cost and multiply it by ten years. It's a shit-ton of money. They take away from retirement, kids college, etc.

What you cause it what a friend of mine has done for ten years: No insurance. If he needs something important he travels to Latin America, gets excellent care and at a reasonable cost that is LESS than the cost of insurance here in the US. Actual care costs less than paying for insurance. Go figure. And, on top of that, you get doctors who will spend 45 minutes talking to you rather than 5 minutes looking at a chart and see you next visit.

The only reason people accept the dumpster fire that US health insurance has become is because they have not been outside the US to understand how else it could be. This does not at all mean socialized medicine (which is, in general strokes, a disaster).

> Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted.

Nope, the net effect of the ACA was to make all those plans evaporate. No longer available. We tried. It was impossible to keep our plans and doctors.

You mention "the market" a few times. The ACA forced a paradigm shift, there was no market left. Not as it was pre-ACA. We have several doctors and medical professionals in our family. Believe me when I tell you that they all say the ACA is shit and it destroyed US healthcare. This is not to say it was perfect before the ACA, but it certainly was not this bad.

After a few experiences I concluded that the system the ACA has created is now worse than the DMV. I never thought I would find something that would top the DMV.

We had one horrific experience that I will not recount here in detail. My son tore his ACL. It took WEEKS to get his care sorted. It was incredible to witness the dysfunction and horrifically low quality of care we experienced.

I have friends who will travel to different countries in Latin America for medical care because of what the ACA did to their healthcare in the US. I was talking to one today over lunch in fact. He has been without US health insurance for a decade now. When he needs anything important he goes down to Argentina, gets better care and at a lower cost.

> If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.

The list of government abuse is long and wide. Don't get me started. My post was not intended to be a compendium. That said, yes, we have much to question...and if people ever got their heads out of their asses, we would.

Simple truth: Both major political parties deserve a solid spanking. They have caused more damage to the US over the last, say, 50 years (pick a number) than one could express in a simple post. Politics in this nation has become so disgusting it inspires projectile vomiting.

> services like door-dash are literally built on a concept of a sucker pays more

Strongly disagree with your entire narrative, one that it demonstrably disconnected from reality.

Nobody is forcing anyone --at all-- to use these services. Not one person. Not one company. Not a single law or mandate. If I want to use it and you don't, that's perfectly fine. If I, for whatever reason, want to pay a premium and you think it's stupid, that's fine too. Don't use it. I will. Simple as that.

What's the opposite of that? Obamacare. Mandated and forced on everyone. It's shit. It's three times the cost of the insurance we were all promised we could keep if we wanted to (and we could not, because Obamacare killed those plans). Etc.

See the difference there?

The numbers fail to make sense in the real world.

The 1.6 MW number is the nameplate capacity of the panels. That is not the actual peak generation capacity for this system (or any other system). This is due to the panels not having optimal alignment to sun rays. For example, in Los Angeles, once your array is facing directly south, you need to tilt it to about 35 degrees. The array in question has panels almost facing straight up and possibly tilted away from sun rays. They will experience a significant drop in peak output at various times in the year. My guess is they'd be lucky if they peak out at 1 MW during the best possible conditions.

So, you have a 1 MW array that cost $20 million. That's $20 per Watt. A traditional ground mount solar array costs about $1 per Watt, maybe $1.50. So, they took something that would cost $1 million and turned it into $20 million.

There does not appear to be any information whatsoever about ongoing maintenance, service and operating contracts. That would be useful information to have.

The good news is that it appears they did not have to run new high voltage power lines to connect to the array. That is unlikely to be the case for a much more extensive installation, which means that the cost of bringing high voltage power lines to the array would have to be added to that $20/Watt figure.

Wait. There's more.

One of the claims being made is that the shading helps save a million dollars a year in canal maintenance. That's fantastic! This also means that we must evaluate the cost of shading the canal using other technologies.

I had a quick look at solutions. It appears that tensioned fabric shading would run about $3 million per mile.

Solar would cost about $60 million per mile, maybe less, maybe more.

Yet, the story does not end there. What would the operations and maintenance costs be over, say 25 years?

The estimate I got was about $1.5 million for tensioned fabric (replacement and disposal) and almost $7 million for solar (replacement and disposal).

Now multiply that by, say, 50 or 100 miles...

The Verdict:

Wholesale electric prices in California vary, but a utility like TID can typically buy or generate clean energy elsewhere on the open market for 5¢ to 9¢ per kWh.

Paying a 31.2¢ per kWh structural premium means that without massive, permanent government subsidies or a dramatic 70%+ reduction in structural costs, the solar canal is a massive financial loser compared to a simple fabric shade structure.

The maintenance overhead and structural complexity of suspending high-voltage power over water completely swallows the value of the electricity it creates.

One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion.

In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.

Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.

Anthropic needs to shut down. They are promoting insanity from every pore for some crazy reason.

The best message these people can get from the public is to have their IPO fail miserably. Nobody should buy one share.

Either they are crazy, in which case you should not give them your money.

Or, they are truly building a doomsday machine, in which case you should not give them your money.

Ergo: Don't buy their IPO.

I've been trying to steel-man the argument and find a way in which AI could kill all of humanity. Maybe I am too stupid to come up with a clever enough idea. You would have to assume that eight billion people are NPCs in the game of life and simply fall over without any thought, effort, action or desire for self preservation.

Poof! Game over.

Right.

> I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold

Then he should not IPO, dissolve the company and go into politics to fight against human extinction.

I am certainly not buying a single Anthropic share. Why would you support them financially if they are telling you they are going to kill all of humanity?

My position on the clear gaslighting coming out of Anthropic is simple.

1: It is ridiculous on the face of it; it does not pass the physics test. They are actually claiming that AI will kill ALL OF HUMANITY (>10% probability) and have not provided a detailed explanation of exactly how they see that happening. Not one.

Publish a paper showing exactly how you kill eight billion people while we all sit around and do nothing watching the first 5, 10, 100, 500 million die on CNN. I mean, as smart as these people are to work on AI they seem to be some of the dumbest people on earth.

In addition to that, all proposals invariably assume we are complete idiots for decades and do nothing to install safety measures (which do not have to involve AI at all in lots of cases) to mitigate.

So, yeah, everyone: Stop working on all cybersecurity projects. Resistance is futile.

2: If everyone at Anthropic truly believes this doomsday vision, they should move to shut down the company immediately and go write software to get more clicks on Facebook or something.

3: Nobody should buy Anthropic's stock when they IPO. Not one person or institution. Why would you provide them with massive amounts of money if they are telling you that they are going to kill all of humanity? What? They are good and everyone else is evil? Please.

I remember when the Y2K zealots were convinced civilization would come to an end at the turn of the clock starting at the end of 1999. "Bat shit crazy" is the only way I can describe that era. I also remember when Al Gore said we would all be dead by now. Again, "Bat shit crazy" and likely with political and financial objectives driving it all.

It seems humanity is susceptible to these crazy cults that grab onto something and just don't let go. I have yet to see one such predictions come true, the proof being that I am writing this and you are reading it. These people are bat-shit-crazy and you should not listen to them or support them.

4: Don't work for them. You'd be killing humanity.

5: No company should use Anthropic's products. They are telling you they are building the human extinction machine. Don't help them succeed.

----------

Etc.

This is one of the things that really gets me about the ease with which the ignorant media outlets can reach billions of people with complete nonsense these days. And nobody asks even the simplest questions like: How do you actually kill eight billion people? Show your work. Or, why would we just bazooka power plants feeding AI data centers on day 5? Etc. It's FUD at its best. I am sure there are both political and financial reasons for supporting and promoting this nonsense. I won't even venture a guess as to what they might be.

And let's not forget about enemies of the West being thrilled to fund the FUD because, if we set the brakes on development, they will absolutely win. Then what?

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If you care to have a better understanding of what might be going on, watch this:

AI Kills Everybody or Doomer Psyop?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvxjqbfLVk0

It isn't going to be easy, of course. Yet, I do believe they will make it work.

One correction: SpaceX makes their own solar arrays. The cost is nowhere near what you quoted. Source: I worked for SpaceX for a few years.

Also, you can generate a lot more power in space per unit area due to not having the limitations created by our atmosphere and weather. It's continuous generation at 30 to 40 percent higher per-unit-area radiation. Generation on earth is roughly an inverted parabola (on a good day without clouds and weather) that, at best, if you integrate the area under the power curve, delivers 66% of the total equivalent energy say, a nuclear reactor, could deliver during the same period. So, once you increase radiation from about 1,000 W/m2 (impossible to achieve on earth due to weather and other realities) to 1,400 W/m2, 24/7, no weather, etc. The scenario quickly becomes vastly different.

Geothermal is very interesting, thanks for the ticker, I'll look into it.

All that said, I think the US (and Europe, if they care to survive) needs to have, as a top national priority, a massive program for the construction of nuclear power plants.

A few years ago, I ran through an analysis of power generation needs to convert our entire fleet of vehicles to electric power. That required at least doubling our power generation capacity. This was the equivalent of having to build 1,200 nuclear power plants, each producing 1 GW 24/7.

This is impossible to achieve with solar, or wind, or the combination.

So, even if we decide not to care one bit about AI data centers, we need to double our power generation capacity (and infrastructure to deliver it).

Add AI data centers to that equation and the number could easily climb another 600 nuclear power plants.

Here's the problem that a naïve conversation with an LLM will not uncover: Humanity and Politics.

Could we embark on such a massive energy-generation project? Yes, absolutely.

Is it realistic? Nope. Not even close.

In other words, we can do it but it is impossible...which sounds like an oxymoron until you consider that we have lots of examples of projects that are absolutely plausible that, once they contact political and government reality, quickly become impossible. The best-worst example I always grab is the California high speed train disaster.

Last time I used the Windows version it pegged all my cores at 100% usage for some reason. The machine became unusable. Instead I used Codex with JetBrains Rider (doing a C# project) and it worked flawlessly.

Everything everyone is predicting has almost zero value. Nobody owns a crystal ball. Right now there could be someone working in a garage somewhere that could shake the entire LLM world to the core with a unique insight and innovation.

Think about the world before the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper.

Did anyone predict that paper, what preceded and followed it?

Nope.

Same case now.

Maybe the word "prediction" is the problem; "guessing" would be better.

OK, what the heck. I'll make a prediction too:

You better buy SpaceX stock now. The way things are going in the US, the only way we build AI data centers at scale will be in space. Politicians have turned data centers into punching bags to be used to gain votes. We can't build power plants and people are being led to believe all kinds of things. Regardless of which, if any, are true or not, the rate of construction of AI data centers in the US is and will be seriously constrained by realities on the ground.

Hence my prediction: It's all going to space.

It is a security risk. That's the problem you create if you allow every single vendor from imposing their own rules. The contracts are not awarded because doing so would create a security risk.

I don't know what analogy would drive the point home. Imagine a password management system where the people running the company have an ideology that leads them to believe that their system should not allow anyone to secure anything used in military applications. Well, that's a security risk. And no contracts should be granted. Cause and effect. There's no confusion here.

> But to prohibit anyone else from using it is a much bigger and more questionable step.

What do you mean? You and I are not prohibited from using Anthropic products unless we do work for DoD/DoW that collides with their usage restrictions.

Your analogy makes no sense. At all.

> Democracy is not about mob rule, it's about a dialog.

No my friend, Democracy is majority rule, which easily turns into a ruling mob. It has nothing whatsoever to do with dialog.

Also, your quote of Lincoln's address is taken completely out of context. He was talking about his opposition of the ideas of a faction of Democrats who were in favor of slavery and his support of the majority of Republicans who believed slavery was a moral, social, and political evil.

In other words, take the time to at least do some research before you try to use quotes in support of a failed conclusion.

Did you read the Greeks in school? Probably not. I recommend Plato's Republic. Both he and Socrates talked about the flaws of direct/pure democracy that would usually make it degenerate into mob rule.

In Republic Plato developed a hierarchy:

  Aristocracy: Rule by the wise (my comment: a fantasy)
  Timocracy: Rule by the honorable (my comment: another fantasy)
  Oligarchy: Rule by the rich (my comment: a reality in many societies)
  Democracy: Rule by the masses (my comment: glad we don't have this)
  Tyranny: Rule by a despot (my comment: plenty of examples of this in history)

It took until the late 1700's for the idea of a representative democracy to actually take hold, with Alexander Hamilton being credited with the terminology.

So, "democratizing" means letting the masses have their way. It does not mean making things accessible to everyone, which is the hilariously or tragically ignorant way in which Silicon Valley tries to use the term. You see startups all the time say "we are democratizing <X>". Just how stupid are these people? They are saying we are going to let the mob have access and benefit from <X> not making it available to everyone.

In the context of Plato’s political philosophy the modern, casual use of the word "democratizing" completely ignores the historical and philosophical baggage of the root word democracy.

The irony is that modern society uses "democratize" as an undisputed positive term (meaning liberation and fairness), while the very philosophers who birthed western political thought used "democracy" as a warning label for instability and lawlessness.

A better term for what startups want to say would be "commoditizing": turning a specialized, elite resource into a public good or a widely available commodity; not "democratizing", which is an ignorant use of a term that means almost exactly the opposite.

I guess classical education has not been a part of schooling for quite some time. As a kid I did not necessarily enjoy reading the Great Books. As an adult, I can see how much damage has been caused by the abandonment of such valuable teachings.

> Democracy is about access

No, not really. I know what you are trying to say, and I fully agree. We need to stop using "democracy" or "democratizing".

Democracy, in it's purest form, is about mob rule --majority rule, if you want to say it in a softer/kinder way. "Democratizing" means giving a mob control of the thing, it does not mean making it accessible to all at all.

IANAL, so I can't comment on the legal merits of any of it.

From a practical/business perspective, I can see the government's position. It's very simple and it makes sense. Here's an analogy that I think is apt:

We use Solidworks, Altium Designer and JetBrains tools for our work. Imagine a scenario where each of these companies has license terms that restrict their use to certain domains or types of products they --for whatever reason; it does not have to be political-- do not agree with. Further imagine that the restrictions are different for each product, creating a virtual mine field of sorts.

Now imagine that every supplier adopts this philosophy over time; hardware, software, tools, components, fabricators, contractors, consultants, etc.

Well, very soon you will have to conclude that the only job you will be able to do is drive for Uber, if that.

The DoD/DoW is massive and massively multidisciplinary. They simply cannot afford to have vendors create no-go mine fields for them. It quickly becomes an unmanageable pain in the ass.

So, yeah, under those circumstances, I would not touch Anthropic with a ten foot pole duct-taped to another ten foot pole. It simply would not be a reasonable decision to work with them.

Years ago I used PostgreSQL under Django to drive an industrial test and inspection robotic cell (which I also designed and built) at a major technology company. It worked very well. PostgreSQL maintained machine state, path planning, sensor readings, faults, operator input, etc.

I wanted to see how far I could push that toolset. It worked surprisingly well. Django's capabilities meant such things as multi-user login pages, access controls and remote monitoring were very easy.

> 2 bare-metals with Linux, Postgres, HAProxy and PHP (or Python/Django) work perfectly fine for 99% of apps that businesses need.

I agree. Simple and effective.

I would add a third small machine to give HAProxy a third vote. The problem with only two machines is that, if communications between them fail, you don't want both believing the other died and doing the wrong thing. You could use that third machine for Postgres backups, which would be smart because Postgress replication is not the same as backup.

> I am still a firm believer in garbage in -> garbage out, AI is only as good as the abstractions and contracts you put in place for it.

Absolutely on point. I just completed the port of a industrial application written in Python using a sophisticated console-based UI to C# and Avalonia UI. This is my second major coding project using Codex.

The one salient element of the experience has been that, as I keep saying to anyone who will listen, AI still does not understand anything it is doing. It presents an amazing simulation of it, but, no, it does not.

Here's a simple example: The original application had a clean communications protocol implementation. A single file with a class that implemented every single command you could have the industrial controller issue to the hardware. Codex was explicitly told to replicate that in C#. It did, at first, but then it started to duplicate command processor code in the individual functional blocks throughout the application. Which means that, when a bug surfaced, you had to fix it in five different places.

Another example: The application has a highly customized table view. Once again, it was told to make that a component to reuse throughout the application. It did, at first, and then weird bugs started to surface that made it clear that it had reimplemented the table control in different areas of the application.

If you don't know what you are doing you will probably not pick-up or even care about some of these things. It is easier to whack-a-mole bugs with AI than to worry about code structure, efficiency, maintainability, future-proofing, scalability, etc.

I purposely decided not to look or touch a single line of code during this project to see what's possible and where the issues might be. I learned a lot and continue to learn. I think the next step is some sort of an agentic approach, maybe using OpenClaw (or whatever, I don't really know right now) to create a team with coding, supervisory and testing agents.

While the project got done significantly faster than it would have without AI (four weeks instead of probably 4 to 6 months), the process was just as intense as coding, just operating at a different level, micromanaging architecture and implementation.

Sure buddy, whatever you say.

You changed my mind. I think OpenAI should pay you to use their technology for free without restrictions. It's only fair.

Live long and prosper.

None of these things are free my friend. They probably represent tens of billions of dollars in development over years, decades in some cases.

You are missing the point entirely. Let's just take one: LibreOffice. This was a FOSS project from the very start. It is intended to be used as you use it. Even then, bitching about functionality and features would be entitled. In that case, if you don't like it, stop using it or participate in the development...for free, donating your time.

ChatGPT is NOT a free product. Yes, they have a free tier. And that's fantastic. We've all used it. But this is not a FOSS company. Bitching about their free tier isn't right. Again, that's being entitled. Why do they owe you more than they are giving you? They do not. If you want more, pay for it.

Or, you could buy a bunch of powerful computers and run an open weights model on your own hardware and have free intelligence to use as much as you want.

Oh, wait, that wouldn't be free, would it? You'd have to pay thousands for the hardware.

OK, wait, how about you do that and I use your self-hosted LLM's for free and then bitch about the lack of performance.

Yup. Entitlement. Always a reason for other people to owe the entitled and never a reason for the entitled to owe them anything. And this goes way beyond what we are talking about here, far and wide.

> I'm very glad most good software creators I've come across do not have your mindset.

Here's something else you do not understand. FOSS isn't free to create, not even close. Take something like Linux. I would be comfortable estimating that Linux has probably a development cost in the one-hundred billion dollar range. I would not be surprised if was way more than that. The massive number of people who worked on Linux over the decades have lives, families, homes, responsibilities, etc. The only way Linux happened is because they are otherwise employed and donate their time (with is fantastic, I did a lot of of that when I was younger, had time and less responsibilities) or someone is explicitly paying for them to work on Linux because of the benefits they might derive from it. The only "free" part about FOSS is that users of the software don't pay for it. Don't confuse that with all software having to function this way. Like I said, OpenAI is a business. It isn't your personal charity. If you want more, pay for it.

> "your first hit is free" like your crack dealer's marketing

Oh, please.

Don't use it then. Simple.

Sign of entitlement: You get something of value for free, bitch about limitations and make-up bogus reasons to continue using the product without paying.

If it is of value, use it and pay for it. If it isn't, do not use it and you have nothing to worry about. You are bitching about having access to untold billions of dollars of infrastructure and a massive amount of work from people who have lives and families FOR FREE. Get a grip dude.

I use it for work, extensively, and I gladly pay for the services from a number of AI providers. I would gladly pay double. It's the no-brainer of the century: I can do months of work in weeks or less for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month.

I was talking to someone the other day who shares their Netflix account for four other families. Same thing, although, in this case, it's not entitlement, it's theft.

They are both versions of the tragedy of the commons in various ways.

> I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will.

This isn't about political will. Politicians are whores, it doesn't matter what side, they respond to money and votes. This is worse than that, this is about people not being intelligent enough to vote with a view towards future benefits --decades away. Politicians buy votes by promising crap that the masses eat-up and never get. This nonsense is as old as time. This is precisely the kind of thing that destroyed nearly every nation in Latin America. And now idiot voters are pushing the US in the same direction with these bat-shit-crazy socialist/communist politicians gaining ground in various places. Americans will eventually learn, however, and sadly, this might require a few decades.

In that context, the whole mass transit conversation is so utterly insignificant it isn't even worth the bits we have wasted in this chat.

> bike lanes are woke

No, they are not woke, they are stupid...in certain cities. Some of the things I have seen are truly horrific. One of my own kids, who decided commuting to work on a bike was a good idea, nearly got killed twice. A year later he bought a car.

Once again, there's reality and fantasy. They are not the same.

>You flying on that Joby tomorrow?

If I could, absolutely. I've talked to people who would never get in a Waymo. I have, many times, also through Uber. Great experience. Progress.

> I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing.

If you've never been involved in product development, manufacturing, testing and certification within a regulatory environment you don't have a real sense of just how hard and detailed these processes can be. Could it go faster? Sure. The point is, we probably don't really want them to in a case where safety is the top consideration. It will take as long as it will take.

> I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

Sure, but it will happen and affordability is relative. For example, it costs me $120 each way for an Uber to the airport that could take one to two hours to get there. If I drive my own car, I still get to eat two hours on the road and spend about $300 parking it at the airport. So, if I can buy a 30 minute Joby ride for $300 to $500 round trip, with Uber car pickup and drop-off included, sign me up!

Also, people use helicopters today and they are not at all cheap to fly. So this isn't like comparably-priced options are not out there. In fact, a Joby solution integrated into Uber is far more likely to democratize short-range air transport than anything else.

It's one thing to be a free user...quite another to be an entitled free user.

This is precisely why I do not offer anything for free. I've been there and done it back in the iPhone 3 era with a dozen apps. Learned my lesson quickly. Never again. It was a nightmare. If the product isn't good enough for someone to pay for it (that could be direct user-paid or advertiser supported) it should not exist.

I drive track days with some frequency. When I am on the road I have to turn my brain down to slow and just let it happen. To be fair, you can't expect grandma to drive at a high level. What most people talking about congestion and traffic don't stop to think about is that the traffic you get is a function of the lowest common denominator. All you need is one small rock in a stream to disrupt it.

> Yeah, all the people who refuse to ride busses

It's not that people refuse to ride busses. In most places in the US this is either a non-existent or extremely impractical option. It's just reality.