The problem of "where did I see that" is something I suspect most people have encountered before. How that's actually done, though, is the devil. The vision -- semantic search of human experience -- is cool. The implementation -- always recording cameras piping every minute of your life to TotallyTrustworthyPeople's servers -- not so.
General chatbots are great for things they have general data about. "What was that movie where..." type things. They don't help with individualized information, unless you feed the same type of information as Recall type solutions gather anyways. Perhaps you don't have much individualized information, or perhaps you just remember it all very aptly - it shouldn't be hard to imagine differently though.
My main usage problem with Recall type solutions is less with lack of something to promise and more with lack of ability to deliver. Especially for local-only solutions. The concept can be great as can be, but it needs to be damn near foolproof to beat out how much we already remember.
I love this angle, and would take it further. I'm starting to think about AI in the same way that we think about food ethics.
Some people are vegan, some people eat meat. Usually, these two parties get on best when they can at least understand each-other's perspectives and demonstrate an understanding of the kinds of concerns the other might have.
When talking to people about AI, I feel much more comfortable when people acknowledge the concerns, even if they're still using AI in their day-to-day.
MyST Markdown (the MD flavour, not the same-named Document Engine) was inspired by ReST. It was created to address the main pain-point of ReST for incoming users (it's not Markdown!).
As a project, the tooling to parse MyST Markdown was built on top of Sphinx, which primarily expects ReST as input. Now, I would not be surprised if most _new_ Sphinx users are using MyST Markdown (but I have no data there!)
Subsequently, the Jupyter Book project that built those tools has pivoted to building a new document engine that's better focused on the use-cases of our audience and leaning into modern tooling.
The PyPI ecosystem can not, for the foreseeable future, replicate the scope of the conda ecosystem. From microarch builds to library deduplication, conda is a more general purpose solution. That doesn't mean that one "wins out" (and, for reference I predominantly use Python's PyPI), but they're not the same tools.
I don't disagree with the general vibe here, but a few points:
- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc.
- Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
Just a note on MyST's citations feature as I was researching it this morning: until this ticket [1] is worked on there's one bibliography style and that's it.
I want to be careful about what I write given the context of what's going on, and the personal ramifications that can have.
Suffice to say, it's worth considering whether the cost of a decision can be interpreted solely as how much money there is vs the wider ecosystem level consequences of said decision.
To make a counterpoint: never underestimate people's ability to make a convincing hypothetical case to connect their livelihood to "the wider ecosystem", even when that livelihood involves committing fraud.
I take a lot of these arguments with a grain of salt. As a society, we've gotten way too used to substituting plausible hypotheticals for concrete data.
It's a fair point to distinguish that baseload is just one mechanism to reduce the amount of surplus renewable capacity required to cover demand. However, what is the alternative in the face of a grid that's designed for centralised large power producers, and an environmental policy that disincentivises us from using gas?
Yes, in a hypothetical world we can just scale up storage and decentralise production, but what are the timelines and costs on that? Because my understanding is that realistically something like nuclear is the best way of making that problem tractable over the timelines that e.g. a nuclear plant can operate.
> Yes, in a hypothetical world we can just scale up storage and decentralise production, but what are the timelines and costs on that?
Why a hypothetical world? I think that current timelines, while not particularly awe-inspiring, are quite realistic (Germany: no more coal for electricity within 2038).
I also see no problem in using gas peaker plants provisionally for the next decade, and gradually phasing them out in favor of storage as batteries get even cheaper.
Newly built nuclear power is basically useless by comparison-- construction alone currently easily takes a decade (see: Olkiluoto 3 >15y, Flamanville 3 >15y, Vogtle 3/4 >10y, Shin-Hanul 1/2 >10y), local resistance is very large, costs are astronomical.
ROI for those plants is completely abysmal already and continuously getting worse, because they are completely unable to compete with solar/wind energy prices whenever those are available.
So going "full nuclear" now would mean that all the extremely expensive effort is completely useless (climate-wise) for at least a decade (until first plants finish), while spending the same on solar/wind improves the situation right now (by allowing us to rely on fossils less often), and those projects also tend to finish within years instead of decades, and they don't need astronomical sums (and guarantees) from taxpayers to get financed.
> I think that current timelines, while not particularly awe-inspiring, are quite realistic (Germany: no more coal for electricity within 2038).
I am not an expert on this, at all... but I'm not sure that's the case. c.f. Wikipedia:
> In March 2024, Federal Audit Office published a report in which it assessed the policy as not meeting goals on a number of points: the planned 80% share of renewable energy requires dispatchable sources but the assumed 10 GW in fossil gas generation is neither sufficient nor on schedule; extension of electric grid is behind the schedule by 6,000 km (3,700 mi) and 7 years; security of the supply chain is not sufficiently assessed; system costs to ensure 24/7 generation are underestimated and based on "best-case" scenarios; capacity installed in renewables is behind the schedule by 30%, whereas demand is expected to grow by 30% as result of electrification of heating and transport
As for
> ROI for those plants is completely abysmal already and continuously getting worse, because they are completely unable to compete with solar/wind energy prices whenever those are available.
That's because the pricing model is arbitrary. If we need nuclear, we can make it economically viable through reforming the way we purchase electricity. But,
> construction alone currently easily takes a decade
is the real problem. Unless SMRs actually materialise _and_ have fast build times, it's just not happening (and realistically, I think _that_ ship has already sailed).
I'm not really making a point here much beyond "it's one thing to say nuclear is no longer viable given our lack of investment" and another to say "it was a good thing to drop nuclear N years ago". You're not saying that for the record. By dropping nuclear, we have to deal with a bigger shortfall and that means gas peakers, etc.
> That's because the pricing model is arbitrary. If we need nuclear, we can make it economically viable through reforming the way we purchase electricity
I don't really agree on this. The problem is that intermittent sources (wind/solar) have become really cheap per MW. Whenever those sources are available, nuclear power just cannot compete, so you basically build nuclear plants as glorified peaker plants (even if you run them full throttle all the time, when wind/sun is available the power they provide is effectively worthless).
You can see this very effect in China, where the capacity factor of coal power plants is going down every year (and coal power is not very suitable for that).
> By dropping nuclear, we have to deal with a bigger shortfall and that means gas peakers, etc.
I completely agree on this. Having built like 30 nuclear power plants 40 years ago would be a godsend now for almost every country (=> see e.g. France, which is still reaping the benefits).
But its important to consider: The whole concept shares similar weakness with renewables (=> need additional dispatchable sources), and it also works pretty well for France because not every nation around them is doing the same thing (=> somewhat cost effective power imports, because not every neighbor needs to smooth out the exact nuclear-caused daily load profile).
Another point is that back then, there was
1) Much less local resistance (pre-Chernobyl)
2) Much cheaper labor and more economy of scale in building reactors
And it still took a lot of additional national commitment (from France) to fully nuclearize (mainly for strategic defense reasons, i.e. oil independence).
Seeing people advocate for nuclear power now is really frustrating to me, because we had that opportunity half a century ago, but now it's become unrealistic, unhelpful against climate change and insanely expensive, compared to much better alternatives (which are straightforward and just need to be executed). Arguing in favor of nuclear power now instead of wind/solar/batteries just feels stupid.
