I read the parent’s comment as arguing that the existence of profits implies exploitation of workers in the quoted instance (p perhaps broadly in England at the time) and that there is some similarity with DeepSeek. No hard-line assertions, just suggested similarities.
Distributed energy resources eliminate a large portion of the transmission cost, leaving only the distribution grid in an idealized/future-state scenario (as I assume you’re talking about). In the summer, you lower the solar output so as not to overload the s distribution grid.
Also, batteries come in several long-term flavors. Thermal sand batteries are able to provide many months of energy storage today. A mid-term future will surely include even longer term storage as we develop improved storage technology. LiPo batteries are a bridge storage solution.
Regressive in that solar programs are not inflated, but do require distribution upgrades to realize their efficiency advantages over centralized power transmission. These distribution upgrades are costly to IOUs because they cut into their margins when the efficiency of distributed generation is considered.
Paying distributed generation export at retail rates or higher (DR, etc) makes plenty of sense because there are significant load, resiliency, and efficiency advantages to homeowners who are supposed to be the ones to benefit most from the grid.
The only change needed for solar users is a different meter swapped at the house that supports bidirectional metering. Solar power at the residential level only lowers overall demand in the neighborhood and on the grid, and in the very rare case where the net solar production exceeds the entire neighborhood's demand, PEC could choose to simply not use that excess (curtailment) and the meter at each person's house would accurately reflect that with no upgrades needed (Texan power utilities are not required to buy back excess solar). So the added cost to PEC is entirely optional. At its worst PEC was only crediting almost half of the power they were reselling from solar users (from originally a simple net credit), although they've thankfully been starting to backpeddle on that.
Honestly, I would prefer they simply charged the cost of swapping meters and adjusted the flat infrastructure fee for solar users (when necessary) for cases where upgrades are needed in neighborhoods with excess solar generation. Instead, PEC is able to resell solar power for a very significant profit with their current rates.
He’s saying Texas is hot for humans, which is objectively true. One’s willingness to tolerate it is subjective, but that’s not the point here. Don’t take it so personally.
You are uninformed. ERCOT is heavily influenced (“owned”) by Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) and market makers that are profit seeking entities. This is true of all ISOs for all intents and purposes. It is the primary reason why the U.S. grid is slow to innovate/change, e.g., implementing distributed generation participation in wholesale markets, etc.
> If you have to verify the details of the work you outsource
Yes, they have to verify. Verification is necessary whether or not the component is sourced through a supplier or in-house. Verification happens after the sourcing step. And yes, you are criminally liable in the supplier case if your supplier commits fraud and you knew about it, as is the implication here.
Are they legally bound to do the verification themselves ? Seems like it would be more cost efficient to outsource that as well, which would just be prone to fraud.
I did not see it mentioned where they were aware that their suppliers were committing fraud. At these large companies the executives only look at the spreadsheets and take the contracts as fact, regardless if a third party can deliver.
It would only make sense that they would do it. We test materials randomly at one place I went to randomly. It wasn’t every piece or every batch, but we definitely sent off materials to labs to get tested. We weren’t under the eye of anything like the FAA either, we were doing it to just ensure QA that out gearing was made with quality materials and not junk. It’s not cheap but it’s not outrageously expensive either to get metallurgy checked to make sure it’s meeting your requirements as per the mechanical design.
It takes less than an hour of conversation with either, giving them a few tasks requiring logical reasoning, to arrive at that conclusion. If that is a strong position, it's only because so many people seem to be buying the common scoreboards wholesale.
That’s very subjective and case dependent. I use local models most often myself with great utility and advocate for giving my companies the choice of using either local models or commercial services/APIs (ChatGPT, GPT-4 API, some Llama derivative, etc.) based on preference. I do not personally find there to be a large gap between the capabilities of commercial models and the fine-tuned 70b or Mixtral models. On the whole, individuals in my companies are mixed in their opinions enough for there to not be any clear consensus on which model/API is best objectively — seems highly preference and task based. This is anecdotal (though the population size is not small), but I think qualitative anec-data is the best we have to judge comparatively for now.
I agree scoreboards are not a highly accurate ranking of model capabilities for a variety of reasons.
If you're using them mostly for stuff like data extraction (which seems to be the vast majority of productive use so far), there are many models that are "good enough" and where GPT-4 will not demonstrate meaningful improvements.
It's complicated tasks requiring step by step logical reasoning where GPT-4 is clearly still very much in a league of its own.
They are opening themselves up to massive liability even with “fine print” — this is meaningful and should not be disregarded. Just because there’s some super indem clause in their customer agreement doesn’t mean the courts will rule in its favor and not strike it out.
Agreed. Every time I’ve used it or been in a Tesla as a passenger with FSD engaged, human intervention has been required several times each trip to avoid accidents, harm to pedestrians, or moving violations. It’s frankly embarrassing to use and terrifying to imagine the masses relying on it in any way in its current form.
