Category: Tech

Y2Kyoto: Going Green Coal

AI Alternative Subsidy Y2Kyoto 10 Comments

Will Wade, for Bloomberg;

Something strange is happening with utilities.

For decades, electricity usage in the US has been mostly flat. Even with more people starting to use more power for more things, much of that has been offset as buildings, factories and appliances become more efficient.

But suddenly that’s changing, and the industry isn’t ready. Big tech companies need lots of electricity, for data centers and especially for artificial intelligence. Homes are using more electricity for heating and cooling. Factories need more electricity to shift away from fossil fuels.

And when faced with this sudden increase of load on the power grid, utilities are going to rely heavily on natural gas, and even coal.

“It will be a struggle to meet load growth,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a Washington-based research company that’s been tracking this trend. He expects US demand to for electricity to climb almost 16% over the next five years, more than triple his estimate from a year ago. Utilities are expecting customers to need as much as 128 gigawatts of new capacity in 2029.

That’s really going to disrupt the green transition. Power providers that have made pledges to cut back or eliminate carbon emissions are now starting to reverse course. Duke Energy Corp. plans to extend the life of its largest coal-fired power plant, which would push aside its goal to exit coal by 2035. Duke has said that its resource plans are not final decisions and are revised regularly.

FirstEnergy also will operate a pair of coal plants, stepping back from an earlier pledge to stop using the fuel by 2030. And energy companies in the US are planning new gas plants at the fastest pace in years.

And all of that is before Donald Trump returns to the White House next month. The president-elect is well-known for his support of fossil fuels and his skepticism of climate policies.

“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Freespeechers Tech The Urban Bigot 6 Comments

That quote comes from Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, who lived between 1834 and 1902.

Here’s a great interview with David Sacks, who will be Trump’s new AI and Crypto Czar and Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is one of a few openly non-Woke tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

Update: In the comments, Joe Butson recommends the All-In podcast, featuring David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and other interesting folks.

Y2Kyoto: Shut Up, They Argued

Freespeechers Social Disease Y2Kyoto 25 Comments

Everything old is blue again.

This week I was invited by a colleague to try out the BSky app as an alternative to X/Twitter. They told me that it is far more welcoming for discussion about energy and climate. Sure, I thought, I’ll give it a try.

I actively posted there for a bit and learned that climate activists have created a Bsky climate “blocklist” that focuses on me and anyone who mentions me — Matt Yglesias of Slow Boring and Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute are also on it. The blocklist prevents those on it from seeing the posts of those who join and creates a disincentive for anyone to mention those on the list, lest they get added to it. This is not a new strategy for some climate scientists and journalists.

People are free to create their social media echo chambers however they like, of course, but one detail is worth mentioning — One person promoting the block list is one of the lead scientists of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. That degree of intolerance among those selected to represent the climate science community is a problem for climate science and politics.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

AI 36 Comments

Garbage in, garbage out.

We are building AI on the random sewage of the Internet crawl. AI builders can’t conceive of base models built on Reddit wars, Facebook comments and old Twitter Drive-by hot-takes as being problematic. I had the talks, “Brian you are crazy, data is data”.

Calories are calories, there are calories in sewage, most choose not to consume them (willingly 🤓).

But all corporate AI models are built on Internet Sewage (of course there are facts and history too, but low percentage). The ingredients label would show 99% sewage.

And just like the Y2K problem the technicians could not convince that this data, and how it reflected upon the essence of humanity would form a faulty foundation ultimately built on sand.

Social Disease

2024 Democrats Social Disease Tech 15 Comments

Election interference.

A senior engineer at Meta admitted in a secret recording that posts critical of Vice President Kamala Harris are “automatically demoted.”

“Say your uncle in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris is unfit to be a president because she doesn’t have a child, that kind of sh*t is automatically demoted,” the Meta employee told an undercover journalist working for O’Keefe Media Group. The software engineer went on to explain that the person would be unaware this happened but may notice a decline in engagement with their post, and if they had this happen on several occasions, they would then be “redlisted.”

In a post sharing the undercover footage, O’Keefe said the software engineer explained “that Meta’s ‘Integrity Team’ is responsible for controlling content through ‘civic classifiers,’ a system that ‘shadowbans’ posts without notifying users.”

“Gyawali also revealed a specialized Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) team that was created at Meta, stating, ‘There is a SWAT team that’s already set up since April… just to think about all the scenarios of how the platform could be abused,'” O’Keefe’s post continued.

Asked whether Meta has the ability to influence the 2024 election, he said “yes” and claimed that Mark Zuckerberg will help Democrats this cycle.

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