so you’re saying there’s a chance…

The human capacity for reason is greatly overrated. The overwhelming majority of conversation is regurgitated thought, which is exactly what LLMs are designed to do.

Just for another angle on the problem: baseload generation (nuclear) is most efficient at its highest possible output, but it has to maintain that output 24/7. It can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the demand curve, and it can’t be ramped up above the minimum overnight demand.

To increase its efficiency, utilities push large scale consumers like steel mills and aluminum smelters to overnight shifts. This artificially increases the overnight demand, allowing the baseload generators to ramp up their relatively efficient production. This reduces the need for less-efficient peaker plants during the day.

That overnight demand can’t be met with solar, and wind generation tends to fall overnight as well.

What nuclear can do is help level out seasonal variation, between the short days of winter and long days of summer. If you want to contemplate a truly pie-in-the-sky scenario, there are provisions for tying large ships, (like aircraft carriers and hospital ships) to shore power, and backfeeding the local grid to support disaster relief efforts.

Imagine a fleet of nuclear generation ships, sailing to northern-hemisphere ports from November to April, and to southern-hemisphere ports from May to October.

Pumped storage is also essential, but extraordinarily limited. We can probably run essential overnight loads on pumped storage, but it does not make sense to keep an overnight load on pumped-storage that can be shifted to solar/wind directly.

We need to take a look at demand shaping rather than supply shaping. We need to shift load to times we can produce, rather than shift production to times of demand.

Owner occupant credit/exemption. If you live in the home, you pay a much lower property tax than if you don’t live in the home.

This is used in Ohio as a “homestead exemption”. Elderly and disabled Ohioans pay a lower tax rate on their primary residence.

It is used in New York as the “STAR Credit”, to push part of the burden of school taxes from families to investors and businesses.

This is used in Montana as a Property Tax Rebate, where taxpayers can get some of their property taxes back on their primary residence. Montana has also been talking about implementing a “second home tax” which would increase the tax burden on properties that aren’t claimed as a primary residence.

A substantially similar program is used in Oakland as the Vacant Property Tax, which punishes landlords who hold property primarily for financial speculation rather than actual use.

These programs all operate in the same way I am describing. The only difference is that I would phase in a radical increase the effective tax on investors/landlords. I would increase the tax on investors and landlords of residential property so much that they find it more lucrative to switch their investment strategy to “lending” rather than “landlording”. Basically, the only rental arrangements that will continue to exist are 2-4 unit residences (where the landlord-owner lives in one of the units) and roommate agreements.

A “land contract” (sometimes called “contract for deed”) is a sort of “rent to own” agreement that is recorded with the county like a deed. For purposes of the tax exemption I am talking about, the occupant is considered an owner rather than a tenant.

A Land Contract is a type of seller-financing that is available to anyone, including the tenant on whom the landlord is already taking a financial risk. That former landlord is now collecting interest on a loan, rather than rent on a property.

being hit with a tax that basically kills any chance of renting out something.

That is exactly what should happen. It should be practically impossible for an owner to “rent” a property for enough to justify doing it. Landlords should be heavily pressured to convert tenants to buyers.

“Renting” should be confined to commercial activities, not residences. You want to rent out space for a shop, warehouse, office, factory, no problem. This is only for residential property that you are not living in. It should not be economically feasible to rent out such property as an investor, because that practice strips tenants of equity and is the leading factor driving people into poverty.

Go ahead and use your property to generate an income, but do it by charging interest on a loan, not rent.

The entire concept of rent needs to die in a fire. It is inherently exploitative. There is no way to redeem it.

Rent needs to be replaced with “private mortgages” or other approaches that return equity to the occupant.

Individuals that need the flexibility of temporary, short-term housing can use “land contracts” rather than exploitive rental agreements. Land Contracts have fixed payments for the life of the agreement: no annual rent hikes. The occupant is considered an “owner” rather than a “tenant”, but only begins gaining equity after three years. The occupant is free to walk away before three years, or renegotiate after.

How do we eliminate renting? We make it less lucrative than other investment options. We increase the tax rate on residential properties to be extremely high. But, we also create a tax exemption for owner-occupants, so your effective tax rate is actually lower on your own home. Landlords are forced to choose between a small return on a rental, or a larger return on a private mortgage or land contract.

With that simple change, landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert “tenants” into “buyers”, so they don’t have to pay the excess taxes.

Beyond renting, with this change, lenders are motivated to work with borrowers rather than resort to foreclosure. As soon as the bank initiates foreclosure proceedings, they are on the hook for the increased tax rate.

Nobody has a Xitter account.

They need to advertise a legitimate use for their service.

If they don’t have a threat from public wifi or other security concerns to remedy, then the only purpose for their service is to bypass region limits and block infringement notices. They would be considered complicit in such infringement.

That their service also hinders efforts to stop pirates needs to be an “unintended” and “unavoidable” side effect.

We have incentivized night time consumption. Base load generation (nuclear, coal) can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the daily demand curve. They can’t produce more than the minimum overnight demand, but they have keep producing that around the clock. To minimize the need for “peaker” plants during the day, they want the overnight demand to be as high as possible.

So they put steel mills, aluminum smelters, and other heavy industry on overnight shifts by offering them extraordinarily cheap power.

That incentivized overnight load needs to be shifted to daytime, so it can be met with solar and wind. Moving forward, we need to minimize overnight demand.

Because it is not cost effective. Simple as that.

The problem is that we don’t have enough demand shaping to shift night time loads to day time, and we don’t have enough storage to shift production to overnight. The result is that daytime generation is regularly going into negative rates (you have to pay to put power on the grid, which melts the returns on your investment into solar.

As far as problems go, it’s a good one to have, as it will eventually result in lower prices for daytime generation.

I’m glad you mentioned insulin pumps, because there is a community of developers working on pumps, making them available to a broader audience, providing more people with better control over their blood sugar levels than manufacturers are willing or able to provide on their own.

https://openaps.org/

What you are arguing for is a threat to systems like OpenAPS, and to the people who benefit from them.

People repair their brakes wrong all the time. It’s absolutely caused accidents.

It also allows end users to install parts superior to OEM, improving braking capabilities, and preventing accidents.

Any automotive technician can tell you that manufacturers take engineering shortcuts, resulting in a product with certain deficiencies. The manufacturer’s motivation is to put out a product that widely appeals to the general public. They want nothing to do with a product specifically tailored to the needs of a particular individual.

We probably shouldn’t let people repair their own brake pads

What kind of auth-dystopian nonsense is that?

Repair an insulin pump the wrong way and it will absolutely kill you

You’re just as dead if you can’t get that insulin pump repaired or replaced because the manufacturer won’t or can’t support it. When they go bankrupt because other customers have sued them into non-existence, you still own the device they manufactured, and you still need it repaired.

Further, you presume the manufacturer can provide the best repairs. It is entirely possible and plausible that a competing engineer or programmer can improve upon the device, rendering it safer or providing superior operation. Car Mechanics can install a better braking system than the cheap, generic calipers and pads provided by the factory. Repair technicians can replace generic parts of medical devices allowing superior operation.

Yes, dangers exist from third party repairs.

Refusal or even simple failure to provide critical repair data to the end user or their agent denies the end user the ability to make an informed decision about repairs.

The company should be liable for all damages from a botched 3rd-party repair unless they provide to the end user complete specifications and unrestricted access to the device in order to make informed decisions about repairs.

Proprietary information and corporate classified information do not exist once they are incorporated into the device and sold to the end user. That information now belongs to the end user, who will continue to need it even if the company is out of business, or refuses service to the owner of the device.

Any attempt to conceal that information from the end user should make the company liable for any failed repair performed by any individual, including harm arising from that failed repair. The only way to avoid that liability is to release all information to the end user, so they are fully informed when making a repair decision.

You may need gasoline, but you don’t need BP’s gasoline. By choosing to buy BP’s gasoline, you support everything BP has ever done. Don’t want to support them, buy different gasoline.

FWIW, I’m not sure if I have a Xitter account or not. I did at one point. Definitely don’t remember a password, and I probably used a former email account that I can no longer access either, so no way of recovering it if it still exists. I have a severe lack of fucks to give about it.

But, I am pro-pedantry, and your argument kinda sucked.

The “collapse” you’re talking about is a reduction in the diversity of the output, which is exactly what we should expect when we impart a bias toward obviously correct answers, and away from obviously incorrect answers.

Further, that criticism is based on closed-loop feedback, where the LLM is training itself only on it’s own outputs.

I’m talking about open-loop, where it is also evaluating the responses from the other party.

Further, the studies whence such criticism comes are based primarily on image generation AIs, not LLMs. Image generation is highly subjective; there is no definitively “right” or “wrong” output, just whether it appeals to the specific observer. An image generator would need to tailor itself to that specific observer.

LLM sessions deal with far more objective content.

A functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The inability to consider it’s previous interactions denies it the ability to learn from it’s previous behavior. The idea that AIs must not be allowed to train on their own data is functionally insane.

Also, with llms there is no “next time” it’s a completely static model.

It’s only a completely static model if it is not allowed to use it’s own interactions as training data. If it is allowed to use the data acquired from those interactions, it stops being a static model.

Kids do learn elementary arithmetic by rote memorization. Number theory doesn’t actually develop significantly until somewhere around 3rd to 5th grade, and even then, we don’t place a lot of value on it at that time. We are taught to memorize the multiplication table, for example, because the efficiency of simply knowing that table is far more computationally valuable than the ability to reproduce it at any given time. That rote memorization is mimicry: the child is simply spitting out a previously learned response.

Remember: LLMs are currently toddlers. They are toddlers with excellent grammar, but they are toddlers.

Remember also that simple mimicry is an incredibly powerful problem solving method.

I can see why you would think that, but to see how it actually goes with a human, look at the interaction between a parent and child, or a teacher and student.

“Johnny, what’s 2+2?”

“5?”

“No, Johnny, try again.”

“Oh, it’s 4.”

Turning Johnny into an LLM,nThe next time someone asks, he might not remember 4, but he does remember that “5” consistently gets him a “that’s wrong” response. So does “3”.

But the only way he knows 5 and 3 gets a negative reaction is by training on his own data, learning from his own mistakes.

He becomes a better and better mimic, which gets him up to about a 5th grade level of intelligence instead of a toddler.

What other networks?

It currently recognizes when it is told it is wrong: it is told to apologize to it’s conversation partner and to provide a different response. It doesn’t need another network to tell it right from wrong. It needs access to the previous sessions where humans gave it that information.