> No idea how fast these can switch from storing energy to producing it and if these were used to help during the blackout.
Typically ~10 seconds.
The bigger issue is if these have blackstart capability. (IE, if they can switch to generation when there is a blackout, or if they need power from the grid to start.)
> Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
We're currently used to SAAS billing models that are either all-you-can-eat subscriptions, or metered around some easy-to-understand metric like # of users, or otherwise number of gigabytes consumed.
The SAAS economics work that way because the compute consumed is typically too cheap to meter. Some customer uses a little more than average, some customer uses a little less than average; it's not worth the time to even it out to the penny.
AI is so darn CPU (GPU? AIPU?) intense that will only be profitable, and affordable, if it can be metered like electricity and billed with a small margin.
In SAAS, we're not used to metering billing computations this way.
In war, the civilians can't audit every move of the military. (It's impractical, both for reacting timely, and for keeping secrets from the enemy.)
If the military doesn't work with Google, they will work with someone else who might not put the same amount of pressure on the military about the practical limits on AI. Or, even worse, our enemy might use a significantly better AI that we do.
My hope is that "war" shifts to AI vs AI, machine vs machine. Calling people who work on AI for wartime purposes immoral is fundamentally immoral when AI in war replaces the need for human casulties.
As a private contractor, you can sign a contract to deliver pizza or bandages to US soldiers, but also put into the contract that you won't deliver lethal weapons, if that's your own ethical stance. You don't need to audit every move of the military, just the stuff you're doing at their request.
And sure, maybe that just means the military decides to take their business elsewhere. But if you have confidence that your service is the best, then you sell based on that.
I think you and your parent have great arguments. Your pizza deliverer chose his battle, which was to only deliver pizza, not materiel, and is commendable. Your parent seems to want to delegate death from humans to AI, which seems to me like a simplification that won't turn out exactly like that, but the premise of deciding whether that is a battle to pick is valid. If you want to start blurring the lines between the analogy and literality, if you choose to pick every battle to fight, there's not enough human bandwidth to do it all, and delegation to AI could be helpful. That last sentence is more loose, so I won't defend it, but I couldn't help not making a tie between picking your battles and literal battles. Perhaps a form of dark humor there.
The broader context of this is that Anthropic did put ethical restrictions into their contract. A bunch of AI employees industry-wide called for solidarity with Anthropic. But then OpenAI, and now Google, defected against this equilibrium and signed contracts agreeing to "any lawful use".
The GP was arguing that, first of all, it's not practically possible to put limitations on such a contract, because you can't audit everything the military does. But that argument is bunk, because not only do you not have to audit everything the military does (only what you as a contractor are asked to do), Anthropic also signed exactly such a contract, and the DoW did indeed run into those restrictions and got frustrated by it.
Their second argument, that if Google didn't agree then someone less scrupulous would take their place and exert less pushback, is also bunk. Google's pushback is as low as it gets; you can't sign a contract to do something illegal, so agreeing to any lawful use is the loosest possible contract that anybody can sign. And given that they defected in this prisoner's dilemma, they are already the less scrupulous party doing the work that Anthropic would not.
It shouldn't be the role of a company to hold their nose and work with the government, it should be the government's role to inspire confidence that what they are doing with the technology is ethical.
> Calling people who work on AI for wartime purposes immoral is fundamentally immoral when AI in war replaces the need for human casulties.
This is naive. It will only reduce casualties for the side with the AI, and will very likely embolden countries to fight more wars.
Just a note regarding meeting hate (that's a common topic in this thread.)
(Something that this article should mention)
People (managers) who advocate for meetings need to keep an eye out for:
1: People scheduling meetings as a form of group procrastination.
2: People scheduling meetings as a form of pontificating or having people listen to their ego trip. (These quite literally feel like someone "holding court.")
3: Confusing meetings for general collaboration on work. 2-3 people working together on a problem is not a meeting. > 3 people collaborating around a table should only happen long enough that everyone gets enough information to break apart into smaller groups so that they can get their job done.
4: Meeting overload: I think there is a "healthy target" of ~1 hour a day of meetings for an IC, slightly more for an engineering leader, and significantly more for a manager.
Meetings become a problem when the ICs are pulled into more than an hour of meetings on a typical day, or an engineering lead being pulled into more meetings than they are comfortable with on a typical day. The managers need to shield them from too many meetings.
Another comment in this thread points out that the people having trouble are the ones that previously used to copy & paste stack overflow without understanding it.
Wow, I'm shocked at the negative attitudes in this thread. Porn and gambling are legit businesses, even if you don't like it. (And some people used to argue that part of the rise of the PC was because some people bought it as a "porn machine.")
It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt.
When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
Also its silly to vilify porn and gambling but not social media and the plethora of seemingly socially acceptable / legal things which are still legitimately destroying the fabric of society. Most haters are just as culpable.
plenty of people vilify social media on this site. do you think any post criticizing one thing also needs to list out every other thing the poster doesn't like?
I've also been shocked by the censoriousness around gambling in particular on HN recently. I feel like this is filtering in from some culture war that I'm not exposed to as a part of my information diet.
Hmm.. I've had some customers be gamblers. It's kind of sad to see. These are like middle aged dads of various economic classes that are desperately chasing a high when they should be focused on their families. To me, gambling and porn are yet more strains on the most important social institution: the family. It's fun, but it's bad for society, for those who care about that
If it's not gambling, it'll be something else: video games, alcohol, drugs, religion, work... Anyone can turn anything into a vice to the detriment of their family.
There's been a spate of articles on left leaning sites about the harms of prediction markets and gambling over the last 6 months or so, along with a tie to the current admin to glaze the article among anti-Trump and anti-corruption people.
One thing I've noticed about HN in recent years is if publications (right or left) start posting about something, the topic turns quickly into flamewar territory. What used to be subtle debate turns into slogans copy/pasted from these articles along with hyperbole. Hard to avoid I guess with how big HN has become.
Porn is repeatedly demonized but the supposed evils are pretty much nonexistent. No, porn isn't destroying marriages; rather, people in failing marriages often turn to porn. For porn to be more attractive than reality there must be something wrong with the reality.
Actually when they become illegal less people do them. The problem is that you view men (criminials) killing each other as a bigger loss than women being raped, killed and objectified. There is an optimal ballance, but you are unable to see it because of your bias towards dehumanizing women, caused by porn addiction.
Are you arguing that it's better that the sex or porn work is done illegally, without the ability to pay taxes, follow the law, forced into rh underworld and into the cartels and gangs?
Wow. That will certainly do better for sex trafficking and illegal porn. Criminalising all of it.
Typically ~10 seconds.
The bigger issue is if these have blackstart capability. (IE, if they can switch to generation when there is a blackout, or if they need power from the grid to start.)
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