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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • ClamDrinker@lemmy.worldtoMath Memes@lemmy.blahaj.zone<3
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    11 days ago

    Just a small correction in case you didn’t know, but your answer shows as 432*1 because Lemmy formats text wrapped by * as italic, so it thinks you want to italicize the 3. You meant to write 4*3*2*1 (written as 4\*3\*2\*1). This is because \ is an escape character that tells lemmy not to take the * as a formatting character.



  • Yeah, it’s literally all over this thread, not exactly a secret. It’s kind of a weird nitpick of my comment, considering it’s just a way of phrasing things. If I give an alcoholic some money, I will say “they might use that to buy booze”. Because I am sure they buy booze, but they might use my money to buy some food instead. Not every single dollar you give the developers will go to ml.


  • You’re not required to do anything, let alone directly funding ml. That’s not what I am arguing for. I am arguing for you to support Lemmy despite the chance some of it might go to ml.

    It goes the other way too, the developers probably disagree with a large part of the beliefs of people using lemmy, yet they also put in their time to create and foster it, which we never had to pay for either. They did it for the reasons they mention (free spaces, not owned by corporations that suck their users dry), which is separate from their other political positions.


  • While I understand the moral objections people have to supporting the developers, I do think its fair to highlight how they do not treat us.

    We are not a product here to be exploited and advertised to. They also respect your choice to block ml and not to interact with them at all for the rest. I am sure I would be absolutely abhorred by the depth of depravity of your average silicon valley CEO’s hot takes, but they dont share it for this exact reason. Instead they just design their entire product and business around it, which is the enshittification we all know and hate.

    People you dont agree with having a place of their own on the fediverse is a logical consequence of the idea behind it, and while uncomfortable, is a greater good in the end.

    But to maintain that it means putting your money where your mouth. If not to them, to your own instance.





  • There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.

    The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very underwhelmingly like nuclear fusion and very gradually improve with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.

    All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.


  • 2.160 GW is it’s rated capacity. I’m not sure how you got from there to 14.2 dollars per watt, but it completely ignores the lifetime of the power plant.

    Vogtle 3&4 are really a bad example because unit 4 only entered commercial activity this year. But fine, we can look at what it produces just recently.. About 3335000 MWh per month, or about 107 GWh per day. We can then subtract the baseline from Reactor 1 & 2 from before Reactor 3 was opened, removing about 1700000 MWh per month. Which gives us about 53 GWh per day. The lifetime of them is expected to be around 60 to 80 year, but lets take 60. That’s about 1177200 GWh over it’s lifetime, divided by the 36 billion that it cost to built… Gives you about 0.03 dollars per kWh. Which is pretty much as good as renewables get as well. But of course, this ignores maintenance, but that’s hard to calculate for solar panels as well. As such it will be somewhat larger than 0.03, I will admit.

    Solar panels on the other hand, often have a lifetime of 30 years, so even though it costs less per watt, MW, or GW, it also produces less over time. For solar, and wind, that’s about the same.. So this doesn’t really say much.

    But that wasn’t even the point of my message. As I said, I agree that Nuclear is slightly more expensive than renewables. But there are other costs associated with renewables that aren’t expressed well in monetary value for their units alone. Infrastructure, space, approval, experts to maintain it.

    Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet.

    Because they cannot. They can’t do it because there’s not enough capacity. If the sun is cloudy for a day, and the wind doesn’t run. Who’s going to power the grid for a day? That’s right. Mostly coal and gas. That’s the point. Nuclear is there to ensure we don’t go back to fossils when we want to be carbon neutral, which means no output. If you are carbon neutral only when the weather is perfect for renewables, then you’re not really carbon neutral and still would have to produce a ton of pollution at times.

    I’m glad batteries and all are getting cheaper. They are definitely needed, also for nuclear. But you must also be aware of just how damn dirty they are to produce. The minerals required produce them are rare, and expensive. Wind power also kills people that need to maintain it. Things aren’t so black and white.

    Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.

    This is not true, and it should be obvious when you think about it. Since this data fluctuates all the time. Nuclear has been more expensive in the past, before getting cheaper, and now getting more expensive again. Solar and wind have had peaks of being far more expensive than before. These numbers are just a representation of aggregate data, and they often leave out nuance like renewables being favored by regulations and subsidies. They are in part a manifestation of the resistance to nuclear. Unlike renewables, there are many more steps to be made for efficiency in nuclear. Most development has (justifiably) been focused on safety so far, as with solar and wind and batteries we can look away from the slave labor on the other side of the world to produce the rare earth metals needed for it. There is no free lunch in this world.

    For what it’s purpose should be, which is to provide a baseline production of electricity when renewables are not as effective. A higher price can be justified. It’s not meant to replace renewables altogether. Because if renewables can’t produce clean energy, their price might as well be infinitely high in that moment, which leaves our only options to be fossil fuels, hydro, batteries, or nuclear. Fossil fuels should be obvious, not everyone has hydro (let alone enough), batteries don’t have the capacity or numbers at the scale required (for the foreseeable future), and nuclear is here right now.


  • ClamDrinker@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnon questions our energy sector
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    8 months ago

    Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.

    Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It provides a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned (Which would make it the largest). That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.

    For reference, the largest hydro plant has a storage capacity of 40 GWh, 6.6x more (at 6000 MWh above).

    Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between nuclear, solar, and wind, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.

    There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plants with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fusion becomes viable.







  • Beginning artists also need good reference material to become good artists and create new transformative material, is that also copyright infringement? For training to be useful you need more refined material than what you can currently produce, that’s just how knowledge works. The goal of these AI isn’t to produce the same as it’s reference material, if it was then you’d have a case. You can easily see from the output of these generators that the vast majority of what it produces is transformative, confirming it’s intended goal.

    Scraping data is also very well established as not infringing on copyright if used for analysis purposes. And if you’ve ever done any kind of analytical research yourself for a PhD or any kind of higher educational degree you know this to be a fundamental freedom required for a healthy society, not even just for artists to learn.

    Proposing it should be seen the way you put it would essentially turn ideas into a property one can own and license, and I can tell you now, the same companies you probably dislike will own so many of these ideas that you could effectively do nothing without paying a license to one of them. Is this what you want?

    And well, shouldn’t need to be said but, if a company gets sued when they think they’re in the right, they’re going to defend themselves lol. And as far as I know none of these lawsuits have been settled in the favor of artists claiming copyright infringement.


  • Yes exactly. The people who can conceivably use AI the best are those with very little to begin with. And should you create something successful you would most likely eventually hire actual artists to assist you. It’s never that black and white. There’s a lot of bad things to say about the big companies and their fascination with putting AI into everything, but that’s really just overlooking the much broader societal impact of AI, which is much more visibly positive for independent creators and smaller companies.

    The sudden change in how copyright infringement is weighted by some feels mostly like a tactic to me too. Which is a shame because you don’t need such things to get sympathy from most people. Losing job security is not something people are stone cold about, and will most likely support protections on that basis alone. Misrepresenting or lying about it will make allies shy away from you even if they have your best intentions in mind. As someone else put it in one of these threads: “If ethics is on your side, slam ethics. If the law is on your side, slam the law. If neither are on your side, slam the table.” and this fascination with harshly applying copyright infringement to people doing things with AI that artists did without AI since the dawn of time is stupid.


  • I’d argue not from a different point of view. The overwhelming majority of AI aren’t trained to mimic one specific person or style. Users can still guide the AI towards doing that, but that’s exactly the same as what @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social said. Most artists using AI assisted tools do not try to intentionally use AI for that, they try to guide it towards new creative expression, as it should be.

    So yes, technically there is a clear difference. The people as described by @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social are edging far more closely to intentional copyright infringement than AI is. But still well within the lines of fair and ethical use. Usage of AI is well within those borders as well if used correctly.


  • Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren’t quite art for 80% of the time I’m awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.