I really hope this triggers the ruling class to care but I get the feeling it'll be thrown on the pile of other "investments that make money" along with healthcare, working public transit, proper electrical grid, and free college. ๐
BackupRainDancer
Hello, companies have not be net zero for years? In fact the US is anticipating increased reporting reqs on green house gas emissions. What you might be referring to is the fact that some companies went the "easy route" and bought a bunch of these sketchy recs and are now being told by certain committees they cannot claim carbon neutral. I want to say it was CDP who was having these discussions?
The biggest issue I think we see from a clarity standpoint is that there is currently balkanization over industry terms. CDP may say that carbon neutral claims have to be proceeded by operations decarbonization and then the remainder can be bought down but the layperson doesn't see that.
Layer in that countries have to go by each jurisdiction on what they report in (Businesses in the EU have one emissions factor set, another in the UK has another, Asia a third etc) And you get some confusing estimates.
I promise you though, most companies may have committed to Net0 but a very large portion ended up buying RECs to offset. The arguments that are happening now are good because that's the easy way and once everyone is doing it that doesn't work.
Back to carbon sequestration, we are repeatedly seeing that new hype developments in this space are bunk or generate more carbon then they develop OR are too hard to track and prove (can't think of examples for that one, forest?).
Some of the only ways companies are decarbonizing right now are greening of the grid and purchases of emissions free energy. Unless we spend more time adding to the grid with electricity that will not generate emissions, we will never be able to hit net zero. (Without a significant cultural change in consumption).
Pragmatically I think we have a lot to be gained on focusing on logistic improvements via a cost of carbon built in (to later be force spent on recs or sequestration tech/R&D). Consider that some companies buy an entire fleet of gas and then ship that overseas for their fleet simply because it makes their audit and accounting easier. That is such a net deficit in energy we're producing with that fuel it's an oxymoron. (I mean this as smaller distro networks will always be less efficient)
Sorry I didn't mean to wall of text you but I find this stuff fascinating.
12 yr club here ๐
These all align with my understanding! Only thing I'd mention is that when I said "we've not had llms available" I meant "LLMs this powerful ready for public usage". My b
"Nuclear lover" is a bit harsh. Someone mentioned batteries but another area is in actually buying emissions free energy and proving it for audits or reporting.
An angle that needs to be considered is that any upgrades that need to happen to a power grid in order to connect (in the US) need to be paid for by the party adding to the grid. The US distribution grid is ancient and this actually incentivizes them to do nothing.
One of the major negatives in solar and wind power is the instability of it. I think it's overblown but is a genuine issue. Factor in the massive, massive bill the newer renewable power generator pays and it makes sense to use something more stable to recoup investment. Nuclear is then safer, capital does what it does.
There's also the negative that depending on the contracting for the batteries, the lessOR of the batteries might be able to "claim" the energy credits towards their zero energy claims. This is also how those other solar companies profit off installing them on your house, they take the "green energy credits" and can sell them.
Nuclear doesn't usually have these types of stipulations.
Fwiw most people in the corporate sustainability push (who actually give a damn that is) think net zero is impossible without a significant nuclear push.
I haven't been in decision analytics for a while (and people smarter than I are working on the problem) but I meant more along the lines of the "model collapse" issue. Just because a human gives a thumbs up or down doesn't make it human written training data to be fed back. Eventually the stuff it outputs becomes "most likely prompt response that this user will thumbs up and accept". (Note: I'm assuming the thumbs up or down have been pulled back into model feedback).
Per my understanding that's not going to remove the core issue which is this:
Any sort of AI detection arms race is doomed. There is ALWAYS new 'real' video for training and even if GANs are a bit outmoded, the core concept of using synthetically generated content to train is a hot thing right now. Technically whomever creates a fake video(s) to train would have a bigger training set than the checkers.
Since we see model collapse when we feed too much of this back to the model we're in a bit of an odd place.
We've not even had a LLM available for the entire year but we're already having trouble distinguishing.
Making waffles so I only did a light google but I don't really think chatgpt is leveraging GANs for it's main algos, simply that the GAN concept could be applied easily to LLM text to further make delineation hard.
We're probably going to need a lot more tests and interviews on critical reasoning and logic skills. Which is probably how it should have been but it'll be weird as that happens.
sorry if grammar is fuckt - waffles
Fantastically put!
This is a bit dated but shows that 41% of road upkeep on average is paid for by gas taxes (and other fees). So yes while they may have some tax paid on fuel (that they have likely negotiated down via bulk purchase), they're not even paying for half on average.
Edit - just to include given we've seen landmark inflation over the last few years it's likely the share of taxes on upkeep has gone down.
Predictable issue if you knew the fundamental technology that goes into these models. Hell it should have been obvious it was headed this way to the layperson once they saw the videos and heard the audio.
We're less sensitive to patterns in massive data, the point at which we cant tell fact from ai fiction from the content is before these machines can't tell. Good luck with the FB aunt's.
GANs final goal is to develop content that is indistinguishable... Are we surprised?
Edit since the person below me made a great point. GANs may be limited but there's nothing that says you can't setup a generator and detector llm with the distinct intent to make detectors and generators for the sole purpose of improving the generator.
Fuck no society (or at least my country) does owe me, I pay taxes. Quite a bit due to where I live actually, I'm not upset about it but I get fuck all for it. And I'm just a working class person, I don't have any connections ... Imagine all the people just avoiding taxes.
Tax me more, honestly just give me working infrastructure, healthcare and other things that a functioning country should have. I'm so sick of footing the bill for all these fucking bailouts and subsidization of private interests, the do nothings in Congress are the real freeloaders. And yet they'll bitch at you when you suggest we allocate some of the funds from the military into making sure our 'strategic highway' systems bridges dont just fall over.
I don't mind paying but the service sucks ๐ญ
My unpopular opinion is that if you evade all of your tax responsibility as a company you should have no legal protections in said country but they'd never bite.
Amazon's semis and delivery trucks provide how much wear and tear on the highway grid but how much do we get in taxes for allowing that? $0 (maybe not exactly but you get the gist).I mean fuck cars but most Americans want working roads too.
And no it's not smart to avoid taxes, that's bad business that hurts the entire system in the long run.
I feel like you think this until someone who 'knows someone' or otherwise benefits from nepotism gets to walk all over you and the facade of a system breaks down.
The fact alone that the courts in the us were packed with political interests during 45 already means the system is broken as your case could be "made an example of" at any time at any donors behest. That's the fundamental form of redress in a civilized society and we can't even guarantee that anymore.
You can go to googles sunroof project website to see how much footage/mwh a fully sunned home in your area would get. It's been a while but I think they give you kwh, from there depending on the (if in us) eGrid you'd be on you'd be able to see if there would be a meaningful difference in a) energy you'd be saving or generating and b) how bad your average grid is.
The Epa also publishes a tool called power profiler that can help you.
Edit to include that I believe the EPA even has a GitHub that might have how bad each energy plant is? Not sure