Humanius

I like to think that these videos are the only thing keeping Patrick Boyle sane from his career in finance.

His channel is great. I love his dry sense of humour.

People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

I’m just curious to see where it all goes.

Discord and Whatsapp
I’d love to use Signal, but virtually noone in my sphere uses it.

The Houthis are funded by Iran, get their weapons provided by Iran, and Iran provides them with targeting information.
You’d really have to warp the definition of proxy in order not to consider them a proxy to Iran (even if they are a bit of an unpredictable factor)

But someone still needs to pay for that storage investment (as well as for maintaining the grid), and if noone (or nearly noone) is paying for their power then there is no money to invest in these things

Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

• During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
• During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.

Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

• The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
• The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

The headline is a bit misleading. Trump agreed to the ABC debate if Harris agrees to the Fox debate.
This is just a ploy for him to either get Harris to show up on Fox, or if she doesn’t debate him on Fox, spin it in such a way that Harris is somehow not wanting to debate him (Even though she never agreed to a Fox debate)

More like they have an ancient sewage system.

Basically, if the sewer system gets overwhelmed, for instance if there is a large amount of rainfall in a short time, then the sewage overflows directly into the Seine.
They have built infrastructure leading up to the Olympics to capture this overflow in storage tanks, but you cannot build infinitely large storage tanks so at some point it will still overflow.

And 2024 has been a very wet year thusfar, so…

Okay… So he went to Russia in 2003. Considering that the consensus in 2003 was that Russia was still on its way to becoming a democracy I am not that offended by it personally.
“Putin’s hometown” being St. Petersburg, which is the 2nd biggest city in Russia.

What is more worrying is all the things that happened since 2003.

If it’s a publicly traded company the answer is that they likely don’t believe in anything. They just do whatever the leadership believes would generate most profit, since that is what shareholders (usually) care about most.

If appearing to support progressive goals gets people to spend money in the store, then that is something that makes sense for a company like this to do. But if they stand to lose more money than they gain, for instance through boycotts, they will drop the pretence pretty quickly.

Personally I see the stance such companies take more like a reflection of general acceptance in society as a whole. If a company promotes progressive values then that would indicate that society as a whole is on average leaning more progressive.
Similarly, if companies stop supporting these values that indicates a worrying trend with regards to societal acceptance.

Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the company itself (as an entity) really believes in anything.

(Note: This doesn’t hold for companies that aren’t publically traded. If there are no stockholders to please the leadership can let their personal view affect the company’s policy quite a bit)

You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.

In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.

https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)

That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.

Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.

Christ, my dude… They are quite literally doing everything in their power to make sure their child won’t be run into a concentration camp. Stop lecturing them on what “work and sacrifice” is.

Please please please don’t vote the orange man into office… good God.

But at least is was a lemon with style… unlike the Cybertruck ;P

In the end it’s not about your absolute wage, it’s about buying power.
If you can buy the same of more with your wage, your quality of life is going up.

The comparison to US dollars is probably skewing the picture somewhat (since the US dollar is quite strong right now), but I find it hard to believe that an eight-fold decrease in value doesn’t negatively affect buying power.

https://www.thecable.ng/historical-review-nigerias-national-minimum-wage/

It looks like this would be a monthly figure. Based on this source minimum wage currently sits at 30.000 Naira ($22,45) /month.
From what I understand it is higher than what it was set at in the 80s, but the value of the Naira did drop quite a bit over time (when compared to the US dollar)

According to this website the 1981 wage would have been equivalent to $204, while the 2024 wage is equivalent to $24

Guess I’ll be contacting my MEPs, and looking into which MEPs support and oppose this plan.
Though I am glad to see my country at least has stated it finds the proposal unacceptable.