Looks like it’s not a case of a fork and but rather of different publishers all trying to serve a common need with a well understood formula. There used to be many almanacs, then there were two, now there is one.
In Italy, where I grew up, my grandparents used to read the Almanacco di Barbanera; the first edition came out in 1762. It is still around https://www.barbanera.it/
This seems to boil down to AI uses lots of power and some of that currently comes from nuclear so we’re going to definitely ramp up nuclear energy production. It in no way addresses the cost, regulatory, or public acceptance issues. It also completely ignores things like grid storage that could make renewables a viable alternative. I don’t know if nuclear energy production is going to increase and after reading this I’m absolutely no closer to a deeper understanding of the issue.
Nobody needs a kind of AI that consumes that much energy. There's no way that's commercially viable and carries its own weight. Also, the whole discussion is taking place in the context of present day GenAI where nobody has found a marketable use case for it. This whole bubble would be long bust by the time construction puts its boots on the ground.
A better justification for more nuclear energy is to electrify transportation and residential heating/cooling while navigating the climate catastrophe, don't you think?
> Nobody needs a kind of AI that consumes that much energy.
Rather: nobody needs to spend that much on current quality AI.
Say for the sake of argument that the accelerationists are correct about the timescale for future capabilities (I hope they're wrong in the short term, but run with it):
If we had an AI that could drive robots — cars, androids, surgical machines, industrial equipment — at least as well as any human, but the compute meant that it took 10 kW to do so, at electricity prices of $0.1/kWh that AI is cost-competitive with $1/h human labour.
If that happens and there's enough compute but not enough energy, energy prices rise to match human wages (so at least a factor of ten for this arbitrary example).
To avoid energy price rises, and for current economic output, that would require the USA to have about 170 million (workforce) * 10 kW = 1.7 TW ≈ 3.9 times current US electrical production.
(For the avoidance of doubt, 10 kW is a completely made up number with no real justification beyond it being simultaneously a relatively small number for an isolated valuable industrial device while also much more than a human brain).
> A better justification for more nuclear energy is to electrify transportation and residential heating/cooling while navigating the climate catastrophe, don't you think?
Not really, the reason for nuclear rather than renewables is more about the relative cost compared to time-shifting power generation with storage, and (most*) transportation already needs storage.
Heating and cooling is likewise, with good insulation, something that can work fine as time-shifting — the apartment I own back in the UK has storage heaters, everywhere I've lived (outside university) has/had hot water tanks.
The other reason for nuclear reactors is so you can maintain a nuclear arsenal, which sadly seems to be the only way for nations to stop other nuclear powers from messing with them.
* trains and trams can get rail/overhead line power, but cars, aircraft can't do that; trucks can be adapted that way, but only to reduce storage not eliminate it and even then it's just experimental**; shipping technically can use nuclear but ports don't want to accept such vessels and nobody wants pirates stealing nuclear reactors
I don't know what to do with the first part of your comment, too many variables. If machines can take over those jobs in the short, the societal changes would be so far-reaching that an electricity increase would be the slightest of the worries (one for which we have an engineering solution, at least, as opposed to all the philosophical and economical ones that come with it).
Regarding the second part, I want to also factor installation-lifespan in the case for nuclear energy as well: we know that today's cheap renewable energy is the result of gas-guzzled worldwide supply-chains that are all but certain to still exist couple decades down the road. A nuclear plant can be built today to last a century, which is 5 times the replacement rate of PV and wind. This brings an appreciable predictability to the cost of electricity that intermittent energy sources can't beat.
Perhaps the biggest issue isn't public acceptance, but simply we stuck at building fission plants, even when we intend to.
I was pro nuclear power sixteen years sixteen years ago (these days I'm more ambivalent). In that time the UK has built maybe three quarters of a nuclear power plant.
Nuclear waste sucks but carbon in the atmosphere is way worse. But we're incapable of increasing nuclear production. Meanwhile renewables have gotten way cheaper and storage is beginning to look feasible.
I shared this view and built my partner a little web app to use for aggregating peer reviews for her students. It worked fine for a couple years until she had to go on maternity leave and hand it over to her replacement while she was gone. Due to data/privacy concerns it couldn’t be easily publicly hosted. It ended up being simplest to wrap it up as a Tauri App (coincidentally also on the HN front page right now) and distribute it that way. It’s now being used by a few people and I never have to worry about keeping it operational or losing/leaking data.
I guess in some ways I still went with your suggestion since it’s an html based gui, but local apps make data ownership way less problematic and are the right choice sometimes.
Great great example! Yes I was referring to exactly this - still making a local app for privacy/complexity reasons, but using html for the actual GUI. Will look into Tauri, never heard of it…
I think we've got another one at Alkimos that supplies another 15% or so right? I think we are projected to have the majority of our drinking water come from desal over the next few decades.
Desal is cheap as chips compared to Water Corp's supply charge!
And it’s a pretty recent thing too since we realised we couldn’t just blindly drain the underground water and the rain had become insufficient for our long term population growth predictions.
I had to look it up too. In this case it’s Open Broadcaster Software, but they seem to treat OBS more as a name than an acronym so the usage seems appropriate. https://obsproject.com/
Just last week my old Dell XPS died and I was wishing these were available in Australia. Really glad I was a bit slow to pick out a replacement! Got my preorder placed.
I’ve really seen this go both ways. As an individual contributor working remotely with a mostly in person team sending a weekly summary was one of my most effective tools for getting my work seen and getting people to address issues that were impacting me. As an individual contributor on a fully remote team I saw many of my peers treat the weekly summary as a chore and put minimal effort in, which meant the content wasn’t very useful, which meant no one bothered to read it and the whole exercise just became a waste of time. This type of thing can be incredibly valuable, but it really depends on team culture and buy in from the participants.
This is true with ultra books as well. 3 or 4 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbons or XPS 13s are an easy cost savings and quality improvement compared to low or even midrange contemporary competitors.
Batteries last 3-4 years and can already be very hard to get hold off after that time. I had a tough time sourcing a genuine replacement battery for my 4 year old X1 Carbon. It's a shame as otherwise the user replaceable battery would be a huge advantage over e.g. a MacBook.
The older XPS "developer edition" models with a lot of ram and an SSD also make very good home servers. Power usage at idle is a fraction of what you would otherwise use and the performance is great.
This explanation does a great job of describing what I've seen in Australia. I moved here from San Francisco after working at several startups including a long stint at Airbnb. I've been consistently stunned by how peripheral software is to businesses here. In the bay area organizations are structured around how they build technology and see it as a key point of competition. Here it's viewed as a cost center and usually outsourced to consulting firms who integrate some semi-generalized third party solution.
This isn't universal, there are startups here that "get it". But it's ubiquitous in large companies that have money, and that drives the salary market.
It seems inevitable that this will change in time either by the old guard catching up or new companies displacing them. I think one of the key driving forces behind this could be the return home of people with experience from SV style companies. As they join companies or start their own they are likely to advocate for approaches that more strongly couple the organization to its technology.
In the Canadian startup circles I once inhabited this was a broadly accepted idea. Seeing people move to the US for high paying tech jobs was generally celebrated, because there was an expectation that many of them would eventually return and be a boost to the overall ecosystem.
I previously worked for a large consulting firm and in the Australian side the software arm was seen as 'just another billable unit' even though we built software primarily for internal engineers to use, this has some nasty side-effects
(wasted time/money on busywork, inability to do useful work without 'proving usefulness' first).
The London arm was much more of a 'startup' focus, billing time was second to doing good work and delighting clients (internal or not).
I'm now at a London startup that 'gets it' and when I inevitably move back to Australia I'll be taking these learnings back with me and hopefully be Senior enough to try and encourage change in whichever company I end up in (assuming it is needed).
