I don’t disagree with anything you said but wanted to just weigh in on the more degrees of freedom.

One major thing to consider is that unless we have 24/7 sensor recording with AI out in the real world and a continuous monitoring of sensor/equipment health, we’re not going to have the “real” data that the AI triggered on.

Version and model updates will also likely continue to cause drift unless managed through some sort of central distribution service.

Any large Corp will have this organization and review or are in the process of figuring it out. Small NFT/Crypto bros that jump to AI will not.

IMO the space will either head towards larger AI ensembles that tries to understand where an exact rubric is applied vs more AGI human reasoning. Or we’ll have to rethink the nuances of our train test and how humans use language to interact with others vs understand the world (we all speak the same language as someone else but there’s still a ton of inefficiency)

Amen, only angle I can see someone disagreeing with is trees becoming a potential bank of carbon to be fed back into the atmosphere via fuel for wildfires.

I so wish there were better ways to control forest fires.

From an industry standpoint everything the article says at the end as a critique is correct. We should be playing moneyball, those fans that draw in the particles would be an additional toll on the power grid.

Instead spend the money on removing the emission sources and modernizing our grid/reducing fuel emissions. After weve exhausted low hanging fruit there we’ll have to throw money at offset tech.

I suppose we’ll have to get the tech made eventually but there’s just so much to be reworked on our grids as is.

Yeah, I saw some of your other comments regarding the 3rd world tree offsets. Definitely the shady recs I was talking about. The shady req pushers drive me nuts, the legislation on what you can and can’t count is usually pretty clear but they’re just spam. I would love to see govt action against them

Usually net zero claims are claimed by a certain date so I’m unsure if you’re saying your company thinks it’s at net zero (very few are as outlined in most govts reporting reqs) or they have a commitment and are claiming Z% progress. This is also a good example of the balkinization of terms. Net zero to me means “company no longer emitting in scope 1 and 2 by x year”.

If it’s the latter that’s where the whole review and pushback on net zero as a marketing term is, some of these companies just went out and bought up all the renewable energy on the market, didn’t touch anything they cant just buy and are now bitching they don’t get to claim net zero progress. I agree with the committees, fuck those companies. If you’re not putting in the work then you shouldn’t be able to claim that.

Re: the new system, you’re describing the concept of additionallity to the power grid as well. We will ultimately reach a point where we’ve only got thinga like new growth forests or some other carbon sequestration but we’ve got a really long way to even shut off the flow of CO2.

Right now a lot of focus is on getting scope 1 and 2 emissions to 0 (what you consume vs purchase for raw energy) vs scope 3 (all your suppliers and users emissions too). I believe you may be describing a Scope 3 CO2 neutral. In which case I agree, but goodluck getting most of our politicians right now to agree.

It’s not the perfect end goal but the logic goes that if every company has to get to net zero via supply chain and adding to the grid, we might see scope 3 hit zero with additional crack down on laggards?

Editing: just to add that interim usage of biogenic fuels is a good way to cut CO2 and only release CH4 and N2O in very very limited quantities (from what I’ve seen usually less than those in non biogenic sources). theoretically committing capital to plant or grow these sources now could be used to “reduce” carbon impact in future supply chains. Probably has some issues.

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

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. 🙃

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 👍

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

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 😭

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.

I think what bothers me most is the 2060 ‘comittment’ under their own ‘methods’. Smells like abusing shady EAC/RECs or the carbon sequestration tech we keep hearing is bunk.

Theoretically if the scope 3 legislation across the world had teeth we’d see companies doing business with China having much higher than average emissions factors in their reports. Hopefully we’d see the market correct but not likely when oceans are hitting 101 and yet ‘climate talks are always challenging’ still.

The only thing I hope is that the insurance companies bring a reality check sooner rather than later.

If only these poor oil producers had some sort of half century or more lead to reap the benefits of their export advantage and diversify their interests. Won’t someone think of how unfair it is to ask them to change? /s

It’d be an uphill battle but if someone got into programming via free online courses they could build a resume via collaborating with projects on github. It’d be a way to prove skill without the diploma.

Advice goes the same for anything where you can build a portfolio to demonstrate competency, most people in industries just care about results. This could be photography, graphic design, a physical labor like wood working etc.

Sucks because you’d have to outlay time upfront before maybe getting payed though. Ymmv

I’m not sure if links are allowed here? I have no affiliation but if you Google the maker Battery-Free Ganz you’ll find their website.

It’s a bigger brother imo, double the length, wood stem, and larger bowl. Def needs a bigger torch though

Np I think the way the scopes are outlined is well meaning but man some of the terms and the balkanization of the industry’s terms has made things confusing.

Imo it’s the biggest reason we didn’t get more public pressure on this but science is hard so /shrug