ClamDrinker

@ClamDrinker@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  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 overwhelmingly like nuclear fission and very gradually improved 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  2160 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 proves a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned. 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 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.

  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 all three renewables, 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 plans 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 fission becomes viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NNN⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely not just you, I instantly said “holy shit this is one ancient meme”. I remember it too from the early 2000’s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proud globohomo⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but most people dont have that or take way too long than is worth for a simple meme. There already exist models to unblur entire images in seconds. Ai should take the shitty work lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t solve a dystopia by adding more dystopian elements. Yes, some companies are scum and they should be rightfully targeted and taken down. But they way you do that is by targeting those scummy companies specifically, and creatives aren’t the only industry suffering from them. There are broad spectrum legislatures to do so, such as income based equality (proportional taxing and fining), or further regulations. But you don’t do that by changing fundamental rights every artists so far has enjoyed to learn their craft, but also made society what it is today. Your idea would KILL any scientific progress because all of it depends on either for profit businesses (Not per se the scummy ones) and the freedom to analyze works without a license (Something you seem to want to get rid of), in which the vast majority is computer driven. You are arguing in favor of taking a shot to the foot if it means “owning the libs big companies” when there are clearly better solutions, and guess what, we already have pretty bad luck getting those things passed as is, so again, who is being destructively optimistic here?

  And you think most artists and creatives don’t see this? Most of us are honest about this fact, because we’ve learned how to create and grow our skillset this same way. By consuming a lot of media, and looking a whole lot at other people making things. There’s a reason “good artists copy, great artists steal” is such a known line, and I’d argue against it because I feel it frames even something like taking inspiration as theft, but it’s the same argument people are making in reverse for AI.

  But this whole conversation shouldn’t be about the big companies, but about the small ones. If you’re not in the industry you might just not know that AI is everywhere in small companies too. And they’re not using the big companies if they can help it. There’s open source AI that’s free to download and use, that holds true to open information that everyone can benefit from. By pretending they don’t exist and proposing an unreasonable ban on the means, denies those without the capital and ability to build their own datasets a future. Because if AI does get too good to ignore, there will be the artists that learned how to use AI, forced to work for corporations, and the ones that don’t and can’t compete. So far it’s only been optional since using AI well is actually quite hard, and only dumb CEOs would put any trust in it. It will speed up your workflow, but it doesn’t replace it in large pieces unless you’re really just making the most generic stuff ever for a living, like marketing material.

  Never heard of Cara. I don’t doubt it exists somewhere, but I’m wholly uninterested in it or putting any work I make there. I will fight tooth and nail for what I made to be mine and allowing me to profit off it, but I’m not going to argue and promote for taking away the freedom that allowed me to become who I am from others, and the freedom of people to make art in any way they like. The freedom of expression is sacred to me. I will support other more broad appealing and far more likely to succeed alternatives that will put these companies in their place, and anything sensible that doesn’t also cause casualties elsewhere. But I’m not going to be in favor of being the “freedom of expression police” against my colleagues, and friends, or anyone for that matter, on what tools they can or cannot not use to funnel their creativity into. This is a downright insidious mentality in my eyes, and so far most people I’ve had a good talk about AI with have shared that distaste, while agreeing to it being abused by big companies.

  Again, they can use whatever they want, but Nightshade (And Glaze) are not proven to be effective, in case you didn’t know. They rely on misunderstandings, and hypothetically only work under extremely favorable situations, and assume the people collecting the dataset are really, really dumb. That’s why I call it snake oil. It’s not just me saying exactly this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you think I’m being optimistic about UBI, I can only question how optimistic you are about your own position receiving wide spread support. So far not even most artists stand behind anti AI standpoints, just a very vocal minority and their supporters who even threaten and bully other artists that don’t support their views.

  It’s not about “analysis” but about for-profit use. Public domain still falls under Fair Use.

  I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. Public domain is free of any copyright, so you don’t need a fair use exemption to use it at all. And for-profit use is not a factor for whether analysis is allowed or not. And if it was, again, it would stagnate the ability for society to invent and advance, since most frequent use is for profit. But even if it wasn’t, one company can produce the dataset or the model as a non-profit, and the other company could use that for profit. It doesn’t hold up.

  As it stands, artists are already forming their own walled off communities to isolate their work from being publicly available

  If you want to avoid being trained on by AI, that’s a pretty good way to do it yes. It can also be combined with payment. So if that helps artists, I’m all for it. But I have yet to hear any of that from the artists I know, nor seen a single practical example of it that wasn’t already explicitly private (eg. commissions or a patreon). Most artists make their work to be seen, and that has always meant accepting that someone might take your work and be inspired by it. My ideas have been stolen blatantly, and I cannot do a thing about it. That is the compromise we make between creative freedom and ownership, since the alternative would be disastrous. Even if people pay for access, once they’ve done so they can still analyze and learn from it. But yes, if you don’t want your ideas to be copied, never sharing it is a sure way to do that, but that is antithetical to why most people make art to begin with.

  creating software to poison LLMs.

  These tools are horribly ineffective though. They waste artists time and/or degrade the artwork to the point humans don’t enjoy it either. It’s an artists right to use it though, but it’s essentially snake oil that plays on these artists fears of AI. But that’s a whole other discussion.

  So either art becomes largely inaccessible to the public, or some form of horrible copyright action is taken because those are the only options available to artists.

  I really think you are being unrealistic and hyperbolic here. Neither of these have happened nor have much of chance of happening. There are billions of people producing works that could be considered art and with making art comes the desire to share it. Sure there might only be millions that make great art, but if they would mobilize together that would be world news, if a workers strike in Hollywood can do that for a significantly smaller amount of artists.

  Ultimately, I’d like a licensing system put in place Academics have to cite their sources for research That way, if they’ve used stuff that they legally shouldn’t, it can be proven.

  The reason we have sources in research is not for licensing purposes. It is to support legitimacy, to build upon the work of the other. I wouldn’t be against sourcing, but it is a moot point because companies that make AI models don’t typically throw their dataset out there. So these datasets might very well be sourced. One well known public dataset LAION 5b, does source URLs. But again, because analysis can be performed freely, this is not a requirement.

  Creating a requirement to license data for analysis is what you are arguing here for. I can already hear every large corporation salivating in the back at the idea of that. Every creator in existence would have to pay license to some big company because they interacted with their works at some point in their life and something they made looked somewhat similar. And copyright is already far more of a tool for big corporations, not small creators. This is a dystopian future to desire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you are making the mistake of assuming disagreement with your stance means someone would say no to these questions. Simply put - it’s a strawman.

  Most (yes, even corporations, albeit much less so for the larger ones), would say “Yes” to this question on it’s face value, because they would want the same for their own “sweat of the brow”. But certain uses after the work is created no longer have a definitive “Yes” to their answer, which is why your ‘simple question’ is not an accurate representation, as it forms no distinctions between that. You cannot stop your publicly posted work from being analyzed, human or computer. This is firmly established. As others have put in this thread, reducing protections over analysis will be detrimental to both artists as well as everyone else. It would quite literally cause society’s ability to advance to slow down if not halt completely as most research requires analysis of existing data.

  Artists have always been undervalued, I will give you that. But to do that, we should provide artists better protections that don’t rely on breaking down other freedoms. For example, UBI. And I wish people that were against AI would focus on that, since that is actually something you could actually get agreement on with most of society.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re confusing LLMs with other AI models, as LLMs are magnitudes more energy demanding than other AI. It’s easy to see why if you’ve ever looked at self hosting AI, you need a cluster of top line business GPUs to run modern LLMs while an image generator can be run on most consumer 2000, 3000, 4000 Nvidia GPUs at home. Generating images is about as costly as playing a modern video game, and only when it’s generating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like reddit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I got the point just fine… you’re wasting a ton of electricity and potentially your own money on making text that is not bad training data. Which is exactly what I said would happen.

  LLMs are made of billions of lines of text, the last we know is for GPT3 with sources ranging from 570 GB to 45 TB of text. A short reddit comment is quite literally a drop in a swimming pool. It’s word prediction ability isnt going to change for the worse if you just post a readable comment. It will simply reinforce it.

  And sure you can lie in it, but LLM are trained on fiction as well and have to deal with that as well. There are supplementary techniques they apply to make the AI less prone to hallucinations that dont involve the training data, such as RLHF (Reinforcement learning from humans). But honestly speaking the truth is a dumb thing they try to use the AI for anyways. Its primary function has always been to predict words, not truth.

  You would have to do this at such a scale and so succesfully voting wise that by that time you are significantly represented in the data to poison it you are either dead, banned, bankrupt, excluded from the data, or Google will have moved on from Reddit.

  If you hate or dislike LLMs and want to stop them, let your voice be known. Talk to people about it. Convincing one person succesfully will be worth more than a thousand reddit comments. Poisoning the data directly is a thing, but it’s essentially impossible to inflict alone. It’s more a consequence of bad data gathering, bad storage practice, and bad training. None of those are in your control through a reddit comment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like reddit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I can definitely say for a while that was the case for me as well. It’s honestly why I like Lemmy, since by the nature of federation it can both be self-contained and owned by the people actually using it, but still kept around even if the specific instance doesn’t last forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like reddit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry to hear that, that’s a shame. My experiences are more with gaming communities from the early 2000s, so perhaps my view isn’t universally applicable to other hobbies, professions, and such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like reddit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry to hear that. For me I’ve seen far more (relatively) big forums either turn into a discord, a subreddit, or just die out altogether due to being unsustainable for it’s cost. Just seems more logical to me that the less personal places have more trouble sustaining themselves, but we can disagree on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like reddit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate to ruin this for you, but if you post nonsense, it will get downvoted by humans and excluded from any data set (or included as examples of what to avoid). If it’s not nonsensical enough to be upvoted, it will not realistically poison any data and perhaps even be good for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like reddit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What makes you think so? I read hardcore as ‘small and tight-knit’, exactly the kind of forum that could survive easily on user donations and due to the more personal relationship there’s more loss in leaving it. I know some forums that fit that description that are still around now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pademelon⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Let bro touch some feathers man 😭

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lectures⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Counter point: It’s from that one teacher who really gets teaching and it’s two hours of fun where you dont realize you’re learning

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We cater any event!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “You know you don’t need to bring a dead horse every time you want catering right, Jim?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I created an image using AI. Not sure what this style is called, an I want to know the type of this drawing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you use StableDiffusion through a web UI (might exist for others as well), you might have access to a feature called ‘interrogate’, which allows you to find an approximate prompt to an image. Can be useful if you need it for future images.

  It can also be done online: huggingface.co/spaces/…/CLIP-Interrogator

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you call someone born in the US besides "American"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Halfway-North American

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Research funded by Big Neck Pain⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Get one of those pillows where you can remove or add stuffing - Be your own Walter White.