Would it be fair to say that because the US Navy is not running it as a for-profit power generation that would help. Like every accident seems to be a list of cost saving shortcuts being responsible
Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.
The reactors on aircraft carriers have a similar thermal output to many commercial power reactors. The ones on submarines are around a third of that size, about the size of SMRs like NuScale VOYGR or the Xe-100 reactors proposed to be built at Long Mott in Texas.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
Why put a number on it? Every number so far has been wrong. Can we agree on the negative impacts of humans on an environment conducive to humanity without putting obviously wrong timings on predictions? I bet your intention is to provoke urgency but to most people it just causes an eye roll because it's not true, whereas the underlying ideas are true.
Very much agree. It's a pretty common mistake to bundle real information with obviously wrong details and lose credibility. Especially in the eyes of people looking for a reason to discredit the argument.
The disingenuous people who discredit climate change will do so no matter how serious people act. There is no point in changing behavior on their account.
The point is to convince people who are undecided. Using information that's known to be false or weakly supported is then short-sighted and counterproductive, because enough false predictions will turn up that those undecided will tune out entirely
I think their point is that discounting the time estimates is more a constant shifting of the window of what we expect more than them being de-facto incorrect. They’re more off by degree (e.g. an XX% reduction vs complete extinction) than being worthless. As the example points out a large reduction can be very similar to an annihilation it’s just that we are only used to what we know so we constantly shift what is normal.
You have sailed past the point. There were so, so many cod it was hard not to catch a bunch. That isn’t a metric, it’s an indicator that most likely meant vast unseen numbers. The tip of the iceberg is a metaphor for a reason, though it may become an anachronism within our lifetimes.
So make predictions about stuff that happens next year and be right about them. The problem is that strongly predicting what will happen in 30 years has always been wrong so far. My point is just focus on what you know. Anyone can say whatever about 30 years from now and ride that for the next 29.
>strongly predicting what will happen in 30 years has always been wrong so far
No it hasn't, this is climate change denialist nonsense. In fact no less a figure than ExxonMobil correctly predicted the trajectory of global CO2 levels and corresponding increase in warming as far back as the 1970s and their predictions remain accurate today.
I've been alive long enough that my hometown was supposed to be underwater several times already. Climate change is real and predictions have also been very wrong.
because whales can communicate into the thousands of kilometers range and nowadays, because of marine traffic, they are luck to get into the hundred meters
micro-plastics into the ocean don't have a good prognosis on numbers reduction
Right. Just because some predictions weren’t accurate, doesn’t mean they were directionally inaccurate. You biodiversity and total volume of plant/animal/marine biomass that’s not human or commercially consumed by humans has depleted in the last 50 years and it only accelerates every year. There objectively will be fewer whales, if any in 50 years. Life as we know is ending and has been for decades.
Because they think it might make people give a shit enough to do something to change that outcome?
Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.
Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.
tl;dr is there's very poor ROI to do nothing to improve our polluting habits and banking on the world sorting itself out.
Furthermore, most actions we can take to improve climate outcomes can also improve societal and technological outcomes. The only downside to taking more actions to have clean energy and less pollution are based on made up economic rules that normal people are supposed to follow, but that the super rich/powerful skirt at their leisure. A cleaner future benefits the VAST majority, irrespective of climate change. And the bonus is that if climate change does progress, we're better suited to manage it.
Or we can keep burning liquified dinosaur bones and partying like cigarettes don't cause cancer. I get the appeal of the 60s for how care free people could be - they lived without consequence. And we're stuck dealing with their failed policies.
While I have no problem blaming the rich. You are post here you are most probably part of those people who are skirting it at their leisure. Even I with a life long devotion to climate and environmental issues have a hard time to be a positive effect. The only way to not skirt your responsibilities right now is to be a Greta Thunberg.
> liquified dinosaur bones
I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be true. When I was 13 I did believed it, so now days I try to not spread this factoid. We can talk about the fascinating history of millions of years of efficient carbon storage on our planet.
The rich and powerful bit was specifically around how we could easily do more for clean energy and pollution if politicians and ultra elites stopped acting like it's economics preventing us to do so. World powers are fine to go to war on a whim, but the second we talk about health care, cleaner energy, pollution, or other topics that will broadly benefit humanity, we are met with "this is too expensive to do".
And: on the 'r' side of the r/K reproductive strategy. Whales are literally the exemplar of K-selection, that is a very small number of high-quality offspring.
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
Evolution of small things like algae and the krill which feed on it and feed the whale is quite fast. Single celled organisms reproduce on the scale of 20 minutes and hold immense amounts of genetic diversity in their populations to facilitate the success of a better adapted line almost immediately. Additionally, they are adept at horizontal gene transfer from other well-adapted organisms.
This would be great news if the whale literally only required krill to survive, but complex megafauna have complex needs, so the ability of krill and other small creatures to evolve is largely irrelevant in a discussion regarding the ability of megafauna to survive. This is especially true if you read TFA and see that the whales already adapt to eat different things as necessary.
My point is, for instance, that they need appropriate temperatures in the water. Again, nothing survives PURELY based on caloric intake. It does not matter much at all if krill evolve.
Algae are the bottom of the ocean food chain. Everything interacts with it. But algae's happy to grow in a bowl of water left in the sun.
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
But it's not a bottom up interaction. If whales are killed off from climate change, then those other things can get out of control. Too much algae, and then you have hypoxic environments.
A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on those environments.
My point is that any change to the careful balance can have non-linear effects.
I think we're coming at this from different directions. The OP I responded to originally said: "Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years." which isn't what you're talking about. A top-down extinction looks like whaling in the 1800s and we already had that. Now they're on the mend.
Right, this is my point. Looking at krill is looking at one PIECE of the stack. Other things support and interact with that stack. The stack is the whale. The point is that it doesn’t matter if this one single piece of the stack can evolve, it’s not nearly enough.
It could easily become this fast or even faster, if we would just stop worrying so much about "playing god" and focus instead on getting good at this job. We don't have much time for this either, as AI is on the trajectory to take over that mantle in the next decade or three, whether we like it or not.
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
The next question is which traits to do you choose and the next question is which traits are better, because choices will imply ordering, and then you open a big can of worms that last time killed millions of people. So maybe there's other ways to avoid doom that didn't create doom last time we went down the path.
Unpopular opinion for obvious reasons, but probably the only realistic one apart from just witnessing one extinction after another. Pollution and climate change aint going anywhere until we elevate whole world to the level of say western Europe.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
Imagine you killed off all of humanity save for a couple people in Muncie, IN. How long until the next Shakespeare or Einstein emerges? Better yet, a properly heterogeneous culture?
Some of these laws are like Gravity, inevitable things you can fight but will always exist e.g. increasing complexity. Some of them are laws that if you break people will yell at you or at least respect you less, e.g. leave it cleaner than when you found it.
If AI could reliably write good code then you shouldn't need to even commit the code as the general rule is you shouldn't commit generated code. Commit the session when you don't need to commit the code
This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet?
Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?
"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
Kind of funny that some of those wait-6-month people are basically the same ones behind "no human driven cars being sold after 2025" and "computer vision is all you need"
And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo.
But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period.
I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously.
I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.)
It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines.
And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.
I think the decline of manual transmission is different from self-driving. Manuals, you could argue are a technological progression that doesn’t change the fundamental economics or sociology of driving. But self-driving has issues far beyond the technology. Like liability, like ownership of vehicles, availability, traffic rules,…
I’m not even sure if, outside of highly mapped environments it even makes sense.
Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that what the "self driving" promise has been.
Um.. Claude Code has been out less than a YEAR.. and the lift in capability in the last year has been dramatic.
It does seem probable based on progress that in 1-2 more model generations there will be little need to hand code in almost any domain. Personally I already don't hand code AT ALL, but there are certainly domains/languages that are under performing right now.
Right now with the changes this week (Opus 4.6 and "teams mode") it already is another step function up in capability.
Teams mode is probably only good for greenfield or "green module" development but I'm watching a team of 5 AI's collaborating and building out an application module by module. This is net new capability for the tool THIS WEEK (Yes I am aware of earlier examples).
I don't understand how people can look at this and then be dismissive of future progress, but human psychology is a rich and non-logical landscape.
Because then you won't be important, the model will be important. And then everyone will have to use their model, that's their dream. Why isn't that your nightmare too? Why will you be special if it can just code whatever it needs to code? Then anthropic can just employ all the programmers that will ever be needed, to just review new skills and modules of code. It was predicted early on there would be a need for about six big computers worldwide. Well now we'll just need six AI shepherds. And then literally everyone else will forget how anything works because it will be a solved problem. People already treat computers like magic, it will literally become a dark art. And I guess it's fine, what can we do, right? Go with the flow I guess. "If I don't , someone else will. Maybe I can be one of those six real people at Anthropic".
Things have progressed much faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true. Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today will probably be equally moot in 6 months.
Maybe we should look at output like quality of software being produced instead of discourse on forums where AI companies are spending billions to market?
Where is all this new software and increased software quality from all this progression?
It doesn't necessarily enhance or detract from software quality. You could use it for quality assurance or code health initiatives, but you'd have to prioritize that. Obviously it is hard to find a lot of humans who will (be allowed to) choose that over adding some new feature to satisfy the sales guys. And since you measure quality basically on vibes (how many times has this app crashed lately?) it probably takes a while to diffuse from commit to your consciousness. But I have seen it used for the purpose of quality, so I am cautiously optimistic.
Quality shmuality. Get good bro, my app already uses best patterns and you can do all the things and has enterprise SSO and runs on vercel and needs 39 services and costs a few million to run to show you AI generated excel sheets because you cant be bothered to think for a hot minute. We can't have you thinking you might get wrong ideas about ownership. I'm afraid open source was a mistake in the end because it enabled enterprises to iterate faster than they ever could on their own.
If we were as smart as the smartest guys throwing trillions at LLMs we wouldn't be predicting anything, we would be creating it like the gods we were always meant to be ever since someone hurt our feelings irrevocably. Hitler could have been a painter, these guys could be slinging dope for a living but here we are.
But the sentiment has changed significantly over the last 6 months. I think this is the biggest step change in sentiment since ChatGPT 3.5. Someone who said "wait 6 months" 6 months ago would have been "right".
Won't people just use AI to define specification? Like if they are getting most of it done with AI, won't they won't read/test the code to verify won't they also not read the spec
Social media is cigarettes. There are lots of studies showing the negative impacts to say that limiting their reach is probably good for society and individuals.
Just about all arguments against this are the same arguments that would stop governments limiting booze or tabaco
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