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 underwhelmingly like nuclear fusion and very gradually improve 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.

2.160 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.

Ik dacht dat SGP over het algemeen een respectabele partij waren, maar ze zeggen hier letterlijk gewoon “Yep, accepteer maar wat Isreal hier op dit blaadje zet.” in hun motie. Dat is toch te gek voor woorden als het gaat om mensen en organizaties als terroristen markeren? Daar hebben we toch onze eigen veiligheidsdiensten voor om dat soort beslissingen te onderbouwen? Niet klakkeloos over nemen van een land dat een gigantisch conflict van interesse heeft om kritiek de mond te snoeren en mensenrechten veel minder serieus neemt.

Ja wat er in Amsterdam gebeurt is, is ver weg van acceptabel. Maar laten we niet doen alsof er niet gezonde mensen zijn die niet heel vrolijk worden van Isreal’s manier van dingen doen.

In mijn ogen niet anders dan Erdogan die hier of in Duitsland vraagt om hier iemand te veroordelen of uit te leveren omdat ze online wat gemene woorden over hem zeggen. Kom maar met bewijs dat het hier illegaal is, en dan kunnen we verder praten, tot dan, rot op met je ongefundeerde inmenging.

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 provides a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned (Which would make it the largest). 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, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) 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.

For reference, the largest hydro plant has a storage capacity of 40 GWh, 6.6x more (at 6000 MWh above).

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 nuclear, solar, and wind, 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 plants 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 fusion becomes viable.

The time will come, you can slowly see the tide turning :) Most people aren’t inherently against it, just (understandably) cautious, and at worst misinformed or radicalized about hating it.

What really helps is to start with showing something you really put your heart into, where you can explain your choices and techniques, before you tell them it was done with (help from) AI. There was a recent study where people actually seemed to prefer works made with AI, until they were told it was made by AI and not a person. This just shows there is an AI-bias under people, and being able to show that whatever you’re making was in fact largely a product of your creativity, not the AI’s, really helps.

I tend to make recordings and snapshots of work in progress and then turn that into one of those animations that blends frame to frame to show the entire process. Just being able to show that it wasn’t just doing nothing yourself and that it’s still your creation really helps make people understand.

People differentiate AI (the technology) from AI (the product being peddled by big corporations) without making clear that nuance (Or they mean just LLMs, or they aren’t even aware the technology has a grassroots adoption outside of those big corporations). It will take time, and the bubble bursting might very well be a good thing for the technology into the future. If something is only know for it’s capitalistic exploits it’ll continue to be seen unfavorably even when it’s proven it’s value to those who care to look at it with an open mind. I read it mostly as those people rejoicing over those big corporations getting shafted for their greedy practices.

Not sure why you think I have blind faith? I’ve got blind faith in no one. Least of all the american voter lol.

Stop trying to force your interpretation on my words, it’s not what I said, period. I’m not limiting my scope to two choices. The US constitution does that for the matter of what party is in office. There are very obvious other choices, and most of them call for massive human suffering like civil war or political violence, which I’m not going to iterate on for obvious reasons. Nowhere do I deny the existence of those choices, I’m just presenting the obvious conclusion of trying to change the system in a peaceful manner.

Not that optimistically (And realistically, not common sense either apparently), but yes, it’s a potential path. And a peaceful one, among a multitude of bloody ones.

I’m not expecting anything, And I never said they had to do anything. Who would be expecting any kind of logical reasoning from US voters after this result. I said “If you want to” = “In order to get a desirable outcome, this is potentially the only way to do so.”, not “Everyone must do this because I say so”

You can blame both, honestly. The US has always had the same political game as ever, people should be wise enough to understand how to play it. If you ever want to get to a more stable democracy that no longer has the stupid two party system that prevents any form of real representative democracy where you can actually have a selection of parties that represent you perfectly, the choice should be obvious.

At least with Harris they could try to work with her and convince them to change their views for the future as they ruled. Trump will call you a left wing lunatic and slam the door in your face. Zero influence and no chance for progress (and even regression) vs some influence and some chance to progress.

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

First of all, I understand your point of view. And I’ve been looking at artists being undervalued like your potential client for decades, before AI was even a thing. So I definitely feel you on that point, and I wish it would be different. That said, here’s my response. (It’s a bit long, so I put it in spoiler tags)

I told him he wasn’t looking for a composer, but rather a programmer or something

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I could also tell you about the written assignments that students hand in, and for which I can identify in less than 30 seconds which ones have been produced by AI (students overreact to their writing skills, it’s often laughable).

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As I tell them, those who have used chatgpt have “learned” to use AI, those who have done the work have learned to carry out research, to synthesize their ideas and to structure, articulate and present them.

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One last thing. As far as innovation is concerned, AI can endlessly produce pieces that sound like Bach, but it took Bach to exist in the first place, and Glenn Gould to revolutionize the interpretation of his scores for this to be possible.

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EDIT: Just want to add to this:

I have no interest in replacing this practice by entering prompts into an algorithm, even if I could make easy money from it.

That’s not something anyone should do. Because that’s not using it as a tool. That’s making it the entire process. That’s not the kind of AI usage I’m advocating for either. And you’re free to forego AI completely. Just like there are probably some instruments you never use, or some genre you never visit. I don’t like taking the easy way either, that’s why I make creative stuff as a living too. If I just wanted money I would go elsewhere too.

If you think that’s depressing, wait until you find out that it’s basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.

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And as others have pointed out the water isn’t gone, there’s some cyclicality in how the water is used.

Most things produced by AI and assisted by AI are still human creation, as it requires a human to guide it to what it’s making. Human innovation is also very much based on mixing materials it’s seen before in new creative manners. Almost no material is truly innovative. Ask any honest artists about their inspirations and they can tell you what parts of their creations were inspired by what. Our world has explored the depths of most art forms so there is more than a lifetime’s worth of art to mix and match. Often the real reason things feel fresh and new is because they are fresh and new to us, but already existed in some form out there before it came to our attention.

That AI can match this is easily proven by fact AI can create material that no human would realistically make (like AI generated QR codes, or ‘cursed’ AI), very proficient style mixing that would take a human extensive study of both styles to pull off (eg. Pokemon and real life), or real looking images that could not realistically, financially, conscionably, be made using normal methods (eg. A bus full of greek marble statues).

Nobody is saying you have to like AI art, and depending on your perspective, some or most of it will still be really low effort and not worth paying attention to, but that was already the state of art before AI. Lifetimes of art are being uploaded every day, but nobody has the time to view it all. So I would really keep an open mind that good AI art and AI assisted art exists out there, and you might one day come to like it but not realize you’re seeing it, because good AI usage is indistinguishable from normal art.

This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it’s frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don’t actually understand it. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn’t meant for (unless it’s a novelty “because we could” kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

Preach! I’m surprised to hear it works for people with aphantasia too, and that’s awesome. I personally have a very vivid mind’s eye and I can often already imagine what I want something to look like, but could never put it to paper in a satisfying way that didn’t cost excruciating amount of time. GenAI allows me to do that with still a decent amount of touch up work, but in a much more reasonable timeframe. I’m making more creative work than I’ve ever been because of it.

It’s crazy to me that some people at times completely refuse to even acknowledge such positives about the technology, refuse to interact with it in a way that would reveal those positives, refuse to look at more nuanced opinions of people that did interact with it, refuse even simple facts about how we learn and interact with other art and material, refusing legal realities like the freedom to analyze that allow this technology to exist (sometimes even actively fighting to restrict those legal freedoms, which would hurt more artists and creatives than it would help, and give even more more power to corporations and those with enough capital to self sustain AI model creation).

It’s tiring, but luckily it seems to be mostly an issue on the internet. Talking to people (including artists) in real life about it shows that it’s a very tiny fraction that holds that opinion. Keep creating 👍

Totally second the latter part - it’s the self destructive nature of being blindly anti-AI. Pretty much everyone would support giving more rights and benefits to people displaced by AI, but only a fraction of that group would support an anti-AI mentality. If you want to work against the negative effects of AI in a way that can actually change things, the solution is not to push against the wall closing in on you, but to find the escape.

Yeah and honestly, this is largely a reasonable standard for anyone running an email server. If you don’t have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, basically anyone can spoof your emails and you’d be none the wiser. It also makes spam much harder to send without well, sacrificing IP addresses to the many spam lists. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people setting up their own mail server were made aware of these things because of being blocked.

There is so much wrong with this…

AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.

You’re most likely talking about “Chat Control”, which is a controversial EU proposal to scan either on people’s devices or from provider’s ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone’s privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn’t change anything about how dystopian it would be.

You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It’s clear on it’s own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don’t need some kind of conspiracy theory about ‘the true purpose of AI’ to see that.

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