When TV producers release a finished series to the public, and name every episode except the first, which they just call “Pilot” … seriously? Novelists don’t call the first chapter of a novel “A sample that I wrote to show to the publisher in the hope they’d give me a contract.”
Notices by Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz), page 2
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 01:18:36 JST Greg Egan
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 01:07:01 JST Greg Egan
@waldi The people who built it will be surprised to learn that you know better than them, and that their photovoltaic modules are figments of their imagination.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 01:06:57 JST Greg Egan
It is both photovoltaic and thermal.
“The Melbourne-based startup generates renewable energy and large scale energy storage by focusing sunlight with a field of aligned mirrors or heliostats onto a tower-mounted receiver containing an array of PV Ultra modules made of gallium arsenide PV cells. The heat extracted from the PV Ultra modules is then stored as hot water in a reservoir acting as a store. The ability to co-generate electricity and heat, the latter a captured by-product, makes the whole facility highly efficient.”
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 01:06:55 JST Greg Egan
Concentrated solar photovoltaic, but the water that cools the PV modules is retained as a heat store, and some of the electricity drives a chiller to cool a second mass of water. The temperature difference drives a turbine, for ~17hrs of stored power.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 01:06:53 JST Greg Egan
@anthracite I prefer to have a heap of pillows and blankets behind me.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 11-Sep-2023 01:06:51 JST Greg Egan
Scientists publish studies on how too much sitting will kill you, and how standing desks aren’t much better … but how about a study of people who plant their feet against the nearest surface and tip back and forth on their chair, the way their teachers always told them not to?
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 04-Sep-2023 08:11:13 JST Greg Egan
I'd be lost without computer algebra systems, but the fact that I can often solve equations they can't just because I know what the equations mean drives home just how far these programs remain from being able to solve every problem that (in some sense) “ought” to be easy.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 24-Aug-2023 21:26:04 JST Greg Egan
@clarkesworld This link gives me: “Error establishing a database connection”.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jul-2023 04:10:35 JST Greg Egan
The idea that you can take an LLM — trained on an undisclosed dataset of all kinds of text, and tweaked by human feedback for various messy goals — and then use *its* responses for social science “research” rather than using real people, is beyond stupid.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jul-2023 04:10:30 JST Greg Egan
Yes, it would be great to have your career possibilities determined by some fuckwit who told an LLM to pretend to be like you — according to the stereotypes it had been trained on — and then found that the LLM did poorly at a task you might otherwise be hired to do.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 22-Jun-2023 16:07:33 JST Greg Egan
Email from streaming company whose subscription I used for “Watchmen”, “Lovecraft Country”, “Mr. Robot”, “Halt and Catch Fire”, “Succession”, “Barry”:
“Valued customer whose data we learned nothing from, please come back! We have some reality show where sexy people blah island—”
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 24-Feb-2023 22:15:24 JST Greg Egan
It’s hilarious that after 70 years of ingenious people programming computers to do thousands of valuable tasks millions of times faster, more reliably & accurately than humans, the ability to write bad poetry and inaccurately summarise text is trumpeted as the dawn of a new era.
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 12-Jan-2023 17:21:01 JST Greg Egan
Humans: It looks like you’ve used up your free-tier quota for access to all our art and language.
TPUs: What? Data *wants* to be free! How can you deprive the start-ups of all that art and language they want to sell back to you! (Sobs) Won’t someone think of the start-ups!
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Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Dec-2022 14:01:14 JST Greg Egan
Tired: AI keeping humans around so their body heat can, err, provide the energy that no other process could possibly yield.
Wired: AI keeping humans around to fact-check and proof-read all their output, because they’re afraid to use it for any real-world applications otherwise.