This is not necessarily true for all situations. Northern Europe is planning to produce a lot of electricity with offshore wind, but laying deep sea high voltage electricity cables isn’t cheap. There’s already a lot of gas pipelines that can be retrofitted for hydrogen transport at a much lower price. At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.
There are also industries like steel production that are just not going to transition to electricity. Hydrogen has a place there too.
> At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.
If you are talking about excess energy, that implies there is non-excess energy that’s being transported across cables. So you are already transporting it to land and connecting it to the grid. Storage from there is trivial compared to a hydrogen transmission and distribution network.
As for repurposing the LNG pipes for hydrogen, that’s a pipe dream to convert a standard asset into a story you can sell.
My impression is that a big part of the reason for the sudden boom in humanoid robots is that they lend themselves particularly well to RL based training using human-made training footage using VR. It’s much easier to have a robot broadly copy human actions if the robot looks like a human, instead of having to first translate the human action to your robot arm equivalent.
The success of large multipurpose AI models trained on web-scale data pushed a lot of people towards "cracking general purpose robot AI might be possible within a decade".
Whether transfer learning from human VR/teleop data is the best way to do it remains uncertain - there are many approaches towards training and data collection. Although transfer learning from web-scale data, teleoperation and "RL IRL" are common - usually on different ends of the training pipeline.
Tesla got the memo earlier than most, because Musk is a mad bleeding edge technology demon, but many others followed shortly before or during the public 2022 AI boom.
That is certainly a factor, but you also have to take into account that all these tasks in the factories are now centered around the human form because humans are doing them.
Nobody shipped this because previously almost nobody could use CLI tools. Now you can just ask an llm to generate the commands which makes things much more accessible
Interestingly Shannon did write about entropy relating to the English language, and how given a sequence of tokens, the next token can be predicted using the probabilities of finding that token after a certain sequence in other bodies of text: http://medientheorie.com/doc/shannon_redundancy.pdf
This is from 1950. I wonder what he would have to say about today’s LLMs.
But that example is of writing a green field library that deals with an extremely well documented spec. While impressive, this isn’t what 99% of software engineering is. I’m generally a believer/user but this is a poor example to point at and say “look, gains”.
Just out of curiosity, what do you believe Snowden intended by leaking what he leaked? From your comment it almost reads as if you think the publication was the point, not that those implicated by the leaks should be made to change their ways?
Snowden himself says that he saw a surveillance state being built and the people responsible lying about it under oat in front of democratic representatives (see James Clapper).
In his words, he wanted the American public to know about what was going on, and to get a say.
But when you say "I'll stop publishing once my political goals are achieved", you are openly admitting that:
1) You publishing this informations causes harm
2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals
3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).
That, to me, is the difference between "whistleblowing" and "blackmail".
> 2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals
Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing
> 3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).
Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine.
> Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine.
This is exactly my point. This framing makes it clear that the leaks are not about publishing information that the leakers believe is vital to get out-- it is about leveraging the resulting fallout.
> Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing
It is perfectly fine, expected even, for a whistleblowers ethical/political goals to align with them blowing the whistle (duh).
But If you, at the first opportunity, turn around unprompted (!!) and go "I'll stop publishing immediately if you just do what I want" then you're not actually a whistleblower past that point in my eyes.
Does not mean that you are automatically wrong, or a "bad guy" or even acting unethically-- but you do give up significant moral high ground by doing this regardless.
Both of these can be true. Compare the US to countries like China for example, which has had success growing its economy with more state led companies and financing through state owned banks. It’s not perfect, but compared to western countries, less of the profits go to the private sector, and it allows the government to more directly chase long term strategic goals.
There are also industries like steel production that are just not going to transition to electricity. Hydrogen has a place there too.