↙ time adjusted for second-chance
JSON Canvas Spec (jsoncanvas.org)
[...] common trope that was proven false years ago by the existence of zero shot learning. Ok, that's better than comparing LLMs to humans. ZSL however, has not proven anything of that sort false years ago, as it was mainly concerned with assessing whether LLMs are solely relying on precise instruction training or can generalise in a very limited degree. Ironically, you are writing this under a paper that shows just that: A model that cannot determine a short strings parity cannot have abstracted from the training data to arrive at the far more impressive and complicated maths challenges which it successfully solves in output. Some of the solutions we have seen in output require such innate understanding that, if there is no generalisation, far deeper than ZSL has ever shown, than this must come from training. Simple multiplication, etc. maybe, not the tasks people such as Easy Riders [0] throw at these models. This paper shows exactly that even with ZSL, these models do only abstract in an incredibly limited manner and a lot of capabilities we see in the output are specifically trained, not generalised. Yes, generalisation in a limited capacity can happen, but no, it is not nearly close enough to yield some of the results we are seeing. Or to put it simpler, if the output provided can be useful for Maths at the Bachelor level and beyond and this capability is generalised as you believe, these tasks would not be a struggle for the model. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@easy_riders
France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet, and they cannot get a reactor built within reasonable capital costs. Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons. California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE data product I've cited in my other comment in this thread). EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-will-cost-over-100-billion-euros-by-2035-court-auditors-says-2025-11-17/ - November 17th, 2025 French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/ - March 4th, 2024 Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022 Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-nuclear-shutdown-set-to-test-renewables-success-story | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 15.45% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly )
> France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet That's just wrong. EDF nuclear fleet is highly profitable with around 92TWh exported in 2025 and more than 5 Billions of benefits for the country and the company. https://www.sfen.org/rgn/le-nucleaire-en-chiffres-923-twh-delectricite-exportes-2025-record-porte-hausse-production/ The reason EDF had to be nationalized is because the government used the company as a "price shield" to protect consumer against energy price rise on the European market in 2022 with a mechanism named TRV (Tarif Régulé vente). That digged up EDF dept tremendously. > Spain plans to deprecate their remaining nuclear for renewables for similar reasons Span deprecated their nuclear government because their current Socialist government is aligned with Ecologists that are, like everywhere in Europe, antinuclear. Additionally, the lack of spinning generator in Spain is currently partially what caused the Blackout in Spain in 2025 due to a lack of inertia in the system. > EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says This is over 25 years and will prolong-ate the lifetime of the 56 reactors by 20 more years. These produce 70% of the country need in electricity. In comparison, the German energiewende cost 400 billions for 37% of electricity of 2025 produced by solar and wind. With production medium that will need to be entirely renewed in 20 years. > California will achieve a low carbon generation profile for far cheaper than it cost France (refer to the Lazard LCOE That is also wrong. Because LCOE calculation does not take into consideration the price of the grid consolidating necessary for renewable nor the necessity of backup generation in case of dunkleflaute.
I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not? The thesis is simply this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece. The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful: The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-power-will-change-the-world | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024 > To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them. > Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind. > To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel. So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
I have also done similar research because I wanted to build something to handle microtransactions on a personal website that could scale if adopted to be usable by everyone if they wanted. I looked at crypto currency because it seems like the obvious naive solution. it doesnt work. the cost of the transaction itself far outweighs the value of the transaction when dealing with fractions of a cent. you want an entire network to be updating ledgers with ~millions of records per ~$1000 moved. the fundamental tech of crypto leans towards slower, higher value transactions than high volume, small transactions. Lots of efforts have been made with some coins to bring down the bar of "high value, low volume" to meet everyday consumer usage rates and values - but a transaction history at the scale of every ad impression for every person is a tough ask and would perpetually be in an uphill battle against energy costs. Ultimately, the conclusion I came to is that the service would need to be centralized, and likely treated as cash by not keeping track of history. Centralized company creates "web credits", user spends $5 for 10,000 credits, these credits are consumed when they visit websites. Websites collect a few credits from each user, and cash out with the centralized company. The issue is that since it would cost more to track and store all the transactions than the value of the transactions themselves, you have to fully trust the company to properly manage the balances. I started building it and since I would be handling, exchanging, and storing real currency - it seemed subject to a lot of regulations. It is like a combination bank and casino. i've thought about finishing the project and using disclaimers that buying credits legally owes the user nothing, and collecting credits legally owes the websites nothing, and operating on a trust system - but any smart person would see the potential for a rug pull on that and i figured there would not be much interest. The alternative route of adhering to all the banking regulations to get the proper insurances needed to make the commitments necessary to users and websites to guarantee exchange between credits and $ seemed like too much for 1 person to take on as a side project for free
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