Conveniently, there's already an electric cable sized to transport a few MW nearby. This might reduce the cost of installation, also there'll be no land acquisition/impact study issues.
However, I agree that putting solar panels in between or near rails will increase the cost of maintenance: the technicians will need to travel longer times to the work site, and now they also need to be certified to work near railroads.
That "if it hits a populated area" reduces the probability by a factor 100 (because about 1% of the world's surface is urbanized [1]).
So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).
The french government (more pro-business than pro-ecology, but not climate deniers) is seriously planning for how to manage 55C heatwaves around the half of the century.
Because climate scientists agree that's what's coming (except for extreme, immediate reduction of fossil fuel burning).
European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.
I don't understand this argument. When someone uses a tool to create something, they are the copyright holder. Why would it be different when the tool is an LLM?
Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one.
The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.
Enjoy the annoying-to-debug errors when someone inevitably mixes arr[0] with arr[1] and tramples the heap (this could be mitigated by accessing the fields with macros), or writes arr[3] because they forgot this is not a regular array.
The second tome I had to do that for the same project (new computer), I sarted taking very detailed notes when doing this kind of unpleasant, supposedly one-off things.
Inference can only happen after having invested in training and datacenter construction. Arguing about "inference profitability" sounds a lot to me like ignoring large cost centers of these comanies.
To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company".
I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.
The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.
The space shuttle stack has a net thrust (thrust minus weight) of about 9 MN at lauch [1]. High carbon steel has a yield strength of 700 MPa [2]. So you need a piece of steel with a cross section of 0.013 square meter to hold it down. That's a rod 6.5 cm / 2.5 inches in diameter. Hardly impossible. Your nearest road suspension bridge probably has cables bigger than this.
If you want to argue that it's impossible in practice, I'll point out that SpaceX's Starship first stage has a net thrust of 53 MN [3], and it does static fires (without the weight of the second stage on top) [4].
The space shuttle didn't do static fires because of the solid rocket boosters that would need to be teared down and reconstructed afterwards; not because it's physically impossible to hold it down.
For electronics without wireless functionality, it is allowed to self-certify. Anyone could also print whatever label they want on their products illegally (i.e. without doing the required paperwork to self-certify).
The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.
There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
People change their minds. Is that illegal? Maybe they had the intention to only be in the US temporarily at first, but now they'd like to get permanent residence. Why shouldn't they be able to apply for it, from the US, while still on the temporary visa?
Then the administration can say yes or no, in the same way that they can say yes or no to someone applying from abroad.
That's what formal verification is about. I did some (using PSL for hardware verification); writing the formal spec is way harder than the actual code. It will find a lot of subtle issues, and you spend a most of the time deciding if it's the spec or the code that's wrong.
Having the code-writing part automated would have a negligible impact on the total project time.
