queenofcomplexity.bsky.social
Senior Software Engineer
87 posts
162 followers
885 following
Active Commenter
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We cannot change our past, but we can look critically at our present and work to shape a better future.
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I think we have the mathematical tools to argue for the efficacy and outcomes of interventions in these situations, and the people conducting the experiments are well-equipped to use them.
The demand should be for rigorous analysis, not “you must use this approach”. We are not in primary school.
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Have we some “explanation” or “reasoning” as to how instabilities are caused?
Could you explain how info is propagated across layers in your approach vs densenet in some more details over the conversation?
How do your approaches scale when we need to do RL on say LLMs?
2/2 (for now) Thanks again!
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Beautiful work, thank you for the overview!
I haven’t done RL work in half a decade — I thought delayed updates with exp moving average of target networks helped deal with these instabilities. I assume it’s not enough given your paper.
1/N
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If this is indeed it, then we have good reasons to be optimistic, no?
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Maybe I am just seeing things, but it looks like we are past the upper inflection point of the sigmoid.
Do we have sims of different scenarios?
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Don’t worry, scientists thought of that as well. There is a whole science of communicating with future people that don’t speak our language.
From hostile architecture, to death symbols.
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The very active isotopes of fast-breeder-reactor waste decay over 300 years and need containment.
The very inactive isotopes take thousands of years and are indistinguishable from background radiation. They pose a problem only when ingested or inhaled.
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So personally, if the choice was living close to a nuclear reactor or storage facility vs living next to a battery factory or a solar factory, I’d take my chances with the former.
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Your risk of developing cancer is hundreds of times higher tanning in the sun on a high UV day than living close to a containment facility.
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For fast breeder reactors, the half-life of the more active isotopes is 300 years, then it gaps to thousands of years for the longer dated ones.
The longer dated isotopes are so inactive they might as well be background radiation. In fact, for them to do damage they need to be ingested or inhaled.
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So the important thing to know is that longer lived isotopes are less dangerous than shorter dated isotopes. Inversely proportional actually [1].
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technet...
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The US does not recycle nuclear waste or use breeder reactors.
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It also implies not being dogmatic about particular solutions or fear mongering about things we don’t actually understand and shoving our head in the ground like ostriches.
It is in our best interest to think in 5 years, in 10, in 20, and in 50.
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That implies reducing waste, improving efficiency, reducing reliance on complex chains, funding sciences, math, physics, material science, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, computational sciences and so on.
7/8
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But because the constant supply chain issues reverberated across markets, resulted in difficult to predict outcomes, and threatened stability.
It follows then that the right thing to do to protect our society is reduce the fragility of the system.
6/8
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As much as I hate to say this, the cynic in me believes that we did not make the decision to go off oil not because of climate change leading animals to extinction and threatening ordinary population.
5/N
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It is integral to identify all the ways that said supply chains can go wrong, and ameliorate the situation. The oil crises are exemplars of this.
4/N
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of modern society.
It follows that any country that aims to think in decades about its own sovereignty should seek to minimize the effects of disruption on its supply chains.
Betting it all on any one particular technology is naive if not outright stupid, and when evaluating solutions, 3/N
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Just as we don’t know the future in sciences we don’t know the future in terms of geopolitics.
Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the aggression of CCP towards Taiwan, the Israeli and US war on Iran, the US’ unnecessary and myopic tarrifs exposed the fragility of the complex supply chains 2/N
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Nothing you have said around here is of substance.
Just assertions that can be dismissed with the same effort you spent writing them, and a “gotcha” that lost you any and all credibility.
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Of course your argument is also a whole lot of bullshit because you are not arguing in good faith here.
We seal the uranium and all fission products in lead contains that can withstand collisions with cars and don’t allow radiation to leak out.
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After breeder reactor processing, the waste is primarily fission products that decay to safe levels in 300-500 years, leaving only seven very long-lived isotopes (200,000+ year half-lives) at very low activity levels.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Nuclear is a far more stable and predictable source too. Contrast this with the issues that arise in dealing with over and under production, potential cascades due to lots of smaller power plants, limits or failures of energy storage, and all your “simplicity” arguments go out the window.
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Standard nuclear reactors are already a solved problem and we don’t need to care about complex supply chains or weather systems or integration of lots of moving pieces, nor do we care about batteries.
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Lmao.
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I am not even opposed to solar and renewables, I just find it fascinating how lay people got convinced that nuclear is not safe when we have all the data and numbers, when the tech pushes forward even without all the funding given to renewables, and that they are without their own sets of problems.
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bsky.app/profile/quee...
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The problem is not the plant, we have the know how in Europe for this.
The problem is the materials and entire supply chain.
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www.reuters.com/world/middle...
I should change my name to Cassandra
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It’s a not a matter of “complexity of implementation”, we have plenty of know how in Europe for this. It’s complexity in supply chain and integration.
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3. Technical Expertise: Shortage of qualified engineers and installers for large-scale projects
4. Supply Security: Geopolitical risks could disrupt access to critical materials
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Vulnerabilities
1. Processing Bottlenecks: China expected to control 90% of lithium metal anode production by 2025
2. Cost Disadvantage: Manufacturing costs 35% higher in Europe than China
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Solar Materials:
• China controls 80%+ of all solar panel manufacturing stages
• 97% of silicon wafers made in China
• 35% of polysilicon comes from Xinjiang region specifically
• Europe has only 11% of global polysilicon production capacity
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Battery Raw Materials:
• 67% of global lithium processing controlled by China
• 73% of cobalt and 70% of graphite processed by China
• 95% of manganese controlled by China
• 68% of cobalt refining capacity and 72% of lithium refining capacity in Chinese hands
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Some analysis on the supply chain for Batteries and solar:
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My problem is in the making part and in making the batteries.
For Europe to do that, it needs to import lots of materials from China among other countries.
I don’t want a Ukraine 2.0 where China holds a knife to our collective throats by threatening our supply chain for electricity.
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If this is all you have to say, then honestly I hate that I even bothered with you.
What a waste of my time.
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Please get your face out of your butt. If you don’t have anything useful to say stay out of the conversation.
My goal is having energy sovereignty across Europe, I don’t care how we get there, but I don’t see solar and batteries and whatnot as the right path for lots of reasons outlined around.
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The waste to power a big city via nuclear energy corresponds to the size of 3-4 battery packs.
Obviously we can’t power a city with 3-4 battery packs as batteries are far less energy dense than most forms of fuel.
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My issue mostly is that with renewables and batteries we lose our energy sovereignty and become dependent on complex electronics, making us far more susceptible to disruptions.
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Personally, i’d prefer to live next to a nuclear plant than a battery construction or disposal plant.
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And on top of that, nuclear decays across time, so the waste no longer becomes radioactive. Meaning even the waste stops being waste.
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The same waste to power a big city for a year corresponds to the size of 3-4 car battery packs.
It’s not even a comparison.
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It is so far more dense than battery waste, and safer to dispose as the end product is extremely dense. In Russia, out of 23 thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel accumulated in Russia – about 230 tons, less than 25 cubic meters.
That is about 3-4 large refrigerators.
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Including disposal. A single person’s nuclear waste is about a brick a year, of which about 5grams (or less than 2% of the weight of your phone, 2 Dimes in the US, or a teaspoon of water) is radioactive.
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Getting a baseline through nuclear reactors is a trivial way to massively reduce our reliance on non renewables until we have the technology and infrastructure to be energy sovereign, and that also means not attaching ourselves to technology developed by potentially hostile nations.
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A very distributed system will have very complex integration to deal with the variance that comes with changing weather patterns and variable production.