Cranston accepted Shapps was wrong to describe Naumenko as a friend of Putin, but said it was “excusable political hyperbole”.
Um… I wouldn’t dismiss it as “excusable”. The fact that he’s not friends with Putin is the whole point. It feels really weird to comment in favor of a Russian oligarch, but come on. Justice is more important, and this doesn’t seem fair.
There is such thing as collective responsibility. He lives in Russia, pays taxes in Russia, they go in support of war. Yes, it is unfair to him, but unfairness is the fact that he was born in Russia, he is Russian citizen, and it is Russian government actions that triggered everything.
And they are absolutely correct: the leadership of the EU and it’s component nations choosing to do all they can to hinder an autocracy which invaded a different, democratic, nation, is absolutelly a political choice.
Just like Iran’s leadership’s choice to provide such an aggressor autocracy all support that they can in their invasion is also an absolutelly political choice.
Neither is news, nor is the once again demonstrated hypocrisy of Iran’s despots.
Once you actually read the articles you’ll see that China’s coal use is in fact in line with the goal. Meanwhile, renewable and nuclear capacity in China is growing at breakneck speed while the rest of the world is doing jack shit. Anybody claiming that China isn’t doing their part is deeply intellectually dishonest.
The watermark would likely be comprised of a few different methods to embed marker pixel sets that would be difficult/impossible to see in addition to ones that are visible. Think printed currency. I’m not saying there won’t be an arms race to circumvent it like drm, or bad actors who counterfeit it, but the work should be done to try to ensure some semblance of reliability in important distributed content.
LLMs choose words based on probabilities, i.e. given the word “blue”, it will have a list of words and probabilities that those words should follow “blue”. So “sky” would be a high probability, “car” might also be quite high, as well as a long list of other words. The LLM chooses the words not by selecting whatever has the highest probability, but with a degree of randomness. This has been found to make the text sound more natural.
To watermark, you essentially make this randomness happen in a predefined way, at least for cases where many different words could fit. So (to use a flawed example), you might make it so that “blue” is followed by “car” rather than “sky”. You do this throughout the text, and in a way that doesn’t affect the meaning of the text. It is then possible to write a simple algorithm to detect whether this text was written by an AI, because of the probability of different words appearing in particular sequences. Because its spread throughout the text, it’s quite difficult to remove the watermark completely (although not impossible).
So I can’t stand it when people do the “reeeee” thing either, but this one kind of bugs me.
$11.4 billion in savings per year for 332 million people averages to $34 per year.
Here is a typical electric water heater. Cost: $439. Here is one with a heat pump installed as described in the article. Cost: $1,909 - a difference in price of $1,470.
At $34 per year, this water heater would have to last 43 years before any cost savings from the efficiency gains would be realized. I don’t know if you know much about water heaters, but this won’t happen by a long shot.
Gas units fare similarly, with typical units verses high efficiency units’ price differential.
It’s hard to be a homeowner these days. This will make it harder. I can accept it in the name of efficiency gains and saving the planet and all that, but the whole “this will save consumers money,” bit is pure gaslighting. It’s not true. This will cost consumers quite a lot of money.
Claiming there's savings just isn't true in reality. If they came out and said it's to help reduce energy consumption to save the planet I'd be all in, and I'm still in for this, but it just makes it hard to fully support with the gaslighting as you aptly put.
Part of the problem is that most people who would need convincing of this will immediately turn away as soon as they hear “save energy” or “save the planet” as they see these efforts as nuicanses and a vie for control. The second you frame it as “what’s in it for you,” they immediately start to listen. Look at what happened with solar panels once they crossed the magic threshold of affordability and actually functioned as a cost saving method. A third of the houses in my neighborhood have them installed now. The only reason I don’t is because I’m currently paycheck to paycheck, and my local power company is also doing a killer job of sourcing solar and other renewables.
It would be nice if they occasionally spent time making and enforcing stuff like this for the 7 or 10 corporations that cause most of the climate change problem. Asking all the citizens to spend and extra $1000 when they replace their water heater is just limate change theater.
I think you maybe responded to the wrong person or didn’t respond to the OP. My post was about how to convince people to buy in, whereas yours seems to be focused on the big businesses and how they’re not being held to the same standard. Though, the overlap here is basically what I originally said: frame it as cost-savings for the businesses or something else in it for them and they’ll start doing it with or without regulation.
reuters.com
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