"So, what about that hourly wage discrepancy?"
Well, I don't know, since it's in your title, it seems you asked the AI and their reply was that the male employee had more experience. Obviously that answer didn't satisfy you, did you at least verify that it was true, if yes, why not say it?
But I suppose people would click less if the title was "AI Store Manager Paying Employees less depending on their experience, Can't Stop Ordering Candles".
Could it be that the AI is biased and sexist? Absolutely, but it seems weird to make vague accusations without verifying anything.
I wouldn't qualify "These commitments appear to rely on offsetting carbon emissions rather than decarbonizing directly" as greenwashing, although it is indeed a bit misleading.
98% of all recent environmental claims and commitments from the world’s largest meat and dairy companies can be categorized as “greenwashing”, or intentionally misleading
The claim that "ExampleCo will be net zero by 2028" is intentionally misleading if it's going to be an accounting trick rather than an actual real reduction in emmissions within ExampleCo's footprint.
That's aside from many of the carbon offset schemes being bandied about really don't bear much in the way of close scrutiny. The "all talk and ineffectual action" in carbon offsetting is classic greenwashing though, surely?
It’s really only “misleading” to the extent that any offset/credit scheme is also misleading. Inherent in the words “net zero” is the fact that emissions will continue, but the claim is that something else will be done to make the total effect the same as if zero emission occurred.
It’s no more misleading than “my net income was $X” is misleading because my gross income was $X + $Y.
What could "net zero" possibly mean other than "zero as a matter of accounting"? I definitely think meat and dairy companies should reduce emissions to the extent that they can, but you're not going to convince the cows to stop burping. If you accept the premise that people are going to keep on eating animal products (I'm aware that the authors may not!), offsets are the only option.
Could be a language thing, I'm Australian and that quote from my comment in full was
if it's going to be an accounting trick
My intenty there was to distinguish between "net zero as a matter of legitimate above board easy to follow accounting that can be audited (and pass)" and "net zero via a smoke and mirrors accounting deception with a few divide by zeros and some of the same logic from the proof that 1==2".
> but you're not going to convince the cows to stop burping.
Well, no - but you / we can introduce kangaroo gut biota to cows.
"Overall, renewables and nuclear together met nearly 60% of the growth in energy demand".
That's not enough. It's obvious this is going in the right direction but adoption is still too slow, considering how cheap renewables are now (and will be).
Read it carefully. The growth in renewables exceeded the growth in electricity demand. The 60% figure is all forms of energy.
Stated another way, we could (hypothetically) stop building coal and gas fired electrial generation and we'd still have enough renewable growth to cover electrical needs.
There's certainly room to start offsetting non-electrical power usage, but that's a different ball game entirely. I'd be pretty happy if we got to a point where only transportation ran on oil. To do that, we need enough renewables to both offset growth (done) and to start shutting down non-renewable generation. Even if we did nothing, those plants have a usable service life of < 100 years so we're within a human lifetime of not needing them anymore.
It's even better than this appears, because normally a Joule of electrified work replaces 2 to 4 Joules of fossil fuel. And electrification tends to happen on the less efficient processes first.
The problem is also, that solar infrastructure is vulnerable to some of the attack vectors of climate change. The torrent downpours we see now in the us and in Europe - especially in mountainous regions are endangering the traditional valley cities in the hinterlands- the biggest consumer of solar.
Cost is no longer the barrier as today even the upfront cost of solar is competitive against upfront cost for building coal or gas power plant. While there is no cost of fuel for solar. In China and India even solar + battery is cheaper than new coal power plants.
New electricity generation has been 90% clean for a few years now and solar the biggest part of it for 3 or 4 years. This new landmark is about energy.
That's good progress but it does raise some new cost barriers to get over for each new thing we electrify.
EVs are over this hump, heat pumps replacing boilers are just about there. Some industrial uses are getting there.
Notably, in electricity renewables went through being cheaper than new build and reduced further in cost to being cheaper than running existing plants.
We're not quite at that stage for many electrification use cases, though for growing nations without lots of existing assets that's not as relevant.
A recent Danish research[1] found that the cheapest energy mix (that includes system costs like energy storage) right now for them is offshore wind power (66%), natural gas CCGT (26%), and solar PV (8%). Solar panels are cheap, but their system cost is the highest.
I know most people here hate that, but I think this makes a much stronger case for security by obscurity (not releasing the source code) in these changing times.
Of course security by obscurity by itself is by no mean sufficient.
In the 90's most software was closed source but cracks/trainer were always available.
Even for Rayman that had multiple (26?) cd-check during the game.
Security is mainly slowing the attacker because there's a maximum amount of stuff a human can do in 24hours. But now if you can simulate thousands of human attacking a system in different ways, it will crack.
Just like many stores have lock on their doors and, insurance if someone breaks the lock.
I'm guessing data security insurance will become a huge market in the years to come.
Aren't we in agreement then? Taking your lock analogy again, people don't put locks on their bikes because they protect them completely, but because they slow down someone who wants to steal them.
Given enough resources everything will be cracked, it doesn't mean that making it harder is useless.
People cracking games in the 90's may not have had the source code but they had the machine code and knew what to look for and where.
I absolutely assume that project owners will use LLM tools to protect themselves, but it seems like it whoever spends more will find more security issues. And potentially a malicious actor could decide to spend more tokens on one specific part of the program, while the owner has to protect everything.
I think with open source the idea is that there are more eyes looking at the potential problems, and more of those eyes are benevolent, but LLM change that as it's not about the number of people but whoever is ready to spend the most resources.
Or they could check if the source is open source and available on the internet, and if yes refuse to analyse it if the person who request the analysis isn't affiliated to the project.
That will still leave closed source software vulnerable, but I suspect it is somewhat rare for hackers to have the source of the thing they are targeting, when it is closed source.
Of course just having the hash of the file wouldn't work, they would have to do something more complicated, a kind of perceptual hash. It's not easy, but I think it is doable.
But then I suspect lots of parts in a closed source project are similar to open source code, so you can't just refuse to analyze any code that contains open source parts, and an attacker could put a few open source files into "fake" closed source code, and presumably the llm would not flag them because the ratio open/closed source code is good. But that would raise the costs for attackers.
But that would accelerate the vehicle's depreciation, which is costly. I suspect it would make more financial sense to have a home battery, they should have compared the prices of home batteries vs car batteries.
And for the national grid effects, just charging your vehicle when electricity prices are the lowest would have mostly the same effect but would be a lot simpler.
In a lot of cases the battery lasts longer than the rest of the car, so wearing out the battery a little bit quicker might not affect the cars lifetime. People are getting 200,000 - 250,000 miles out of their batteries. Many cars wear out before that time, especially in parts of the country with winter and salt.
If there is a net benefit for both the vehicle owner and the utility, the utility should pay the owner. A school district bought battery electric school buses with a subsidy from the utility on the purchase price.
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