fullsquare

"what the fuck is exponential backoff" - someone writing software for these meters ten years ago

it's also made worse by the fact that many appliances are turned on in blacked out areas, so when these are brought online, there's spike in load power that then tapers off pretty quickly. this can be managed by powering on areas on in smaller chunks, as small as single blocks

this is PSA to turn off appliances off during blackout (biggest ones are things that deal with heat: mostly air conditioning/heat pump and all kinds of heaters)

also in Spain specifically some capacity was met by spinning generators from nuclear or hydro or gas powerplants, but also there's a lot of photovoltaic generation, which doesn't vary frequency with imbalances in load. after loss of power nuclear reactors that were running at that time are out for a day because of xenon poisoning, and it looks like first nuclear powerplant went online again only yesterday

maybe they'll update inverters in at least some of generating stations so that blackstart with PV assistance would be possible in future, because from what i understand most of these are grid-following inverters. this might require policy changes and tighter control of PV powerplant by grid operator. hydropower is most useful in starting from complete blackout condition because all power that is needed is just what it takes to turn valves + some communications and remote switching to make sure it goes to other powerplants

for now no one knows what really happened, but i do hope that investigation will allow for figuring out what went wrong and preventing similar failure in the future

it looks like Portugal had it even worse - their power generation dropped to zero (until 15:00), disconnected from Spain, started hydro and pumped hydro to bring up gas and wind power (22:00 to midnight), then solar, then when they figured their shit out connected to Spain again and lent them a couple gigawatts (bigger grids are more stable so it's good for both)

also they're talking about quadriyudillions of simulated people, yet openai has only advanced autocomplete ran at what, tens of thousands instances in parallel, and this already was too much compute for microsoft

apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don't want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action

ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever

i don't expect literally this but there's some potential hidden sleaziness inside

AI data centers brought some ratty bloggers into their five minutes of fame, while a boat only brought Ziz &co from Alaska to SFBA

if ethical concerns deterred promptfans, they wouldn't be promptfans in the first place

oppenheimer teaches all of us that even if you specifically learn arcane knowledge to devise a nazi-burning machine, you can still get fucked over by a nazi that chose to do office politics and propaganda instead

idk if i want agent orange to get a stroke because on one hand might just die but on the other hand the nonsense he speaks could just get more powerful

weirder thing is that blumenthal (american) uses british spelling, and russians (where british english was taught more commonly when it was relevant for them? i think?) used american spelling