There is no such thing as the Renaissance Fund. Quanta receives funds from the Simons Foundation... I also don't know where you get it from that Renaissance Technologies is heavily invested in AI. Any sources to back up your claims because I suspect you made all that up?
Exactly. I work in retail and we have ONE guaranteed day off each year: Christmas Day. (And a lot of retail employees don't have even this!) And until recently, I never got holiday pay either.
I can access court decisions just fine and I'm not in the US, so no. It's not.
The chances are not very high that you are well-versed in how all the other countries in the world work. Whenever you think something is unique, it is quite likely that you will be wrong.
I'll go first, and you can match me. Here are several hundred court case dockets over the last 1.5 years or so related to one man.[1] Please provide court dockets for some relative number from your country of choice. Not selected documents: ANY document must be accessible from ANY docket.
I'd say Brazil is your best bet, I'd go with that. We'll wait.
Alternatively, we can explore your excuses on why you cannot. That's also a fun part of this conversation, exploring various national indoctrination systems around their lack of access to their courts. They are usually very different from the United States'.
It's always weird to see people go from "it's not true" to "it's true and it's a good thing" and repeat the government line.
People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated. I feel like you are doing the same. Sometimes nuclear is a good fit, sometimes renewables is a good fit, sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit. Most of the time a mix is the best fit. It depends on what you are optimizing for and what is geographically, (geo)politically and economically possible. All these systems are then built using assumptions, sometimes those assumptions no longer make sense after a certain period of time and sometimes you just temporarily or permanently have to adapt to the changes in the environment. This is an unusual but expected scenario for the nuclear plants along the Danube.
Nuclear makes sense in arctic areas, I’m struggling to see the benefits of real nuclear over renewable plus storage as it’s more expansive and takes decades, even before the cleanup costs.
I'm not really opposed to nuclear power politically. I just think it's a non-starter given the much higher cost, complexity of buildout and lack of reliability.
Storage of energy in the dimensions required for weeks with almost no wind is an unsolved problem. Right now, we can't store enough to make it through a single night without using fossil fuels. Most countries don't even have the capacity to store the energy for a single hour.
Geothermal and storage is worth investing in, investing in nuclear is not. NPPs are simply too expensive and you won't find investors unless you heavily subsidize it with tax money. Only compnies willing to invest in NPPs are those with virtually free money: the handful of AI big tech giants.
We're building the factories to make them as fast as we can find investors with money to spend on them, because they're already cheaper than fossil fuels which are themselves cheaper than nuclear.
As we can store fossil fuels for weeks of demand, we can store the required energy in chemical form, no? Germany has huge natural gas storage, for ezample.
Iceland is a small area, small population outlier literally sitting on two plates rubbing up against each other and a relative excess of active volcanism and large lava fields.
About 85 percent of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Use of abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power has made Iceland the world's largest electricity producer per capita.
Countries like UK, Ireland, Germany, Danmark, Netherland, Poland also have dark winters. Solar in winter is only about a fifth of production in summer months.
Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.
Those places also have a huge wind resource in the form of the North Sea, for Ireland whatever the other bits of that submerged continental shelf are called, and for Poland the Baltic: https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
This is important because wind season anti-correlates with PV season.
Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further. Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
> Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further.
Not for the combination of [continent-wide, offshore, the Atlantic coast].
The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic.
Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.
> Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
Also false. The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.
Also, independently of batteries, hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage. Of these, only generation requires an associated upstream supply and watershed; storage can be done with a hole in the ground, of which there are plenty, and just the currently and soon-to-be closed coal mines in the EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage: https://gfzpublic.gfz.de/rest/items/item_5038282_1/component...
And it's not like we can't dig more holes if we wanted to, we dig holes to get out rocks even though rocks are one of the cheapest things you can buy.
> The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic.
How do you transmit the power? Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it?
> Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.
That reduces the storage requirements a bit, but there is not nearly enough offshore. And offshore is expensive. That's why it's getting harder to find investors.
> The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.
That doesn't prove it's possible, but makes it even harder to get the required quantities.
> hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage
Hydro requires the right geography. Is there any potential for hydro left in central Europe?
> EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage
Max comment nesting reached. Instead of going through your response one by one, let me just say one thing: the premise and promise of the whole energy transition are based on studies that completely underestimated the physical and engineering challenges in practice. That's why we are where we are. Energy costs have gone up; CO2 emissions have not. I wouldn't believe any study before it has been implemented at scale, at least in a region or small country.
> Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it?
They can sell the power, you know. This already happens.
> That reduces the storage requirements a bit, but there is not nearly enough offshore.
It more than covers it.
Even a Dunkelflaute period is reduced, not zero, output. Those seas are huge, and the normal wind there is fast; even on a continental-shelf-spanning Dunkelflaute (much rarer than "just Germany and Poland"), the capacity in those waters *even with that reduction* is more than EU demand just by itself, which in practice means "not building as much as possible".
> And offshore is expensive. That's why it's getting harder to find investors.
Compared to onshore wind. But even offshore wind is cheaper than new-build nuclear, coal, and has strong overlap with new CCGT.
Even then, it's not hard to find investors: the US went as far as banning it because the investors were actually happy to invest.
The limitation on investors right now is that we're transitioning faster than any previous energy transition before, while also having other things to also invest in. It's like how big tech in the US is running out of people to get money from to spend on data centres, the limit isn't actually building them, it's how fast they're getting built when your answer to "how many would you like to order?" is "yes".
> That doesn't prove it's possible, but makes it even harder to get the required quantities.
The fact that EVs are for sale, however, does.
> Hydro requires the right geography. Is there any potential for hydro left in central Europe?
I thought you might say something like that, *which is why I literally wrote what I wrote*:
people often mix up: generation, and storage. Of these, only generation requires an associated upstream supply and watershed; storage can be done with a hole in the ground, of which there are plenty
And then linked you to a document, with a quote from that document, about using coal mines. The document you replied to with doubts, supports the conclusion you've just denied.
Also, I already saw all of Tom Scott's videos when they were new. As per the document:
Finally, the realisable potential includes projects that are not only technically and economically feasible but also aligned with regulatory, environmental, social and implementation timelines, facilitating their implementation within short to medium time frame.
The following table shows that in total 2264 installations have been identified in the EU ETS to be power plants, which have reported emissions in at least one year since 2005. The fuel of 1440 power plants have been identified. Of this there are 124 lignite power plants, 284 hard coal power plants and 2 power plants using blast furnace gas. There are 57 power plants using oil products. The majority of the plants uses natural gas (858 plants). About 824 plants have not been matched to a fuel yet.
Agreed, whenever I hear someone say "we need more/less nuclear and less/more solar/wind", I hear "let's burn more fossil fuels while we uselessly split hairs".
Yeah I care that they aren't invested in fossil, and the question of which renewable to invest in far, far down my list of concerns, to the point where it's not really worth discussing.
A lot like how when I'm starving to death I'm not really interested in a debate on whether I should have ice cream or cake.
Unless the scenario is totally different where you live, pro-nuclears are mainly "we need more nuclear, less rerewables, don't care about fossils, just guaranteed production", while pro-renewables are mainly "we need more renewables, less or no fossils and as few nuclear as possible".
If someone is getting wiped from the mix because of renewables, it is coal and fuel, not nuclear.
The point they are making is that climate change will further push these conditions, so are we willing to build more nuclear power plants, knowing that by the time they are ready to go online this problem will be worse? Or better to invest in renewables which can be implemented today and will alleviate this problem? A mix of both with heavy majority of renewables and nuclear/fossil only to guarantee baseloads seems like the best idea to me.
Disagree, it's just that the safe level is around 0.1% of current use (though I don't just mean use of fossil fuels for electricity, I mean *everything*).
Yes: the way we should think about that is that we do things like switch to trains and BEVs so we can afford to continue running airplanes while synthetic fuels are being put into production.
It's not going to reduce any time soon. Either way the reality is that sometimes fossil fuel power plants make sense, that's why they're still being built.
It's unsafe so it's never a good fit? That kind of reasoning is just noise. Unsafe for what? Compared to what? What alternatives, given the constraints, exist?
Finding something ideologically inconvenient doesn’t make it noise. There is simply no level of new carbon emissions which isn’t guaranteed to cause expensive problems around the world. That doesn’t mean we can’t switch everything instantly but that means we shouldn’t be building anything new which has a safe alternative — and in the case of electric power generation or cars, that’s especially clear because burning fossil fuels for that is more expensive so you’re paying extra to pollute more.
I don't find it ideologically inconvenient, I just don't think it's a realistic take. There are situations for power generation where fossil fuels are the only viable alternatives hence why I mentioned them. Now if you had infinite resources and infinite money then that's probably not true, but we don't live in a world like that.
but it's somewhat risky, since if the power goes out in winter, to first order, everyone dies. I think you'd always keep the generator on at low load, just in case.
Note that wind turbines at pole have not historically been very successful, maybe that will improve.
I presume the optimal solution is solid oxide fuel cells + renewables. Not complete science fiction, but not quite ready to do away with the diesel backup.
Everyone is politically motivated on this subject, and that's a good thing, because this is a political decision by default, where the "political" is comprised of is, the voting citizens. We can't let decisions like these be taken by unelected technocrats alone.
I'm not filled with joy about my chav ("redneck") neighbours weighing in on nuclear vs solar and climate change and national and international energy markets and power distribution...
I don't have a clue either. Don't ask for my vote on how to power a country. Take my taxes and use them to listen to experts
Very few things are purely technical decisions. In this case, it’s about centralized vs. distributed electricity generation (or freedom vs. dependence if you want to state it that way). One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
Edit: I don’t understand how you get from „political decision“ to „state violence“. Politics are at play at all levels of civilization where actors have different goals, from your dinner table and your company Slack to democratic institutions.
> One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
I almost hesitate to ask, do you think that is the centralised or decentralised option?
And, more directly, that is a bad theory. The billionaires will make money either way. It doesn't make a lot of difference to them as a class. They'll have an inclination to the cheaper form of energy because more energy -> more economy -> more money for them.
>In this case, it’s about centralized vs. distributed electricity generation (or freedom vs. dependence if you want to state it that way).
The venn diagram between people who act like renewables are "freeing" (which make no mistake, they absolutely could be) and the people who advocate nonstop for government management of how they are deployed is too close to a circle for me to take such commentary seriously.
>One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
Ah, yes, billionares. Famous for not getting a cut when I buy a plug in solar panel from my preferred e-commerce site or big box store. /s
The billionares have their money in everything. They get a cut of everything. You're just changing who gets the cut. And even if no billionaire is getting a cut, a publicly traded/owned investment bank or other corporate interest that would replace them is not really any less evil.
>: I don’t understand how you get from „political decision“ to „state violence“. Politics are at play at all levels of civilization where actors have different goals,
By not gaslighting myself into thinking politics is anything other than the process of deciding where, when and how state violence is applied.
What backs up all those decisions other than credible threat of violence?
> people who act like renewables are "freeing" ... and the people who advocate nonstop for government management
Where did the person you are replying to even hint at that? I think this may be your own prejudice spilling out here.
> The billionares have their money in everything. They get a cut of everything. You're just changing who gets the cut.
Oh ok, I guess let's just accept this as is forever. Any attempt to try to improve this situation is futile and stupid (for example, as said, making it more difficult for them)
>What backs up all those decisions other than credible threat of violence?
I don't know, do you only act in fear of the threat of violence from the state? In democracies politicians are legitimized by their voters, what you are describing sounds more like an autocracy.
> People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated.
If you can spend a Dollar only once, you might end up with renewables. People can be economically motivated too. No reason to draw politics in an already heated discussion.
The project was first teased by Musk in early 2026 and officially announced on March 21, 2026 during a special event at the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in Austin, Texas [1][2]
Agree. But it was clearly recklessness, given they've have a history of similar issues in the past, they literally ran these sort of tests on 3rd party infrastructure while knowing what the risks were (alternatively, didn't evaluate the risks beforehand so they didn't even think this could happen), and didn't sufficiently isolate something that can clearly impact others and the public.
Had this been a chemical, virus or some other regulated thing, we'd be seeing people going to jail over this. But given LLMs are still fairly dumb and doesn't yet seek world domination or the downfall of humanity, this is apparently OK and entertainment instead.
Well a chemical spill has victims. Whether this incident has a victim is up for debate. From my vantage point (and presumably OP's) HF as a foundational institution in the US AI industry stands to gain a lot more from successful doom marketing than they lose from, what? A dozen devs having to respond to an incident?
If they could know going in that there would be a net gain for HF in this incident, then it really nullifies the distinction between "recklessness" and "intention" on OpenAI's part. It's no coincidence they chose a target in their own industry with hundreds of personal relationships between them. It's not like they hacked into an Indonesian bank or something.
