Fair point, but i think procurement is a lot of the problem.

I've seen a few software contracts in private industry and if they are negotiated by people who couldn't build the thing in the first place, then they are almost universally shit because the people paying for it don't fully understand the requirements. I can build software and am in a good place to negotiate small projects because I understand what's involved. If you've never been involved in building a system on that scale then you aren't going to be able to even know what to ask for, then it's doubly bad because Oracle absolutely _has_ been involved in projects of that size and knows exactly how to protect itself.

Birmingham could have likely implemented this for less if they'd hired a bunch of developers and project managers to build it locally - and that would have the side effect of creating a good number of high paying jobs right in the community.

Especially in a wide far reaching project that's likely ill-defined. While I certainly don't mean to excuse Oracle's performance (and i have absolutely no knowledge of the system) with an overrun like this it's likely that parts of it weren't specified at all. I think the real travesty here is that city councils are being left to their own devices to make these kinds of contracts. Surely Birmingham's needs aren't meaningfully different from Glasgow and Manchester - if only there were an overarching government that could help develop one system for all large city councils to use.

Plus my utility in CO just cut the price of their 100% renewable offset by about 60% (because they are transitioning to 100% carbon free power, and they need to offset less now) and so my rate is actually lower than it was 2 years ago.

Even LLMs are great for just the morass of shitty business data. Like we get PDF orders from a bunch of our customers, they don't order enough or in a standard enough format to automate it properly but most of the time an LLM can digest that, match up the products and produce a result at least as well as a human can. There's just not much opportunity for it to go wrong, the product list is constrained, we also have it report out all the totals from the PDF so if the dollar amount doesn't add up we won't accept it. It's not solving the big business problems, but there are a lot of small problems where they can be really useful

Might actually solve the fentanyl crisis if it's more attractive to smuggle chips

This is pretty much a real life version of the "QA Engineer walks into a bar and orders -1 beers"

But presumably this AI system is creating order tickets and those do ultimately feed into supply chain stuff. I don't work in a taco field, but i've seen all kinds of weird knock on effects from people fat-fingering numbers on factory systems. I'm sure there's a process to go back and edit the order ticket to remove that number, but you have to ask yourself if a taco bell employee cares enough. They'll probably neither fill 1800 water cups nor edit the ticket - they'll just hand out one and laugh about it

Also it cost about $5.2M to build the plant, and it saves about $300k in annual fuel costs. The city got various grants to reduce their initial outlay, but it's a pretty long breakeven (plus they needed to replace the trucks with LNG variants, though I believe that they were already due for replacement anyway) Certainly it seems amazingly wasteful to just flare the methane from wastewater and landfill facilities, but maybe if we captures it at a larger scale the costs for that equipment would fall.

Longmont, CO uses the methane from their waste treatment plant to power most of their garbage trucks (and has done since 2019)

For a while the trucks drove around with "Powered by YOU!" banners on the side - they seem to have dropped that branding campaign

I've played with it a little and it's amazing. I submitted a photo when I was charging my car with no real words or signs. It clocked a Colorado license plate, a Wyoming plate, identified the charging station, then identified the red brick and blue awnings typical of a mid 2000s front range Walmart. It guessed I was one town over, but it's an honest mistake and I don't think I could have told the difference

Yeah I don't super understand this. Models have been getting better and more efficient for years and that only seems to benefit nvidia.

And really it did strike twice for nvidia - they were big winners in crypto mining as well.

I am a CS graduate and understand the tyranny of confirming that something is prime, but if you'd asked me to guess how long the longest known prime number was I think i'd have guessed more digits than that.

I'm in the opposite camp where it almost seems unremarkable. I realize the way exponents work and that is a VERY large number, but intuitively computers seem so fast and we have so many of them that the fact we've only been able to check 136,279,841 of them is surprising.

Yeah this is totally normal, and how my employer does it, but it does also have a significant early adopter advantage. It's pretty easy and cheap for the first 3rd of companies to go all-renewable because they can put a big pile of solar into the grid and draw out the same amount and ta-fucking-da, net-zero. Even if that does mean you are providing solar to someone else during the day and using "their" dirty coal power at night. On the one hand, this is great. Amazon invested billions in clean power and we should totally applaud that. On the other, perhaps they should be held to a higher standard because they can surely afford it - the next step needs to be getting to net-zero on an hourly basis by investing in storage, or maybe getting all the diesel vans off the road and brining on more electric ones.