A big threat for illustrators is not LLMs per se but slop acceptance. We've seen the same with machine translation - it was (and to some extent still is) worse than human translation but people accepted it because it's free. I recently seen and ad on a street which caught my attention - it was a photorealistic image of a taking off plane. It looked off and when I looked at details it's become clear it's AI generated - the 1st giveaway - stationary turbines on a flying plane, an angle relative to the runway is wrong, small details, especially in the background are off. Someone prompted LLM, seen the result and decided it's OK to print this advert. IMHO they would be better off with buying a stock image.
It's a good news but I didn't expect that coal is still on the 1st place and not really trending down. I though coal was largely replaced by gas years ago...
In 2025, renewables generated more energy globally than coal (neck and neck tie, but renewables just edged out coal). This trend is likely to continue.
Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.
You need a lot of batteries to store the energy needed overnight and you have to plan for (lots of) days without sun. At my latitude (45N) the difference in solar production between summer and winter is 5x. Even with batteries, you still need a backup for a week of bad weather; so you have to choose between increasing the solar production 20x to have enough power generated in cloudy days or have a backup coal/gas/something else plant.
In regions where winters are dark windy places tent to be not too far away. If both solar and wind both overbuild to the extent it makes sense (say 5x for solar and 2x for wind) and batteries cover a normal daily cycle you probably will need to burn gas on 10-20% of days which is not net zero but way way better than the current situation.
I don't get why people feel the need to just start lying when talking about renewables. It's probably a large reason why people are always skeptical of 'rewnewables are cheaper than x' claims.
They get built because their market has messed up pricing for providing generation capacity, far in excess of the need for capacity. So the coal plants get built, and not used much.
In particular, they are replacing coal plants meant for baseload with newer and far more efficient coal plants meant for more intermittent use, but that amount of use will go down drastically in coming years as cheaper batteries and renewables flood the grid.
There's also a smattering of coal plants being built elsewhere in the world, but that's usually due to corruption in the process of regulatory approval. It's far easier to hide bribes in large coal plants than it is in tons of small renewables projects.
Edit: and I just realized that I was only talking about developing countries with those corruption accusations; I'd heard of many such instances in places such as Africa and India. But now I guess I must add the US to the list. We don't know what payments are going on behind the scenes because of Trump's cryptocurrency, but undoubtedly that's a big part of these new coal generators too.
Is it cheaper per MW of generated power? I thought that the main reason use of gas has increased so much (for power generation) over the past 20-30 years is that gas became cheaper.
It depends on the region. The US has shale gas which is genuinely cheaper than coal. Europe doesn't want to use coal for political reasons. China and India barely use gas since it can't compete with coal.
Gas prices vary across the world, mostly depending on if it's only LNG imports (high prices) or local sources (much cheaper, e. g. the US) or a mix (e. g. Europe but since 2022 it's heavy reliant on LNG which pushes prices up). Coal prices also vary. Guess we cannot compare gas and coal prices globally, only withing a specific region.
I'm noticing some decline of skills I don't practice regularly and LLM is just one of reasons why one stops practicing. Switching to another area of work gives a comparable decline. If you want sharp skills you have to use them.
True. People don't do it though, because keeping skills sharp and using them takes effort, and we have a predisposition to be as efficient as possible with how we spend our effort; if there's an easier way to do it in our awareness, we will naturally gravitate towards that. LLMs are often a universal crutch or swiss-army-knife that significantly take away workload for many abstract tasks, so all kinds of atrophy in abstract thinking is to be expected.
However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it. I wonder if the same is true for skills; in that case, some kind of regiment where you still use the skill you delegate once a week or so could maybe help with avoiding this loss of skill for most part.
“ However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it”
No.. this depends on how much muscle you have. The appropriate comparison is mass and density of knowledge/understanding vs muscle. There’s not a chance in hell you will retain mass and dense muscle without pushing the body hard. Just in the same way you will not retain very deep understanding of things unless a) you’ve been reciting it for over 10 yrs b) you go back and push the understanding continuously for it to remain as part of your being
Building muscle is much harder than maintaining muscle.
And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before.
It's pretty comparable to skills. You don't need to practice as hard to maintain a skill than you do to build it. And if you let the skill atrophy, it's much easier to recover the skill compared to building it from scratch.
> And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before.
This very much depends on age. I went on statins about 18 months, which destroyed about 15lbs of muscle over the course of a year (160->145). Along with that muscle loss came about a halving or more of the weights I could lift in any given exercise. I interpreted the "do you have any weakness on this medication" question as inability to function levels of weakness, it wasn't until I showed my training logs to my physician that she asserted that I was having weakness.
It's been a year since I went off them and I'm still lifting barely what I could in high school. I'm exploring some different training plans, but AFAIK, there isn't much research into if different weight/volume breakdowns work better for older guys.
I’ve got 20 inch lean arms - I know far more about muscle building and retention than you. I train just as hard to maintain them as I did to get them there.
The people who say “oh it’s easy to maintain” LOL it’s easy to maintain 16 inch arms.
Chiming into this little tiff to say I think bulk muscle is a bad analogy in the first place. It’s more akin to a muscle memory/skill. Something like golf is a better analogy. If you took any golfer, at any level, and had them refrain from golfing for 3 years. I feel pretty confident asserting they would all perform worse than they had. Their skill is diminished.
They would also likely get that skill back faster than a brand new golfer.
I noticed it myself with cycling. Took 8 years off the bike, when I started up again I was nearly back to my old FTP in about 2 months despite starting from basically zero. Muscle memory is real, where I am now as a returning cyclist would take a pure beginner cyclist at least 4+ months to get to, fitness wise.
That said, you do have to work somewhat hard to maintain. With cycling, just 2 weeks off the bike is enough to see a VO2 max drop of anywhere from 4 to 7%. After just 4 weeks, your glycogen storage capacity decreases and you start rapidly losing fitness. After 2 months, you are basically now out of shape.
Detraining happens faster than most people think. And therein lies the danger with over reliance on LLMs for your cognitive skills. Detraining there happens just as fast, skills atrophy in a matter of weeks, not months or years.
People could also regain some cognitive skill back rather fastr when they worked to regain it. But the issue is, many people just lack the motivation to do so. If you golf or cycle, it's likely a passion or hobby. Most people don't view their cognitive health this way, they view it as work. It's why most people don't read much after their schooling, learning and being smart was only ever an ends to a means (diploma, job, money, etc).
I think part of the problem is also that many people simply work too hard or have too much going on in their lives to have any kind of cognitive energy left for this sort of maintenance work, even when they reason/plan that it is useful. This also seems to be encouraged somehow (by society?), to keep going like a freight train, or maybe it doesn't get discouraged enough (i.e. it doesn't get recognized as a problem).
My experience as a parent to an only-child has shown me there's just zero boredom or tolerance of boredom. Any pause or void needs to be filled with something. Any time my son says "I'm bored" my default response has become "awesome", "you're lucky", "I wish I had time to be bored" along with other quips like "boredom is a life skill". Of course, I see this same phenomenon in adults as well. So my rebuttal is that most people have much more free time than they think, it's just a matter of prioritization.
To maintain the muscle you have, you only need about 1/3rd of your normal workouts. It can be retained with 1-2 workouts per week. I imagine the same would be for something you've learned. If you've already put in the effort to learn it, reviewing it ~1x per week is probably enough. During the accumulation phase though - whether it be muscle or learning a new skill - once a week is definitely not enough.
Yes, this is my experience for muscle at least. I used to work out 3-4 times a week, maybe a little more sometimes. Lately due to circumstances, I've been doing smaller workouts about 1-2 times a week. I've lost some finesse, but my muscle mass has remained roughly the same.
Also like some people hinted at this in sibling threads, I think it's different between purely abstract skills, and skills that involve muscle memory. For instance, I could probably stop using my bicycle for a very long time, and still not unlearn how to use it, or learn it again really quickly. Maybe it is because abstract skills are inherently more complex and require more cognitive effort and connections to knowledge overall, and are therefore more fragile.
TUI returns what GUI lost over the last decades - low latency, low RAM/CPU usage, ability to navigate without a mouse. No one seems to be building nice GUI apps anymore.
IMHO peak GUI was in 2000s - on Windows most app used Win32 API and apps which followed "Microsoft Windows User Experience" guide had consistent UI/UX. Since then Microsoft introduced many competing frameworks to create GUI all look slightly different and UX is less consistent too. And then Electron come which brought inconsistency of web to the desktop apps.
That is very rose-tinted view of the era. In reality in early 00s lots of software had their own wacky UI toolkits. MS Office is of course the most notable example, but also iirc all of Adobe/Macromedia or every 3d modeling (Lightwave, Maya etc) and audio production software. In the enterprise realm people were doing Java AWT (and later Swing) UIs. And then there were the classics like WinAmp with its iconic theme support, or Mozilla with XUL (and themes).
>Unfortunately, they often lack what we gained over the last decades. Namely navigating with a mouse
For those workflows (as opposed, to say, Photoshop), we could do without that. That's the whole benefit.
>and being self-explanatory and same-y.
GUIs are quite less same-y that TUI. Not to mention the same app GUI can be widely different between 2010 and 2026, whereas any TUIs from 1990s I still use look and work the same.
Nobody ever got fired for buying I̵B̵M̵ AWS. Most corporations already use AWS, used to its legal terms and accepted the risk. Any new provider will be scrutinised by legal more than an existing one.
Models on Bedrock can have different and additional terms and conditions, there's even variety within the same provider for some of them. The Anthropic ones certainly have their own EULA. It's a bit frustrating because ideally it should be a known legal status, but in fact it still needs legal review if you're doing anything interesting.
this..it doesnt really matter whats on the contract they all sell same things. in enterprise things just should not get u sacked :p then it workks perfectly.
I'm personally was fine with contributing to open-source without any financial reward. But I'm reluctant to release anything in public now because it will be eventually incorporated into the training set for the technology which will (or at least can) lave me without a job and chances to find one.
A significant job loss will trigger a deep recession which will eventually hit most AI customers so they will have too few customers to be profitable. The best (for AI business) scenario is when productivity is increased without mass unemployment.
The problem is that many companies which had reasonable leadership in the past with the advent of LLM AI started to make rushed (and dubious from my point of view) decisions - using token usage to evaluate an employee performance is just one of them.
It's hard to separate impact of workers being replaced by AI from an impact of a recession (or stagnation). It's not obvious how AI impacts employees with various experience: on one hand a senior is better at spotting AI hallucination one other hand a junior using AI can do much more than a junior was able to do a couple years ago for a lower (if adjusted for inflation) than a couple years ago salary.
What is the current market sentiment? Share of EVs is slowly rising so having a good motor as important as ever.
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