> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
A Chinese nuke on the coast of Britain might be hard politically. Even if it's benign, you can bet the US will run an expensive campaign to discredit it in public opinion.
There's a special line crossed by a 100% Chinese owned floating nuclear power plant, as opposed to a 24% Chinese owned fixed in place nuclear power plant like the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station?
You wouldn't even need it to be Chinese owned. Just Chinese built and indemnified. Hell, I'd take a guarantee from a consortium of Chinese SoE banks over the U.S. government today. (I'm American.)
Europe is using lots of refrigerants like r600 (isobutane) and r290 (propane).
They work really well, with the downside they are very explosive. However stories of airconditioners blowing up are really rare - it seems the risk is probably worth it for the environment.
I've been recharging the AC system on my vintage daily driver — a late 1960s Mercedes-Benz sedan — with common off the shelf campstove propane for 30 years. Keeps me cool regardless of outside Los Angeles heat. Requires a bit of care while doing a recharge, but it's nothing too crazy. My grandfather ran a dairy farm in Connecticut, he showed me this trick in the 80s. We used propane to keep all the cooling equipment in the milk houses running smooth back then. I'm curious about isobutane now.
Propane, butane, etc. are not explosives. They are not going to just energetically decompose. They are combustible, but it turns out most things worth having on earth are combustible
Indeed - it is only explosive when it leaks out and mixes with air in the correct quantities. Unfortunately this happens occasionally - with the common case being someone trying to use a knife to get ice out of a freezer or AC which is frozen up and accidentally cutting into a pipe.
They're pretty explosive when they have the right mix with air. This can easily happen in, say, a utility closet with a water heater or air handler, or a fridge in a kitchen, etc.
A small leak on the outside unit probably isn't going to be a big risk. A small leak on a unit in a closet with stuff that sometimes makes small sparks...
I am sure if you ran a factory that worked with highly dangerous chemicals, safety mitigations that are basically 'we promise we're really trying our best, but shit happens' would not be acceptable.
And thankfully, those people wo do run these factories can and are obligated to do way better than that.
But the AI industry is not run by engineers. They pay engineers to do what they want, but the founders are hacks that are good at getting funding from investors and favors from government. That's why we don't see an engineering-oriented strategy in what they do.
Alternatively, they might train in a different manner than what you expect.
They might have determined that your canaries (whether it is a unique string, URL or similar) have a low signal-to-noise ratio and not worth following up.
Unless you provide more details, it's difficult to ascertain whether your conclusion is correct.
* Project exists
* New employees come up with idea for efficiency improvement
* Months spent implementing. Old codepath becomes legacy.
* New thing now has extra features bolted on during build.
* Efficiency of new thing turns out worse than original, but now the new features and 'less technical debt' are the drivers.
* New thing launches, old thing deprecated, but there is little real benefit to all those months of work.
reply