There is nothing wrong with drawing on the values that a text carries without necessarily agreeing with it in its entirety. This quote captures the point of the post above quite well.
First you say owning a car is a cultural norm, then you say it should be changed by legislation. I'm afraid it is really hard to change culture with law.
That's true. I already know every bit of my city, I have visited almost all museums, walked almost every street. If I have the opportunity to do the same elsewhere, I will.
That attitude is the exact reason roads in the U.S. are much less safe. Cars are oversized, heavy and completely lethal for any pedestrians or cyclists. It's just a very dangerous trend that will cause more people to die.
But there isn't such a thing as a raw model, is it? In order to receive anything from a language model it has to 'learn' some objective. And this objective has to be imposed from above.
It is true that the problem of storing energy exists in both cases, but as far as I understand with renewables you lose reliability (in comparison to nuclear power).
Electricity demand does fluctuate, but so does supply from renewables. I think it is easier to store excess power than to deal with power shortage in case of bad weather.
Germany is now a net exporter of energy, but is going to become a net importer precisely because of nuclear phase-out. As described in the IEAs report [0]:
"The government expects it can meet future generation needs after the nuclear and plannedncoal phase-outs with additional renewables capacity, energy efficiency measures and increased imports (given an estimated 80 GW to 90 GW of overcapacity regionally) (Eckert, 2019). However, Germany’s switch from a net exporter of electricity to a net importer will also have implications for regional power generation adequacy."
"The phasing out of the three large, baseload nuclear power plants will increase Germany's need to import electricity from its neighbors. At the same time, all available scenarios show that as a result of the (almost) simultaneous phasing out of the coal units, Germany will transform itself from an exporter to a net importer of energy as early as the mid-2020s. Adding spice to the matter is the fact that the country is particularly dependent on importing energy from France, which obtains three-quarters of its energy from nuclear power plants. Without the widespread availability of electricity from France, Germany's Atomausstieg would not be possible."[0]
Europe needs stable, centralized and long-term source of energy. Neither solar nor wind power fulfills these requirements.
The main goal should be to abandon coal and gas power plants as quickly as possible, and Germany showed that it is very hard / impossible without nuclear power.
GPT surely isn't the end, but rather the start of "intelligent" language models. At this time it's hard to decide whether we can make a model that will be truly super intelligent, or we are already approaching some kind of limit.
As I understand from the article, the author argues that designation of national parks and reserves distracts people from the main problem, which is unsustainable everyday life.
I disagree, because preservation of the most valuable landscapes is an immediate action that is relatively easy to do. It is way easier to ban building factories in certain area than to ban factories altogether. Without national parks being established in twentieth century, these places would be destroyed.
The only way for people to live in perfect harmony with nature would be to abandon all economical growth and that's unlikely to happen. The easiest thing to do is to preserve and reduce our influence.
Even though we see a steady increase in jobs and wages, that doesn't mean that there were periods when in certain communities almost everybody lost their job. There are places / cities in many regions that relied mostly on one factory or industry, and as the employers collapsed, so did the communities. Many never recovered, because you can't just tell a 60 year old miner to requalify.