Any mechanism that can store enough energy to get a car from point A to point B is going to store a nontrivial amount of energy and be subject to some eyebrow-raising failure modes. This applies to gasoline, diesel fuel, batteries, and all flavors of hydrogen.
While that is certainly plausible, I don't think it is inevitable. There have certainly been other points in the history of AI where it looked like exponential growth was about to render everything moot, and then the entire field hit a decade-long plateau.
I'm just a casual observer, but it's not obvious to me that the current set of AI tools and techniques are well-matched to the things that the now-ubiquitous large language models are bad at. (That being said, it's not obvious that they aren't either)
NYC does have a number of dedicated salt-spreader/plow trucks [1].
As for why they use garbage trucks to plow, I speculate that it's an issue of scale. Buying a special purpose plow truck to replace every garbage truck that currently does double duty would leave you with a pretty significant/expensive fleet of trucks that are sitting idle most of the time (not to mention taking up space, which is at a premium in NYC).
"I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood, something that could never, ever possibly destroy us: Mr. Stay-Puft."
Agree that universities don't (and shouldn't) act with a single purpose or intent, but they need to have institutional controls in place that prevent really bad ideas from negatively affecting the surrounding community. Those seem to be lacking in this case, and in their absence I think the kernel maintainers' actions are entirely justified.
Can you elaborate on "we use zero-carbon electricity"? How far abstracted from electrical generation are you? What guarantees do you have that your electricity is provided by low/zero-carbon sources?
Solar panels or wind turbines do emit CO2 (e.g. construction, maintenance). Is the amount of CO2 emitted per kWh negligible compared to what would be captured from the air ? What's the ratio ?
