They can solve it if you keep adding layers to the transformer, it's just not efficient; you'd need exponentially more layers than a similarly sized RNN.
If you look at that graph for a whole day you will see a huge kick-in of power company owned battery storage in the evening. There is no reason the grid cannot operate batteries at scale to absorb excess rooftop generation. NYT: https://archive.is/t1uPj
For profit utility participants are desperately afraid of their return on equity being crushed by the new energy model, hence the need for strong political response from the citizenry. The grid can absolutely operate in the manner you describe, but profits will be diminished and investors will struggle to reach for previous profit potential unless you're in a non profit config (coop and whatnot).
Shades of "The Innovator's Dilemma" and what not. Incumbents do not care for their gravy train being taken away.
> Investor-owned utilities, or IOUs, are large electric distributors that issue stock owned by shareholders. Almost three-quarters of utility customers get their electricity from these companies. IOUs are most prevalent in heavily populated areas on the East and West coasts. In 2017, 168 IOUs served an average of 654,600 electric customers. The two largest IOUs are in California: Pacific Gas and Electric, with 5.48 million customers, and Southern California Edison Company, with 5.07 million customers.
No, not exactly. "the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over" is the OP's statement I disagree with. "They can't take any more solar input", yes they can, by adding more grid battery, which is currently happening.
> Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.
They are referring to the last sentence in the paragraph you referenced.
I'm not sure if this paper corresponds to limits on what it can answer with a single or few tokens, but also the limits where LLM itself is allowed to produce more tokens (chain of thought) as well as use tools (coding) to solve problems?
How long do you think it takes to grill a hamburger patty?
To your second point: This is where exact apples to apples comparison breaks down. The sane home cook skips deep frying at home and associated hassles unless it's a special occasion. Microwave the potatoes or boil. Fast, minimal cleanup, and now it isn't junk food either.
Well, I like deep fried potatoes, that's why I included it. I actually do deep fry my potatoes, straining the oil, re-using it, and ultimately recycling it. None of the alternatives are acceptable to me in terms of flavor or texture.
Could you explain in more detail why you think that cooking potatoes not in oil makes it not junk food? (in the sense of, I've looked at a wide range of comparisons and it does not seem like frying in oil magically turns healthy potatoes into cancer daemons).
It takes me about 7 minutes to fry a hamburger patty on my Griddle (to rare!), ignoring the heat-up time and clean-up time. The actual cooking is quite fast. On the other hand, I can end up waiting an hour in line at In-and-Out. So while I agree that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the economics articles I've seen that compare bsed on fully loaded costs (to the best that they can) seem to conclude that fast food can be about 10-20% cheaper than grocery.
frying, roasting, and baking all produce acrylamides. There's a paper from sweden that shows you can even find acrylamides in bread that was cooked at standard temp.
The story of frying and cardio is still ongoing; I've seen several full reversals in the public health field over the past 30 years. It's really painful being a quantitative physical biologist watching the press around papers that when carefully inspected provide little to no evidence supporting their position.
This simply isn't true and you should cite some source for this "known fact". It seems to be a "known fact" passed around by people who "don't know how much anything costs at a grocery store."
I mean it's a known fact in that there are published articles that calculate the fully loaded cost of a (the most discounted) fast-food meal and compare it to the fully loaded cost of buying ingredients and preparing it.
The economics all look great- about 10-30% cheaper for raw costs- except that the articles also include costs to prepare the meal (time cost, resource cost of fuel) and cleanup (time cost and often more garbage/cleanup).
also, the article that were published were mostly published about a decade ago, when the prices for fast food were a lot lower. This changed in the past few years as fast food prices went up a lot, even more than inflation on basic goods.
I typically don't include citations because nobody is here on hacker news to argue about the finer details of academic studies that carefully control for all the factors, and most of us don't have the time and inclination to read the studies in details to see where the problem lie. Instead, we build generalized models of the world that incorporate a great deal of different data and use those to explain our observations to others. My own model is based on 30+ years of shopping and preparing my own food at home, as well as working in fast food (MCDonald's), talking to franchise owners (always an interesting perspective into how McDonald's works), and regular restaurants.
Note: I live in California, a state with a different economic distribution than any other state in the country (with New York and Texas being the closest comparable states in terms of wealth distribution, relative prices of groceries and fast food, amounts of transportation required to obtain food, etc). Some people I know hunt for their own food- they enjoy the sport and it produces enough meat for a family to eat in a year! Obviously, that's a case where fast food isn't really cheaper.
You can just look at your own grocery store and your local McDs. I also live in CA and for a quarter lb with cheese comparison I looked up:
My local McD's: $6.39
My local Safeway (not a budget option, no sales, you can do better than all of this): 1 1/4 lb beef patty $1.69, 1 slice cheddar cheese $0.37, 1 hamburger buns $0.22 = $2.28, misc condiments are negligible but let's say $0.25 total = $2.53
That's less than half the cost. The time and resources cost of frying that patty in a skillet and throwing it on a bun with cheese and ketchup comes nowhere close to doubling that, it's not even close.
can you add in an estimate of your time spent preparing the food? What about cleanup? It takes me more time to clean my food prep and cook area than actually make food most of the time. And compare that to the time spent waiting in the grocery line/fast food line? What about storage costs- I just threw away a 2-week old pile of nasty ground beef that went bad before we had an opportunity to use it (totally on me, I should have cooked burgers for my kids a couple more nights).
That's what I mean by "fully loaded"- when economists compare things like this, they don't just take the published dollar costs in a single location and compare them. They made a best-effort good-faith attempt at considering all the other costs which lead to a consumer making a decision.
Also, fast food prices shot up in the past few years, faster than grocery prices. Most of the articles about this were written about 10-15 years ago.
I used for cost comparison a pre-formed hamburger patty from Safeway. If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong. You put it on a bun and put things on it and you eat it. There is no prep area to clean. Wash a pan and your plate. This isn't even a scaling issue, this is negligible time and cleanup for anywhere 1 to 4 people. This is a real side by side comparison as a McD's quarter lb also has nothing on it requiring prep.
I understand what you are trying to say about "fully loaded cost". It's also wrong. The fully loaded cost is still much lower for home vs fast. Unless you insist that you really desire specifically something like deep fried french fries, a specific cooking method that is extremely scalable and well suited to restaurant production and very inconvenient at home. But it is emphatically not true that a meal of similar ingredients/macro nutrition (burger and potato) is in general ever cheaper in fast food form.
If you want to promote the myth that fast food is cheaper, you should cite any other source than that you vaguely remember there being articles 10-15 years ago.
> If it takes you more than 10 minutes to pull this from fridge, heat a pan and fry, something is wrong.
Something is wrong, then, because I have to go all the way back to my place to put it on a bun and put things on it and eat it. I don't have to make that commute with fast food.
You two aren't arguing about which is cheaper; you're arguing about which externalities you're willing to ignore.
Literally not being at home to eat home made food is obviously a case where other factors dominate.
However, I really don't think that's the general case people are thinking of when trying to argue that it makes some kind of economic sense for people to eat a fast food diet. The average person does go home at some point, especially so for families.
Or more specifically, it's the claim "I can't go to the grocery store and make this meal for less than a fast food meal", that is absurd.
Time is lost getting "fast" food too. Like, the time to cook a patty in the skillet is the same time as the time waiting through the drive thru. And now factor in burning fuel.
The patty doesn’t get in my fridge unless I put it there… after I’ve gone grocery shopping and picked it up. On the other hand, I pass McDonald’s everyday on the way home from work anyways.
I worked in kitchens for years so I'm not the average home cook but even so I think if you're finding a two week old pile of ground beef in the fridge that's on you. You might have to accept that you are disorganized. A home refridgerator isn't a big place to point your eyeballs at and assess and marshall ingredients. Aside from that, I mean as far as "prep" goes... I hesitate to even use the word prep. Prepping is usually a term used for something more involved. Like if you were making your own ketchup and mustard from scratch, that would be prep and would take time. If you've just got pre-made ingredients ready to assemble into a dish then that's not really prep.
Hamburgers for a family of five with a counter-top mise en place...
Place five buns opened up on a large cutting board (1 minute tops).
Squirt your bottled condiments on the buns (1 minute tops).
Hand-rip your lettuce, five servings, place on buns (3 minutes tops).
Slice tomato rounds for each burger (3 minutes I guess if your knife skills are really bad).
Take ground beef and hand-form five patties (5 minutes tops).
Cook all five patties at once in a large pan or whatever you use (10 minutes tops - smash them if you want them well done or done fast).
Spatula out the patties onto the buns and you've got burgers.
Shouldn't take more than 20 or so minutes really and I even left the cooking part for last so as to not complicate things. What you should really be doing is cooking the burgers WHILE you set up the buns. Personally I could go from all those ingredients sitting visibly in a fridge to five burgers ready to serve in about 10 minutes.
Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge. Home food culture used to be all there was before fast food. Those traditions are lost and everyone's skill in preparing meals at home as atrophied over decades.
I mean I get that there's no more Nana in the kitchen makin the sauce and both parents work but there's so many easy, quick meals that can be made for very cheap if people simply acquired the knowledge and practiced. You don't wanna eat those fast food patties anyways they're probably like half fake with fraudulent filler material or whatever. It's hard to even recreate that lab-researched frankenfood.
> Maybe what we have here with you and with many others in America is just a lack of food knowledge.
This is exactly what's happening. This is why I find it so upsetting to hear a source like NPR mindlessly repeating the myth that fast food is cheaper. People have gotten totally out of touch with basic home economics type stuff and the food industry is all too happy for them to stay in the dark.
I can do a variation on bolognese sauce with ground beef, a few bits of thin sliced onions and finally a dab of tomato pasta sauce. 15 minutes top and done while the pasta cooks.
Cooking at home is just stupendously cheaper. I don't understand how anyone can claim otherwise. I made the switch 3 years ago and the impact on budget was phenomenal.
McDonald's has moved to a model where you get the app and it has valuable coupons that take like 30% off the price that renew every day. Which is part of why the menu costs have gone up.
Menu cost, I downloaded the app to look up the price, I was not offered a coupon.
But the exact same thing applies to the grocery prices I quoted. I gave the non-sale prices from my area's more expensive grocery store, that's what I consider the starting point, you can definitely do better.
The McDonald’s coupons are always available under a menu in the app. You have to know to look for them though. Might be regional but in my area there’s always a 20% off your whole order coupon plus some others that can do even better.
Not to dispute your point that grocery stores also have a lot of coupons and promotions and it’s definitely cheaper than fast food (also grocery store food has even cheaper options like beans, rice, canned goods etc that may not be equivalent to a fast food meal but are vastly cheaper and may not take any real time or effort to prepare).
I see the 20% in my app, but it is for orders above $10 so may not work for a single sandwich order being discussed above. But for 2 people or more, it could be quite useful. Never used this and not a McD regular, but will remember this next time.
> the articles also include costs to prepare the meal and cleanup
So because a contractor makes 500 an hour every burger they make costs 500 dollars. Yeah that sounds plausible. They should be maximalising their economic output and leaving menial labor to others.
2 lb of ground beef is way more beef than a happy meal. A kids meal patty is only 1/10 of a lb, you've given enough for 20 kids meals.
The rest of your numbers are similarly off:
- you are giving each happy meal 1.25 lbs of potato!?
- apple serving size is 1.2 ozs - An average apple is 8-10 ozs, 4 apples = 26 happy meals minimum.
You realize how expensive fast food is if you are at all used to cooking at home from scratch all the time.
When I say "cooking from scratch", I specifically mean the super fast and easy stuff. Starting from raw materials doesn't mean you do anything complicated to it.
For the burger example: buying pre-formed burger patties is still massively cheaper. Throwing a pre-formed burger patty from your fridge in a pan and putting it on a bun with a slice of cheese will take you ten minutes. Microwave small potatoes while you fry. You are done. There is no prep, you have made 1 easily washed pan and bowl for potatoes and your plate.
Is it the exact same thing taste-wise as your fast food meal? No, the potatoes aren't fried, sorry. Does it hit all the macro nutrients for far cheaper, and probably less time than even going to the fast food place? Yes.
It does, but that is a highly subjective value that depends on the person in question. You can't just plug in the average wage for someone doing cooking for a living and assume it's meaningful. And you especially can't do that while running a clickbait headline that just straight up says fast food is cheaper without also explicitly and prominently explaining this caveat.
A great track, but if I really had to pick only one I'd choose Lush 3.
Also... I think Halcyon+On+On is amazing, but it's based so heavily on Opus III's cover of It's a Fine Day that it borders on being a (fantastic) remix. Also interesting to look back at the earlier remix of the original recording of that song by A Guy Called Gerald.
Re 3) Even if you don't care about long context length, Mamba is much cheaper per token of auto-regressive output. Each token has to only compute the next step of a linear RNN, the transformer has to attend back over all previous outputs, which rapidly grows in cost and memory.
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