There are non-battery buffers available too--I recently got rooftop residential solar installed, and learned that my area is covered by a grid profile requiring that the solar system stay online through something like 60 +/- 2Hz before shutting down completely, and ramping down production linearly beyond a 1Hz deviation or so. The point is to avoid cascading shutdowns by riding through over/undersupply situations, whereas an older standard for my area would have the all solar systems cut off the moment frequency exceeded 60.5Hz (which would indicate oversupply from power plant generators spinning faster via lower resistance).

In my system's case, switching to this grid profile was just a software toggle.

This is grid following, very effective for small scale generation. It does not work for large scale generation though when the grid is relying on that voltage and frequency from the utility scale renewable generation ("grid forming"). When those large generators exceed their ride through tolerance, batteries step in to hold voltage and frequency up until the transient event ends or dispatchable generators called upon spin up (currently fossil gas primarily, but also nuclear if there is headroom to increase output). Thermal generators can take minutes to provide this support (called upon, fuel intake increased, spinning metal spins faster), batteries respond within 250-500ms.

Tesla’s Megapack system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia was the first example of this being proven out at scale in prod. Batteries everywhere, as quickly as possible.

You put this well, now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself trying to defend my earlier work as "Pre-ChatGPT," as if that even matters. Relegating future such work to some sort of romanticized "artisanal craftsmanship" feels hollow. That being said, I'm more productive than ever and finally got projects that have stalled out going again, and these projects have made my own life easier as a result. More utility from the result than from having walked the journey perhaps.

Neural networks most certainly go through a process to transform input into output (even to mimic the results of another process) but it's a very different one from human neutral networks. But I think this is the crucial point of the debate, essentially unchanged from Searle's "Chinese Room" argument from decades ago.

The person in that room, looking up a dictionary with Chinese phrases and patterns, certainly follows a process, but it's easy to dismiss the notion that the person understands Chinese. But the question is if you zoom out, is the room itself intelligent because it is following a process, even if it's just a bunch of pattern recognition?

Ah, I thought you were just referring to the decades-long use of the most massive supercomputers to simulate nuclear arsenal maintenance and explosions (maybe literally at the molecular/atomic/sub-atomic level).

Exactly, where it crosses into ultranationalism, it's a coping drug. You may be a nobody on all other scales, but darned if you can't stand under the flag of your country and truly _be someone._

After receiving the orders that were actually printed from an Internet Explorer 6 only website, and faxed over from another office before being re-scanned in along with a barcode that usually failed to make it over the fax, hence the need to hand-type things. True story (not for JR specifically, but circa 2013)

I think we still have trouble defining the 'I' part of AGI and the rest is predicted on that definition being objective and concrete first.

The value of labor i.e. wages depend on labor demand (the marginal product of labor) and bargaining power, not output per worker. If AI is a substitute for many tasks, the marginal value of an additional worker, and what a company is willing to pay for their work can fall even if each remaining worker is more productive.

What you're forecasting is a scenario where total output has substantially increased but no one's hiring or able to start their own business. Instant massive recession is by no means a "sure bet" with technological improvements, especially those that make more kinds of work possible than before.

I'm not forecasting that, and it's a virtual strawman in the face of my much narrower claim: that wages depend on marginal labor demand and bargaining power, not average output per worker. If AI substitutes for labor, the marginal value of adding another worker in many roles can fall. That can mean fewer hires or lower wages in some categories, not 'no hiring' or an instant massive recession. I have no idea what the addressable market or demand for our more productive economy is, but for the record I do hope it's high to support new businesses and a bigger pie in general!

Forgive me, I was responding to the original claim that "it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today".

It will - and z2 explained why, in response to my post

> What you're forecasting is a scenario where total output has substantially increased but no one's hiring or able to start their own business.

I said labor would have “lower value” after AI progresses further and further.

My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.

You twisted my statement and said “nobody is hiring.”

Which isn’t what I said.

> My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.

People have been singing that since the industrial revolution started.

What makes you think it's different this time? Other times increased productivity yielded fewer people doing what a machine suddenly can do. But never fewer people employed or smaller overall economy.

You can argue that our populations are older than ever before. There aren't enough kids, and consumers are saturated with consumption opportunities.

That's maybe never happened before during the industrial revolution. But it's orthogonal to AI.

That’s a perfect summary of what I was getting at, thank you

That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.

Thanks for sharing. Just on the PKM side, is there something about this setup that Claude Code + AGENTS.md (that you get it to write for you) can't do? Is it the chat integration or does it actually have a better knowledge management setup?

It could all be done with Claude Code and tools. But it 'just works' and has done all the plumbing for you. The built-in memory systems help too, but again that can be done with Claude Code or others. I think this is just a step in the pre-build systems that work how you want instead of having to work through every bit yourself. I'm sure the big boys are working on more polished offerings that will be cleaner. The Open AI Codex app that just came out today for example.