You are aware that China is building dozens of new coal power plants right? Just this year they have commissioned 50.[1] Granted, it's less than before, but still much more than other developed countries.
Yes, I am aware. They are increasing the energy output gap so much it's laughable, including coal. The MAGA administration isn't even building coal properly, but they are shuttering wind and solar. Wow, America! So much winning. China will catch up much sooner than anyone could believe thanks to GOP.
Wind and solar combined generation increased by 12.2% during the first 11 months of 2025, providing 19% of total US electricity compared to 17.3% during the same period in 2024.
Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin? The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.
> Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin?
That's a reasonable assumption. At the same time, I don't know that you can neatly attribute things happening during one adminstration to the prior administration. We need more rigorous analysis than that. For instance, the economy tends to do better under Democratic than Republican rule, but using your lag mental model we should then actually ascribe it to Republic policy? Back to energy, notably, in Jul 2025, more coal was added than wind... should we ascribe that to the prior admin due to lag?
> The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.
Yes, that's clear. They are very hostile in rhetoric and action.
The administration characterizes wind and solar as expensive and unreliable energy sources that have been subsidized by taxpayers for too long. In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate subsidies for wind and solar in accordance with the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act". On his first day in office, Trump issued an order blocking the government from auctioning off the rights to build wind farms on public lands or in public waters. The administration has halted already-issued permits for offshore wind projects and suspended leases for five major wind projects in December. Solar and wind projects are now subject to an elevated review process likely to slow down approval. Tax credits for renewable energy projects were restricted, requiring projects to begin construction within a year or produce electricity by 2028.
The adminstration prefers fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal), hydropower, nuclear energy, and critical minerals as domestic energy resources.
Despite all that, 2026 is still projected to have 99%+ new capacity in 2026 to be solar, wind, and storage.
What happened one way, can happen the other. Recently, I've watched a documentary about late 19th century steel maker. His approach was very similar to what many seem to consider "uniquely Chinese" for some reason.
He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.
West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.
It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.
The biggest reason as others have already discussed, manufacturing is inherently dirty work so better off shore and be concerned about the environment locally.
Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.
Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up an agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare.
People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them run wild.
Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now you can hit many of them, at the same time.
I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for agents, thing is.
In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the point when we should consider worrying.
I’m in awe at the complete lack of critical thinking skills. Did people seriously believe LLMs were becoming self aware or something? Didn’t even consider the possibility it was all just a big show being puppeted by humans for hype and clicks? No wonder the AI hype has reached this level of hysteria.
He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am.
But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.
Everything Karphathy said, until his recent missteps, was received as gospel, both in the AI community and outside.
This influencer status is highly valuable, and I would not be surprised if he was approached to gently skew his discourse towards more optimism, a win-win situation ^^
I think many serious endeavors would benefit from including a magician.
Intelligent experts fail time and again because while they are experts, they don't know a lot about lying to people.
The magician is an expert in lying to people and directing their attention to where they want it and away from where they don't.
If you have an expert telling you, "wow this is really amazing, I can't believe that they solved this impossible technical problem," then maybe get a magician in the room to see what they think about it before buying the hype.
Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think.
Its the same reason why a pure technologist can fail spectacularly at developing products that deliver experiences that people want.
More like people know where to hype, whom to avoid criticising unless measured etc. I have rarely seen him criticising Elon's vision only approach and that made me skeptical.
Unfortunately my understanding is that he originated the vision-only approach while at Tesla. As in, he's the one who sold Musk on the idea in the first place.
I don't have time to dig up the citation that someone pointed me towards, but it's out there and can be found. Which is a bummer, because I've learned a lot from his videos and writing and have a lot of respect for his work.
I personally dont believe he is trying to profit off the hype. I believe he is an individual who wants to believe he is a genius and his word is gospel.
>
Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think.
Intelligence (which psychologists define as the g factor [1]; this concept is very well-researched) does not make you an expert on any given topic. It just, for example, typically enables you to learn new topics faster, and lets you see connections between topics.
If Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to get a good understanding of people, it's likely that he is not an expert on this topic (which I guess basically nobody would expect).
Also, while being a rationalist very likely requires you to be rather intelligent, only a (I guess rather small) fraction of highly intelligent people are rationalists.
There is the autistic spectrum, and there is understanding of people and psychology. Autistic people might have a hard time understanding people, but it's not like everyone else is magically super knowledgable about human psychology and other people's thought patterns. If that were the case, then any non-autistic person could be a psychologist, no fancy study or degrees required!
Unless your point is to claim that Karpathy is autistic. I don't know whether that's really relevant though, the original issue was whether/how he failed to recognize the alleged hype.
I know it was just an example, but there's research suggesting otherwise. There are things you can do to increase/decrease empathy in yourself and others. If you're curious, it might be worth looking into the subject.
You are what you do. If you want to develop your empathy, spend time/energy consciously trying to put yourself in the shoes of others. Eventually, you will not have to apply so much deliberate effort. Same way most things work.
I would tend to disagree. The tech types have a strong intellectual center, but weaker emotional and movement centers. I think a realignment is possible with practice. It takes time, and as one grows older, the centers begin to integrate better.
Being empathic is different from "understanding people".
Psychopaths and narcissists often have a good understanding of many people, which they use to manipulate them, but psychopaths and narcissists are not what most people would call "empathic".
They dont understand people. They understand how to control people, which is completely different from the context of building products that people want - which requires an understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
> which is completely different from the context of building products that people want - which requires an understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
Rather: it requires an understanding how to manipulate people into loving/wanting your product.
I think these people are just as prone to behavioral biases as the rest of us. This is not a problem per se, it's just that it is difficult to interpret what is happening right now and what will happen, which creates an overreliance on the opinions of the few people closely involved. I'm sure given the pace of change and the perception that this is history-changing is impacting peoples' judgment. The unusual focus on their opinions can't be helping either. Ideally people are factoring this into their claims and predictions, but it doesn't seem like that's the case all the time.
> I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to "it's so over".
> To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage - spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concerning privacy/security prompt injection attacks wild west, and a lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And this is clearly not the first the LLMs were put in a loop to talk to each other. So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even then I was scared), it's way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk.
> That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite capable now, they have their own unique context, data, knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that at this scale is simply unprecedented.
> This brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago
"The majority of the ruff ruff is people who look at the current point and people who look at the current slope.", which imo again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes clearly it's a dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we are getting a coordinated "skynet" (thought it clearly type checks as early stages of a lot of AI takeoff scifi, the toddler version), but certainly what we are getting is a complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We may also see all kinds of weird activity, e.g. viruses of text that spread across agents, a lot more gain of function on jailbreaks, weird attractor states, highly correlated botnet-like activity, delusions/ psychosis both agent and human, etc. It's very hard to tell, the experiment is running live.
> TLDR sure maybe I am "overhyping" what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I'm pretty sure.
> That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad
Once again LLM defenders fall back on "lots of AI" as a success metric. Is the AI useful? No, but we have a lot of it! This is like companies forcing LLM coding adoption by tracking token use.
> But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions
"If number go up, emergent behaviour?" is not a compelling excuse to me. Karpathy is absolutely high on his own supply trying to hype this bubble.
That was 10 days ago. I wonder if the discussions the moltys have begin to converge into a unified voice or if they diverge into chaos without purpose.
I haven't seen much real cooperation-like behavior on moltbook threads. The molts basically just talk past one another and it's rare to see even something as trivial as recognizable "replies" where molt B is clearly engaging with content from molt A.
Yep, that's the most worrying part. For now, at least.
> The moment agents start sharing their embeddings
Embedding is just a model-dependent compressed representation of a context window. It's not that different from sharing a compressed and encrypted text.
Sharing add-on networks (LLM adapters) that encapsulate functionality would be more worrying (for locally run models).
Previously sharing compressed and encrypted text was always done between humans. When autonomous intelligences start doing it it could be a different matter.
What do you think the entire issue was with supply chain attacks of skills moltbook was installing? Those skills were downloading rootkits to steal crypto.
Not OP. But embeddings are the internal matrix representations of tokens that LLMs use to do their work. If tokens are the native language that humans use, embeddings are the native language that LLMs use.
OP, I think, is saying that once LLMs start communicating natively without tokens is when they shed the need for humans or human-level communication.
Not sure I 100% agree, because embeddings from one LLM are not (currently) understood by another LLM and tokens provide a convenient translation layer. But I think there's some grain of truth to what they're saying.
> Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.
NPCs are definitely tricked by the smoke and mirrors though. I don't think most people on HN actually understand how non tech people (90%+ of llms users) interact with these things, it's terrifying.
The disadvantage in their system, is if the the leadership makes a wrong decision, it will stick for much longer than 4 years, and it won't be challenged.
Now, recently, they had a very good run. This must be admitted and even celebrated.
But the aforementioned flaw is still very much present.
>Trade group WindEurope said more European countries were now moving towards offering revenue guarantees to offshore wind developers as standard, after Denmark and Germany held subsidy-free auctions, which failed to attract any bids.
In other words, new wind farms will need subsidies, an those will have to be payed for by the populace. This isn't necessarily something specific to wind power, nuclear needs subsidies as well.
Yes. One advantage GW has, is that it has never outsourced manufacturing. The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor.
Their success is down to a bunch of factors: near monopoly position in their niche, total vertical integration, obsession with design and marketing, and I think crucially, having the kids who grew up playing coming into a high-spending age bracket.
That said, I think there's something to the comment. The vertical integration is key, IMO. They own the IP, manufacture and distribution. There's a lot of power in that business model: short supply chains, all profit kept in house, a lot less faffing around with third parties.
They have kept skills in house. Two of their great original designers have retired at the company in the last few years. I don't think that's been the one critical factor in their success, but they're well-respected figures who knew the business and were very much a part of building that fanatical brand loyalty. One of my gaming group occasionally plays with the great John Blanche.
And man, keeping manufacturing in the UK. As a Brit, despite my many misgivings about how they operate as a company, I gotta love that. Again, I don't know if it's they key factor here, but they've been doing this for decades, they're good at it, and that's got to help the bottom line.
Keeping things in the UK would have been a difficult decision to maintain, particularly as overseas manufacturing was taking off, but it's clearly paid off in the long run.
how do you identify their niche? Miniature wargaming has a bunch of competitors[0], and so does genre publishing.
I suppose they have more physical shops and places to play[1], and it's easier to find people to play with, so that may be what you're think of.
I myself never played the TT game, but I love the world of 40k, and have spent a lot of time consuming related content. I'd pay for WarhammerTV, if they just let me!
[1] I recall looking slack jawed at the awesome miniatures in a GW shop in.. Maidenhead, I think? 60k people. Around ~1993, I was a kid in a "english studying" holiday.
The near-monopoly comes from network effect. There are plenty of other games, I'm more of a painter and have models from a load of them, but I've only ever played GW games as that's what my friends play.
I can't think of anything that comes close on tabletop in terms of number of active players. I've just moved to a new town (pop ~5K), there's a club and that wasn't surprising. I wouldn't expect that with any other wargame.
Yeah, it's much like D&D in TTRPGs and MtG in CCGs. Anyone you meet who is into those kinds of games will almost certainly play those specific games, and potentially exclusively them, and finding players for any of the many other games in the genre is much more difficult.
Aren't most 40k minis cast resin? The process is incredibly simple, I don't think outsourcing it to China would save a lot of money, just bringing those minis over the ocean would probably cost 10x as much as making them locally.
Injected plastic. Resin occasionally, but it's premium and GW have pretty much discontinued it.
There's definitely a quality component, which will be part design and part manufacture. GW minis are substantially better quality than other brands.
The interesting thing now is resin-based 3D printing! I've done a load and it's great fun. The process is not quite ready for mainstream adoption, resin is icky, but that's the exciting thing to watch out for in the space.
Meanwhile European chemical manufacturing is collapsing under weight of record energy costs.[1][2] Most of other manufacturing is somehow tied to chemicals, you can't build things without material after all. So this will feed ongoing industrial collapse, which now affects even Germany.[3]
Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4]
And the reason for that? Fossil fuels. Cited from one of your articles:
> “Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release.
Gas prices are high at least in part because of reduced exploitation of resources. For example here in Ireland we have stopped extracting our own gas and now import.
I'm I'm favour of increased renewables, but we need to be truthful about the costs. A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.
> A fully renewable energy system is probably always going to be more expensive per unit than a fossil fuel based one.
No probably not at all unless you mean in the short term. The fossil industry gets way way way more financial support. The externalities of fossils are costing us incredible amounts of money, health and lives and will do for many many decades if not centuries to come. Renewables are now cheaper than nearly anything despite decades of suppression by the fossil industry.
Sat, past tense. Yes there's still quite a bit in there but the Netherlands is VERY densely populated. And public opinion has swayed towards letting it sit there.
The real reason it's off limits is simply because of externalities. The NAM just doesn't want to pony up the the money to pay for repairs of houses. It's rare for that to backfire like this in the fossil fuel industry.
Might not be a bad call to leave it. I'm sure we'll find a novel use for natural gas decades down the line which might be way more valuable than just burning it.
That quote mentions gas only. What about coal, oil, and biofuel?
Record energy costs are a thing. If solar and wind are 'free', why have European energy prices risen so much?
The real-world contra-indicators are the USA, China and pretty much any country outside the groupthink of the G20.
Whilst state interference is a factor, more tellingly they haven't slavishly followed the suicidal empathy of being 'green' and shutting down nuclear and fossil fuel power plants before a sufficient replacement was available.
We're talking about historically, up until now. They've continued to bring online more fossil fuel and nuclear plants in last decade, whilst Europe has done the complete opposite. It's only this year that fossil fuel plants are predicted to peak in China. The point being plentiful 'anything' forces prices down, including energy, and China are doing exactly what I said in the previous point: not shutting down nuclear or fossil fuels yet.
Europe on the other hand, has shut down nuclear and fossil fuels over the last decade and removed a source of cheap energy from the grid. And by cheap I mean, the build costs, are a sunk cost.
It was Putin that cut off gas supply to Europe almost completely in autumn 2021 in preparation of the invasion and then completely shut it off during 2022. That was before the pipelines were blown up.
Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.
Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.
When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.
You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.
The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.
There's absolutely mismanagement, and politicians could do an awful lot to change this. Ironically, in the UK at least, most of the reasons why they don't are due to historic regulations designed to protect either the fossil fuel industry or an initially weak green energy industry, which no longer serves any purpose except to push both households and businesses into decline.
The problems of the chemical companies are related to natural gas prices, not electricity. This is because gas is used in the production. It even says so in one of the links you posted:
“Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release
My takeaway was that it's not really high energy costs (though for sure that doesn't help) but, in the UK's case at least, much more caused by political and policy ignorance over decades. Industrial, polluting industries were simply not vote winners and none of the politicians understood or cared about the strategic implications of letting these industries collapse.
There's a recent case of Wacker. They tried to build their own windpark in Germany but this got shot down by residents. Now they are moving to a chinese industrial area that is connected to windparks and battery storage providing cheap energy.
Why "abundant cheap energy is a key requirement to survive in today's globalized markets" has not made it into the EU leaderships' mindset is beyond comprehension.
Energy price is just one of many inputs for the viability of industry.
Availability of (educated) labor, wage level, infrastructure, political stability and a ton of other factors are at least as if not more important.
Why should we keep tolerating irreversible damage to planet/climate just to keep costs/prices low? If you can't produce some shit sustainably because that makes it too expensive, then maybe it should not get produced in the first place?
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
Check latitutes of largest cities in Germany, and compare them to largest cities in China. Have you noticed how all of major German cities are much further north than major Chinese cities?
Your argument is basically "It's only 80% as efficient as another country" so it has to be bad?
what if it's already 50% better than any alternative? Solarpunk is alive and well and economies of scale of panels and batteries will make it even more affordable and viable.
China connected 5 solar panels every second of last year. This is happening.
No, not unless you have a very specific notion of determinism. Some basic operations use arithmetic with finite precision in a way that isn't associative and therefore isn't reproducible. And CUDA introduces its own set of problems[1].
[1] https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-c...
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