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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 8th, 2023

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  • Lemmings is just the best name for us. It’s so anti-corporate, you can rest assured not a single PR team would ever greenlight it in the history of PR teams. We don’t need a PR team to approve our nickname, we don’t want a PR team to approve our nickname, we don’t want to have anything to do with whatever a PR team wants.

    In case anyone was unsure, lemmings don’t even jump off cliffs, that was literally just Disney staff throwing lemmings off cliffs like a bunch of psychopaths.














  • Weather forecasting does create ensemble models to help constrain their forecasts. They’ll adjust some of their inputs in each model, mainly as a way of embedding the uncertainty in the measured data, then run that model and see if it changed.

    This resembles AI on one level, but it’s at a dramatically different scale. An ensemble may contain a few hundred runs at most, but an AI needs tens of thousands of data points at minimum. In order to make predictions like what google is saying they can do, they’d need to train on billions or maybe trillions of data points.

    This is still fundamentally different than ensemble modeling though. Ensembles are physically informed and the perturbations are based on real assumptions. Each model in an ensemble is based on validated physics equations. An AI model would undermine that completely. You can’t possibly describe the underlying equations because there aren’t any, so you can’t analyze its accuracy or propose a more accurate model, you’re just stuck with a bunch of coefficients that you’ll never understand.

    I’ve worked in climate modeling, and this kind of AI work is nothing more than an electricity sink for at least a decade, maybe forever.