One starts to wonder whether the LLM vendors laissez-faire approach to the legality of ingesting copyrighted / licensed material will start to infect the industry in general?
I think it will push opensource/ free software hackers to close source their code because it is being used to feed LLMs. Similar to how allot of hardcore free software proponents don't use Github. Is closed source the future?
No. I don't believe that. I personally want my code to outlast me and help people in the future, but I don't want allow anyone to just scrape it, strip its license and use for whatever. I use (A)GPLv3+, because I believe in "Freedom for the user", not "Freedom for the developer" which permissive licenses provide.
My code is not free labor for anyone. It has conditions attached.
This is the problem that AI solves, though: rather than steal our code directly, now the thieves will just ask their favorite AI to generate a new project that does exactly what our (A)GPLv3+ projects did, which it will be able to do only because it read our code. And, even if the result is eerily similar to what we publish -- we might, after all, be one of the few good examples in the training set for this problem -- it will be difficult to demonstrate, as the AI is more effective at the process of laundering licenses than a human (and no one seems to want to admit that, the same way that a human can be tainted by reading the source code of a project they want to reimplement -- making them have to walk a tightrope if they later want to develop anything similar -- an AI might be similarly tainted). In this shitty new world, our code, is, in fact, free labor for people who are using Cursor to rip it off.
I dunno, even after considering that move, I'll continue to publish FOSS like before.
I always did it without any expectation of gains from it, and with the intention for people to use it for whatever they want. That calculation hasn't changed, even considering machines will slurp it up now.
I do agree that it sucks for people who do care about what the code is used for, and I hope these people migrate to other licenses that support their ideas about control and ownership.
We already did migrate to that license: (A)GPLv3+. You can use my code if-and-only-if you won't then hoard your own changes from the world and lock users of your derivative software away from having the same empowerment you did. It isn't about "expectation of gains", and that's a ridiculous way of portraying the situation: it is about a social contract that happens to be enforced by copyright.
And, as such, when your favorite AI generates code similar to my code after having read my code, that's infringement, the same as if a human had done the same thing... only, the AI doesn't bother to consider that angle, and, even if you know to care, you have no way to know what is going on, in the way a human at least usually can know when it is cribbing off of what it knows (though even a human can do this accidentally).
I will do the same. I am aligned with ESR basically, as expressed in "The Clue Train Manifesto."
Use value of OSS remains high. Because of that, when I can add to the body of OSS, I do. People will do what they do.
All I control is me. They do them.
We all benefit from the high use value.
I do wish those who have made fortunes would contribute more and keep their roots, and the labor of many high quality humans just a bit more firmly in mind.
From an open source software perspective, I don't understand the feelings around LLM ingestion.
The models isn't generally recreating your software, but might be spreading your way of thinking in pieces.
I get it from the artists and to a lesser degree, writers. I just don't understand it from software projects.
I guess if you think of it as something to replace you, but since you are already a creator, it is also a way to unlock much greater capacity for turning your ideas into solutions.
I think the difference between Open Source and Free Software is not known enough.
Open Source software is not about users generally. It’s about other developers. Like a trade gathering. People in the know get there, get the tools they need, build the things they need with these open things and sell them to make a living. That’s fair. I understand, agree, and respect them.
Free Software’s different. Think like end users get the things they need with all the blueprints and specifications of that thing. They can do anything to these things, but if they want to share it, they have to share the new blueprints and specifications as well, to keep the thing available and free from abuse.
I’m in the second camp. I give you something for free, but there are terms attached. If you modify the thing, you have to give modifications away. Plus, you can’t integrate it into a tool which is or can be closed.
I just don’t want the thing i built for you to be closed and used against you to make your life more difficult. Because the aim was to make your life easier in the first place.
Free Software is what you described, but Open Source is what some corporations invented, after Free Software started getting popular, in order to water it down and gain the respect of free software without actually delivering free software.
I, for one, deserted GitHub, and do not use for anything else personal anymore. I'm not against permissive licensing, but all my code will be (A)GPLv3 or later.
A particular project I'm working on will be on a private Git server until I complete and open it as a package. Even after that, I might keep the development closed and release tarballs only (aka Catherdral Model).
All code I write is also AI-Free.
It won't be possible to trust in people for a long time, it seems.
Ya, I custom coded our startups entire bespoke sensor array and smart systems. No AI. It was build before LLMs gains the traction that we see now. I tested several models to see if they could build the same. They can't yet.
My code will never be publicly available. That's a key trade secret of our business. When investors and others tell us that someone else could build it, I let them know that they could build their own, similar version, but it wouldn't be what we have.
We've verified that by having friends and family, some of the best coders that we know - Stanford, MIT, and other CS alum, as well as top FAANG programmers - try to reproduce it. It's always something done in their own style that doesn't do the job as it needs to be done (they work ok, but they all miss some key crucial parts of why our system succeeds at what it does).
GitHub is good for those looking for a job or to share their projects openly. I wouldn't even trust a private repo. Everything is either on systems and servers that we have control over or in my head. As we grow and scale, we have a roadmap for how to keep control over those trade secrets until it's time to pass off the company (if we do). At that point, I'm confident that whoever takes over will realize that this will be like the Coca Cola recipe, or any other trade secret which could be reproduced but not necessarily in the same way. (Knowing the history of that recipe and what others have created that tastes identical, it's more apocryphal and maybe not a perfect example, but you get the idea).
Anything controlled by another company is something out of your hands. Pick and choose wisely where you keep your stuff.
None of my personal repositories are licensed with a permissive license. All of them are GPLv3, however I have found GPL licensed code in “The Stack”. Moreover, there’s an ancient and deleted tweet which confirmed GPL code (in fact any open repository) was used to train copilot in the beginning. As a result, I can’t trust anyone from now on.
Stealing ideas has been the name of the game for a long, long time. It doesn't have to be like that. We just spent $50k defending one of ours, which yields no ROI unless we pull through and make it a reality. If someone has - money, sales and marketing skills, or other business competency, of course they'd rather steal than invent their own thing or invite the dev on board.
Again, this doesn't have to be this way. Either Y-Combinator needs to boot the thiefs and invite the original dev, the thiefs need to invite them in with a fair equity share, or else we continue to perpetuate this culture. And, I agree with others, creatives have already become more and more afraid of sharing their work and having it stolen. Ours was covered with a bullet proof contract that the other party presented us with. We also have a patent pending. Neither of those stop someone from stealing from you and it's your job to protect your IP (and money). It almost bankrupt us... but because it was their contract, our lawyer constantly was scratching his head since it was a slam dunk case.
Steve Jobs and Apple stole the UI from Xerox, Tesla wasn't Elon Musk's, and you can go down the list. Look up the history of Arduino and wiring. I have no problem buying Arduino knockoffs because of it. (The two profs that didn't give their grad student attribution have a history of stuff like this as well as infighting)
But it doesn't have to be like that, it's our choice to continue perpetuating it and it will lead to emergent properties that people won't like. The question is: how long can the party last for investors, incubators, and thief startup founders in our highly connected age?
Instead of waiting to find out, I hope that Y-Combinator and associated investors pioneer a better culture of rejecting these people when they find out and promoting the actual creators. Michael Seibel talked about the best creators not being the best networkers back at startup grind 2019, and that the old model of investing is broken. 6 years people. (I've been building a network of us who are expert at going out and finding the best creators, but it would be nice to have the resources and platforms of larger institutions).
Why don't we promote the actual creators OR pair those good at identifying the opportunities and pitching and marketing them. That would be WAY better, and everyone wins while making a better, long term sustainable culture and model.
I have yet to hear a convincing case for why what the LLM vendors did/do is different than what humans do to learn and become proficient in producing their own work.
Do you owe everyone you have ever read a royalty for influencing your writing style or voice? How about for all the other things you have leaned and become competent in?
There is a bigger issue here that is related to what humanity actually is and how we have been abused for many decades and several generations now, to the point that the abused generations have become the abusers of future generations simply because they are mentally trapped, addicted even.
A good uncontroversial example of this may be the excessive and deficit spending of governments, all based on what otherwise would be considered loan fraud, which is called national debt. It is used to keep perpetuating this system we call an economy because it has been so “successful” over ~100 years of “line go up”, solely because everyone wants the gravy train of reckless good times to continue forever.
Unfortunately for some generation of the future (maybe even our own), it simply cannot go on forever, so it won’t, because it is by definition unsustainable. But the goods times and “success” everyone sees everyone else having, keeps people from stopping the insane and utterly suicidal process of not only consistent, but accelerating addiction to every greater deficit and debt loan frauds called the national debt. It isn’t “Trumps fault” it “Biden’s fault”, or any other totem that can excuse or own actions. These are forces we don’t even understand any more than we are blindly changing at breakneck speeds. And if anyone tells you they understand these forces they are simply lying, when we cannot even understand the most basic concept of the fact that there is no alternative to this planet… as we destroy its ecosystem that produced us at ever accelerating speeds, in millions of different ways.
It’s quite similar if not the same as any other process we call addiction; we know it will cause ruin, yet we cannot extract ourselves from the endorphins, so we just keep lying to ourselves.
> I have yet to hear a convincing case for why what the LLM vendors did/do is different than what humans do to learn and become proficient in producing their own work.
That's because you have either not read enough or have been dismissing the very sound case: Scale.
In law, scale matters. It might be legal to possess a single joint while at the same time being illegal to possess a warehouse of 400 tons of weed.
Now, at least, you cannot say anymore that you have not heard a convincing case for why ingesting every single piece of work by an artist with the intention of out-producing them is a bad idea.
You have heard at least one, supported by precedent in law in multiple jurisdictions.
> I have yet to hear a convincing case for why what the LLM vendors did/do is different than what humans do to learn and become proficient in producing their own work.
Humans don't read other codebases en masse. Hell, I haven't read the entirety of our own codebase. I learned by doing, from books (that I paid for or legally borrowed), and yes, by looking at a small amount of other people's code (permitted by the respective licenses).
Humans are not remix machines, AIs (currently) are.
Exactly. I could from memory recite the main story beats of The Lord of the Rings, and probably even get to the detail of all major plot points and some minor ones, and maybe even some famous phrases.
An LLM unburdened by restraint could like produce page upon page of story nearly identical to the original.
The only difference is that the people getting upset about this stuff is money. They hate the idea that someone is making money off their work. Even if the sum of their work amounts to a penny. They're just angry.
In 50 years they'll be useless anyway when computers are just plotting every iteration and combination of 1's and 0's that might be.
I too see no difference in machines learning from the works of others than man standing on the shoulders of those before them to reach higher plateaus.
I for one don’t care if anyone makes money from my code. It’s released as Free Software as a reason. I wrote something I needed, and I release it to the world to help other people.
However, when you look at the license of the software I release, there are some terms I put forward. In short, it’s called GPLv3+ or AGPLv3+ depending on the thing I have written. You can use/develop/fork/integrate/sell it. I don’t care, as long as you obey the license terms.
Don’t obeying these terms, and running with the code is wrong. Even if you put the laws aside, that’s unethical. This is what makes my blood boil.
I do not develop software as a job. I do it as a side quest, and more importantly as research. I don’t want my research to be laundered and closed down, but be available and free as much as possible. This is why I use copyleft licenses.
If you care about developer freedom, you write Open Source code with permissive licenses. If you care about users’ freedom, you write Free Software with copyleft licenses.
I care about users’ freedom, not developers’ freedom to rip any code and embed into their code bases, which permissive licenses are designed for.
This blatant selfishness of “we are doing something great, we need no permission” is angering me.
Otherwise, get my scrappy code and make a million dollars with it. As long as you obey the license, I don’t care. On the contrary, I applaud you.
Your base assumption that humans looking at restricted code bases and then working on competing products is OK is flawed. That has always been something you'd have to be very very careful about to avoid law suits for anything you inadvertently copied. Clean-room design is a thing for this very reason.
>>"Altman told OpenAI staff that stealth will be important for their ultimate success to avoid competitors copying the product before it’s ready."
How is this not a red flag to anyone? Are we past reality already to this point?
Like, how can you claim you're gonna do something so incredibly revolutionary and at the same time fall for the worst trait a VC would spot in a wannabe startupper -- thinking that the incredible originality of your idea is your moat?
ChatGPT is a success story as much as it concerns brand and distribution, and this product could be the same, but Altman is admitting clearly that they have zero moat in this. This could be copied by anyone as long as they hear the idea? Seriously?
I would rather take the "bullet" but it wasn't my day xD
Tbh, I don't think there was anything substantially wrong with the process. They have a ton of CVs from thousands of the smartest people out there. They have to filter somehow.
I'm certainly sad I did not make the cut, but it's not like the guy next in line is any worse then me.
It is a quandry, the kernel is predominantly C, Rust has demonstrated a path forward, producing safer code without sacrificing performance, but it is undeniable that a mixed code base is far harder to maintain, not impossible.
Here's the thing, in the next couple of years languages like Carbon, Zig, even Jai, will come of age. They will have their proponents and people who want to introduce them into kernel code.
If there is a rust developer out there who doesn't resist the introduction of these languages as ardently as the chosen people (C) are resisting rust, then I will show you someone who lives in some kind of alternate reality.
Personally, I'd be pressuring the C committee to introduce defer, tout suite, otherwise Zig looks favourite. But the reality is that your preferred language is just that, your preferred language, most have seen this drama before and will choose not to participate.
As to whether Linus is failing in his leadership role? Nah, Then again, I wish Sony would open source the PS OS and we can be done with this juvenile debate as to which OS should rule the world. Either that or let's have an exokernal and move on from this monololithic story, surely that would meet the needs of the MY FAVOURITE LANGUAGE isn't appreciated crowd!!
> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C).
The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C).
I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.
You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.
Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.
So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat.
My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones do 0.98, the best you get with electric resistive heat is 1W.
On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
There’s a reason I say living space, I.e. a space with people living in it.
A living space will naturally heat itself with zero furnaces or electric heaters. Because the living things inside it will always produce heat (at least until they cease to be living). On the other hand, you’ll have a hard time getting living things to cool any space they occupy.
> On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
Heat pumps work both ways, and it’s still easier to heat a space with a heat pump than cool it. Sure your AC can move 3.5W of heat for 1W of energy input. But that means 1W of energy allows you to remove 3.5W of heat from a space. But if you used the heat pump to heat the space, you would get 4.5W of additional heat, because that 1W of energy used to power the heat pump becomes waste heat that can be trivially captured and used to heat the space.
My AC works in both directions, in winter it moves more cold outside than the power it consumes. Not sure what the factor is exactly, but I think same as for cooling.
Those high COPs are probably for relatively small temperature deltas. Heat pumps get _less_ efficient when the temperature deltas are larger. See page 18 of the manual linked below for an example. As the temperature gets lower, the heating COP gets lower. The same should be the case with cooling (higher outdoor temperatures lead to lower COPs), but the data is not presented in the same way.
You are saying that heat pumps get less efficient when deltas are larger, and the parent post says they get more efficient when deltas are larger. In a sense, you're both correct.
There are multiple relevant temperatures for a heat pump, and the pump is more efficient when some of those are higher and some lower. A heat pump has two heat exchangers, one on the inside of the building and one outside. Each of those heat exchangers has two temperatures: the refrigerant loop temperature at that point, and the ambient temperature (air for air source heat pumps, ground for ground source heat pumps). There's also a fifth relevant temperature that has indirect influence: the setpoint (the desired indoor ambient temperature).
Efficiency increases when the temperature delta between the refrigerant and ambient temperatures is higher (both indoor and outdoor). But those temperature deltas vary inversely with the delta between the indoor and outdoor ambient temperatures.
So, in summary:
- Heat pumps get less efficient when the temperature delta between indoor and outdoor temperature is higher.
- They get more efficient when the temperature delta between refrigerant and ambient temperature is higher.
The net effect of this is that heat pumps become less efficient as the temperature becomes hotter outside in the summer and colder outside in the winter.
You can also think about it as far as actually moving heat. Cold is the absence of heat, and so when the air is colder, there is less heat moved for the same effort and you have to work harder -- less efficiently -- for the same amount of head to get moved.
"cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space"
Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.
Add insulation, and use a heatpump. The more insulation you add the easier it easy to keep a space warm. Add enough insulation, and eventually the waste heat production from human activities inside the space will equal or surpass the heat loss through the insulation, removing the need for additional heating.
Insulation obviously also helps keep a place cool. But no amount of insulation will ever remove the need for cooling if the outside is warmer than the inside. Energy is always going to move from a hot place to a cold place, but at least insulation lets us control how quickly that happens.
Also the limit on air sourced heat pumps in cold conditions is basically caused by water freezing on the evaporator coils, effectively adding a layer of insulation that limits how much energy can be drawn from the air, we’re not really limited by the refrigerants. As other have mentioned you dig down to find a better source of heat, and often you don’t even need to dig far, a 20-30cm trench is often enough. Although in super cold climates you’ll need to go deeper to make sure your through the frost layer in the winter.
> "cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.
I thought any place that is significantly cold can still dig underground and at some point you can get enough heat to run your heat pump?
Yeah, if you have a bare minimum of 30k burning a hole in your pocket and enough open land to drill the well with the correct geology, and the larger your house the bigger/more wells you need as you're drawing from the Earth's relatively constant temperature. So the only way to get more heat is to get more surface area for the coolant.
Some people on reddit are reporting quotes of 125k for larger (>3000 sq ft) houses.
As someone who lives in a 4-season environment that can get down into the single digits F on occasion in the winter (forecast to be there for a couple of days next week), and has an air-source heat pump, I just suck it up and eat the $400-$500/month heating costs for the auxiliary (electric resistive) heat in Dec/Jan/Feb. If someone gifts me a ground-sourced heat pump I'll gladly accept, but I've got kids to raise so setting aside money for one is a long way off.
Heating is more costly if you use technology created for cooling. When you try to cool a cold space in order to heat hot space, you will have a bad time. You could use electric heater for heating, it should have no problems with heating, but will use more electricity. Or you could use something actually cheaper, like wood or fossil fuels. If you use more expensive method (like electricity) it will be more expensive.
This might be true for you. I have lived with free wood for heating and it was more expensive for me than using a heat pump. What is expensive depends on a lot of factors, political, social, location, time and knowledge. It is not a clear dollar per delta T.
Chopping up a tree is kind of fun, we bill that to the entertainment budget instead of the heating budget. And it usually happens during a hotter season, so I might have to go inside to take a break, get a cool drink. So, we can bill some of the tree chopping activity to the cooling budget!
The figure you are looking for is heating/cooling degree-days.
For each day, use the average high and the average low. Subtract the desired maximum dwelling temperature from the average high: if the result is positive, add it to the cooling degree-days total. Subtract the average low from the from the minimum dwelling temperature: if the result is positive, add it to the heating degree-days total.
Over a year, that gives you comparable figures on how much you will need to cool or heat the space. Many agencies calculate this for specific areas.
It is true that heat is easier to generate. Berlin is considered mild while Phoenix is considered very hot. They just happen to have the same temperature deltas. On the whole, the world spends many, many times more energy heating living spaces than cooling them. The coldest cities people live in just have much larger room temperature deltas than the hottest.
A lot of what you said is intuitively/directionally correct, but misses a lot of important physics related to heat transfer in buildings and operational questions of space heating equipment.
This is your most accurate/relevant point:
> All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper).
Whereas this is plainly wrong:
> It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it.
And then the following is correct but the marginal reduction in load is minimal except in relatively crowded spaces (or spaces with very high equipment power densities):
> Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
The truth is it is generally easier to cool not heat when you take into account the necessary energy input to achieve the desired action on the psychrometric chart, assuming by “ease” you mean energy (or emissions) used, given that you are operating over a large volume of air - which does align with your point about the jumper to be fair!
Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation (simplified ELI5). It is only spending energy to move heat, not make it. On the other hand, a boiler or furnace or resistance heat system generally uses around 1 unit of input energy for every 0.8-0.9 units of heating energy produced. Heat pumps achieve similar to coefficients of performance as A/Cs, because they are effectively just A/Cs operating in reverse.
Your point about a jumper is great, but there are local cooling strategies as well (tho not as effective), eg using a fan or an adiabatic cooling device (eg a mister in a hot dry climate).
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space.
Once you move to cost, it now also depends on your fuel prices, not just your demand and system type. For instance, in America, nat gas is so cheap, that even with its inefficiencies relative to a heat pump, if electricity is expensive heating might still be cheaper than cooling per unit of thermal demand (this is true for instance in MA, since electricity is often 3x the price of NG). On the other hand, if elec is less than 3x the cost of nat gas, then cooling is probably cheaper than heating per unit of demand, assuming you use natural gas for your heating system.
Everyone seems to be making the same mistake here. As you say:
> Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation
You know you can use a heatpump to heat a space as well right? Then you get to move 3 units of heat into the space, plus you also get to use that extra unit energy used to power the heatpump, because the heatpump turns the unit of energy into waste heat! (After all energy can’t be destroyed, so it has to go somewhere).
Cooling takes less energy per BTU moved vs heating. In AC/heat pumps that's represented by SEER rating for cooling and HSPF rating for heating (heat pumps). Modern ACs have SEER ratings for 20+ and HSPF ratings for 8+. What it means is that on average, spending 1 BTU equivalent of electrical energy cools down the house by 20 BTU. Similarly for heat pump it means spending 1 BTU of electricity heats up the house by 8 BTU. Electric resistive heating is equivalent of HSPF 1.
Also in sunny climates it's easy to use solar energy for cooling making it carbon net-zero. Cold places typically burn natural gas for heating, it's much harder to make heating carbon net-zero.
You can use a heatpump for heating as well. Then not only do you get all the energy moved by the heat pump to warm a space. But you can also use the waste heat created by the heatpump for heating as well.
In a cooling scenario, all waste heat is just that, waste. But in a heating scenario, waste heat isn’t waste, it’s additional heat you can use, and reduces the total amount of energy you need to inject into the system.
This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts:
* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.
* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.
* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
> If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
In a cold environment, you can just take that energy from outside. If you’ve got a heatpump, then you can always set it up make sure that waste heat produced can be used to heat a space, and make sure that it’s always scavenging energy from a place you either want to keep cool, or from outside.
> Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
If we’re talking survivable environments here, then phoenix isn’t a good choice. Places like Delhi are better where not only are the temps high, but so is the humidity. At times hot enough and humidity enough that the wet bulb temperature rises higher than human survivable conditions, in which case, without heat pumps, it’s literally impossible for humans to survive more than a few hours.
There’s some element of comfort vs necessity here, I think… really, people could be keeping their houses at, like… 55F and they’d be totally fine. They just need to get acclimated to it.
On the other hand, depending on the humidity, heats over like 85F start becoming a health risk for some activities.
As someone acclimated to warmer weather, I disagree. People work outside in 85, 90, 95° weather without health problems all the time. Hydrate and your body will acclimate.
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space
Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances. Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in the developing world and continental Europe.
On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is more expensive because heating is unnecessary.
The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60 degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees below body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient than the technologies used most commonly for heating (resistive or combustion).
> when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice water).
> Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
That’s moving the goal posts. You can always use a heatpump to heat a space.
Any space you want to keep comfortable will always be easier if the outside is cooler than your target temperature. Everything in that space is going to produce heat as a natural consequence of expending energy into any form. It’s always possible to add insulation to minimise the amount of energy you loose into the surrounding environment, and you can always modulate how much additional energy you let escape using a simple opening in that insulation.
On the other hand, if the external space is hotter, then you must always expend additional energy to move waste heat energy accumulating in the space into the high energy space outside. There is no passive manner that can allow you to cool a space surrounded by a hotter space, you’re always fighting against the temperature gradient. And if you want your living, heat producing, organisms to keep living, then you need to get rid of the heat they produce.
I covered that in the rest of my post. Most of the time, heating involves a much bigger temperature gradient than cooling. And even though you can use a heat pump, most houses don't use one. (I love the tech personally). Meanwhile cooling always uses a heat pump, so almost every air-conditioned house is using more efficient tech than a heated house. While operating on a smaller temperature delta.
> There is no passive manner that can allow you to cool a space surrounded by a hotter space
Insulation works just as well to keep heat out as it does to keep heat in.
100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar panels right now covered with snow.)
you cannot win this argument with the average person who lives in a chilly European country. it just does not compute.
there are whole important cultural lifeways related to opening and closing windows at proper times for efficient cooling and ventilation. these work really well — in Europe — and are treasured traditions.
getting people to accept AC is sort of like trying to convince the average American to go grocery shopping on a bicycle. some may accept the idea but only the most European influenced already.
Recently it was -7C where I lived. Even without heating, my indoor temp didn't go below 15C. In regions where cold temperatures are common, isolation and heat retaining materials are very common. Is preventing heat gain as simple as preventing heat loss?
Yes, insulation works both ways. My garage is unheated and insulated. If I go out there to work on something in the winter I always compare the temperature outside. On a sunny day it might be pleasant outside and freezing in my garage - so I'll open the door and let it warm up.
Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).
One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.
Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?
There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River.
The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations.
Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading.
So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.
How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.
When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.
Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.
I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.
Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.
The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.
The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.
Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood used for residential construction is milled from trees grown specifically for that purpose.
Lumber is quite a bit lower quality than it used to be, because we're no longer using old-growth timber. Less dense wood burns faster, as does the laminated strand board that long ago replaced plywood (unless you're really fancy) (and toxic fire retardant treatments be damned).
The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America that don't make sense economically, but that persist because of momentum, with each generation receiving an inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to nothing).
What is not to say that most of the wood in the US is illegal. It's probably a small share. But some of your houses do pretty much chop forests down. (And your government does help fight that, but it's hard to completely stop it.)
Yes, people from the US always say concrete is expensive and wood is cheap. And unless you are designing a tent (by the way, zinc is way cheaper than wood for a tent), only people from the US say that.
There's something distorting your economy. Concrete is incredibly cheap as a material, extremely prone to use in a large supply chain, and requires way less labor than wood.
You make houses siting over finely built wood lattices... how much do you pay to the people building those? Because I can't imagine it being justifiable with Brazilian salaries.
What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just relocate an entire city.
Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its identity to a significant degree as being opposed to cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to move to even if we could just move the cities.
Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas should be treated similarly.
Pretty simple formula, there simply isn't a market for an $x upcharge on mail and docs, but we have to be part of this latest grift so we'll charge everyone $x - y which is a rounding error. Except it's not. At some point someone is going to admit they have bet the farm on improved auto complete.
