boothby

Closing the loop: google makes ad money on all the views these stories get

I lost my dad to cancer because of surgical complications. All of this stuff is risky, and not treating the cancer is a valid choice that some people make. But anybody who reads an anecdote by a quasi-anonymous non-expert had better not base their care plan on that.

> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release

An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.

I heartily disagree, grading hand-written homework serves as an early warning signal to students who don’t understand a concept* but want to. It’s also useful to keeners who like being told "you’re doing a good job, keep it up!" As well a warning to students who are so far behind that they can save time money and their GPA by dropping the class early.

And as a TA, I liked the income, and there’s a knock-on benefit that you’re learning to read with a critical eye which will help as a reviewer in the future.

* or in mine own obsolescent field, a measure of accuracy that indicates a student need think** longer before writing in the future

** I know, I know

We’ve seen time and time again that "a positive for the world" is not something these companies align on

Don’t worry! If the single electron theory is correct, then this torture only represents an infinitesimal portion of its total lifetime, which is actually experienced in reverse and so it may feel increasing relief over time rather than increasing anxiety over being trapped.

No it is literally not, and that misconception needs to die.

> SpaceX is a trillion dollar company with 0 profit.

And it got there in part through the evisceration of NASA.

> The free market has created everything you use the more we turn the keys over to government's the worse things get.

Government funds research that has brought us such advances as moon landings, computers, and the internet. What an odd example you chose in SpaceX

If I didn’t know David Harvey personally (though a decade removed) I would agree. I’m reconsidering my stance on AI lately and while I still find much of this disconcerting, I begrudgingly accept that his approach of "feed the paper into a different model and make it explain the technical bits until I fully understand it" is perhaps an increasingly valid approach to digesting mathematics. One needs to be incredibly principled in this practice. But that’s exactly how I’d describe David.

Ah, true, I was being sloppy. Thanks

I do hope you can find and reattach your ass; that does sound painful.

If f is O(g) and o(h) then

  Lim f/g -> C a constant

And

  Lim f/h -> 0

The please take time to understand the aims of Project 2025. If you think through the implications and understand the Supreme Court’s recent rulings on executive power, you might find the No Kings protest to be quite reasonable. Because those in power are not looking for "balance" in any meaning of the word

> Do you see benefit in giving more power to those elected by the people than the people who aren't elected?

Yes. In a representative democracy, a plurality of views are represented in government, enabling checks and balances to prevent arbitrary and corrupt governance. When the president is allowed to eviscerate independent bodies and replace their leadership and fill their ranks with loyalists, you get further and further from an expression of the will of the people and closer and closer to totalitarianism.

Russia is a nominal democracy. Putin is the elected leader. He enjoys unchecked power, of which Trump is nakedly envious. Do you think that Russia’s approach is "more democratic" than that of the US because of the strength of its executive?

Obama certainly did his part in strengthening executive power and your attention to the role that Democrats played in this is well deserved. This whataboutism, however, does not absolve the Republicans who are pushing the Unitary Executive theory -- of which a monarchy is the ultimate expression. Therefore, the name "no kings" -- a catchy title that captures the undeniable thrust of the founding of the USA and warns of the end of the slope our country is accelerating down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory

Similar to how Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc. used tiny fractions of their wealth, on things that would bolster the opinions of the public. They’re laudable, but become less so when you see the bigger picture. Those free software tools are things that Meta needs for its own operations, and their moat is so vast that they can give them away for free and benefit from public participation.

Some of us already do!

The most boring reality is lifeless. Are we all doomed by this reasoning?

I was hoping this would be an article about molecular evolution

I'm not convinced that humans will remain entertained by this format. I hope not, anyway. That's how we get WALL•E

We've entered the idler era of building

After decades of enshitification, I have trouble reading this as "objectively better for those made wealthy by working in or investing in tech."

Not that innocuous when the commission is intended to be bipartisan but the two Democratic seats are vacant. This change formalizes uniparty rule.

If the AI recommends murder and you exhibit a pattern of following AI advice are you guilty of precrime

I don't expect such a release to be deliberate on the part of the humans. Just, hooking bots up to wet labs and having coffee while the world burns.

> Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.

Not if it's a virus

> reported datacenter usage numbers look big in isolation, but once you relate them to "how much water is there" and "how much is used by other industries", it turns out to be a nothingburger.

Water scarcity is a problem around the world; even my rainy hometown of Vancouver had steep water restrictions this year. The question "how much water is there" is incredibly disingenuous, to the point of feeling like a motte and bailey: yes, the universe, or the earth contains vast oceans of the stuff but datacenters are using drinking water which is quite scarce. Just because "other industries" use a lot of water doesn't make it okay -- I level exactly the same criticism at other industries which waste water at such an egregious degree.

To be clear: if data centers only charged up a pool of water to use as coolant, that's fine. But when the weather is warm, they run millions of gallons of tapwater down the drain just to cool off. And heat spikes are happening with increasing frequency, severity and duration.

We as a species need to conserve water and emit less CO₂, full stop. The tech industry doesn't get a pass just because other industries are dirty.

I heartily disagree on 1, and you've taken a cheap out on that point. What I said was, the environmental externalities are not in your cost model, and you've said nothing to even acknowledge that. Your point about efficiency is particularly obtuse: efficiency doesn't mean burning less fuel, and getting more compute per Joule. Not reducing the overall carbon footprint, but accelerating the burn rate as fast as we can build.

I'm not even sure I agree that demand is outstripping compute -- nvidia's circular demand-inflating investment/buildout/loan situation certainly muddies the waters on that, see my point 3.

> There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".

There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account.

Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions living on this planet is literally priceless.

Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035?

Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.

Remember to change the location of the marbles in your shoes frequently to avoid adaptive gait recognition