ion_trapper

Next time don’t claim you are “really curious” for a perspective when your actual intent is to espouse moral superioirty.

Is someone who has $100k reasonable for wanting $1M? Sure, one would struggle to buy a nice house with only $100k. With $1M it is much easier.

Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”

Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.

A bug which has allowed 700 proofs from diverse fields of math to appear as proven, and noone has figured it out yet?

On the flip side, the professional mathematician has all the incentive to pearl clutch and rent seek.

The proofs may not yet be understood, but to claim they should not yet be accepted as solved is to claim there is a bug in Lean, which is a big claim.

Being all in on AI doesnt mean they have to be all in on bottom of the barrel slop videos. Youtube actually does a great job of not serving you slop if it gets to know you well enough. And it does notify you if it detects the video is AI generated. I would hope tech companies are awake to the fact that people’s feeds being deluged by the absolute uncanniest and disturbing visuals you’ve ever seen is feeding into anti-AI sentiment, and they probably shouldn’t be further enabling that.

In what way is the Guardian’s article any less ragebait? They’re both presenting an utter non-story as some environmental catastrophe for “datacenter bad” ragebait

Does this have to be posted daily?

A monopoly on their own IP?

Bring out the guillotines! Mickey Mouse is a human right!

Before you form a strong opinion on the matter, I recommend you take the time to investigate who the source of the claims is in this article and whether the counterparty has had sufficient opportunity to state their case.

Let's agree to disagree. I don't see sensationalism as necessary to acting in bad faith. If anything, the veneer of disinterested inquiry can be more sinister (what is sometimes called "concern trolling"). Choosing to platform a certain story is a choice. Choosing what context to present and withhold is also a choice. "Google cleared 0.000...% of Finnish forest" is also a factual title.

Actual evidence for or against either motivation would involve investigating the journalist's notes, search history,... and we're obviously not getting any of that so all we have to work with is our priors. Here are mine:

-The amount of deforestation discussed in this article is miniscule compared to the global amount. The probability of the journalist investigating or the editor of the outlet deciding to platform this specific case by uniformly random chance is small.

-Negative news stories about datacenters, AI, tech, etc. are extremely common and highly engaging. The probability of a journalist/editor deciding to specifically seek out an anti-datacenter story is high.

Given these two priors, what do you think the journalists most likely motivations are (or do you disagree with my claims)? You were able to deduce my own motivations for posting, can you do the same for the news outlet?

And in order to not be a bad faith actor myself, let me clarify my motivations for posting: I am here to express dissatisfaction with an unreasonable amount of anti-datacenter bias in the media.

The commenter’s insinuation is that the article was written in bad faith. Which do you think was closer to the journalist’s process in writing this article:

1) Start an investigation into deforestation, leading to the discovery of the deforestation caused by this datacenter?

2) Start an investigation into anything that maligns datacenters?

It’s equally useful to continually remind yourself that a Turing machine is just a spool of tape with a magnetic head, and that a human brain is just fatty lipids in a chemical bath.

Always a trip reflecting on this hyperbolic and profanity-laden style of comment from the old internet. Cringy by today’s standards.

The Venn diagram of "useful" and "not possible on a classical computer" has demonstrations on both disjoint ends but is currently empty in the intersection. For now. I fully sympathize with the hype-fatigue though.

Is there a QC out there that can perform a commercially useful computation? No, not yet. And yes snake oil is abound. But the reality is not two categories, it's a spectrum. Some are more useless than others.

This effort is likely aimed at industrial/academic entities and not "you" as in a single person. But anyway, it needs to be emphasized that the phrase "quantum computer" is today used to mean anything ranging from

-a useless machine that produces a signal indistinguishable from noise TO -a highly sophisticated marvel of science and engineering that performs otherwise impossible calculations

Many industrial quantum computers today fall closer to the the former category than the latter. A single person or small team with minimal funding has basically no hope of building anything meaningful.

I don't know of any other device that has such a broad range of quality represented under one name. Maybe like calling ELIZA and Opus 4.6 both "AI".