I have a special seething hatred for leafblowers. The noise to utility ratio is so high.
1,084 karma · joined March 3, 2023
I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones?
Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc.
edit: just saw this:
>Previous liquid-cooled servers were hybrid: GPUs and CPUs got cold plates, but the rest of the system stayed air-cooled, with finned heat sinks designed to shed heat into moving air. In a fully liquid-cooled server, the cooling for these components needed to be completely redesigned to use liquid.
I wonder if anyone who is connected with actual academic philosophy can comment on this. I'm pretty skeptical.
This is a field where it is notoriously hard to get a real academic position, I would bet there is no shortage of people for these roles.
70% of people report reducing meat consumption, but research has shown that these intentions have very little correlation with people's actual behavior.
This is a pretty different argument though. The comment that started this thread was talking about LLMs making potentially dangerous knowledge more available to bad actors, now we're talking about LLMs giving personally harmful advice.
You asked:
>If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been?
Probably less? Even if you removed all the guardrails from Claude it would've likely told him his reactor plan wouldn't work and that he would have a high chance of poisoning himself and the environment.
It really isn't.
A pile of radioactive waste isn't a reactor. Marie Curie's notes are famously contaminated with radioactive materials but they aren't a reactor. This is about as close as the boy scout got.
The Oklo fossil reactor is unique because it happened to form in the right circumstances to produce a fission chain reaction, which does make it a reactor. Not every uranium mine is a reactor, in fact this is the only one known.
Fair enough, I misread your original comment.
The broader point stands that the limitation on creating nuclear weapons and reactors is not knowledge but materials. Even if he himself had a PhD in nuclear physics he still couldn't have built one in his backyard because he wouldn't be able to get the materials. A nuclear physicist can't build a reactor without materials anymore than a pilot can fly without an airplane.
The proportion of fissile isotopes being mined was off by a fraction of a percent, which caused the French government to launch an investigation. It turns out that millions of years ago the site had formed a natural fission reactor which depleted some of the fissile isotopes
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
He basically got a bunch of radioactive stuff and put it together. He wasn't anywhere close to making a nuclear reactor let alone a nuclear weapon. For a weapon you need isotopes which he didn't have access to.
Okay, I think this is part of what I found confusing about your initial comment, since "person" is often used interchangeably with "human". But if you're using it to mean something that has a subjective experience then that's fine.
>I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.
This sounds like it would put you with the "extremists" then? It's widely agreed that all mammals if not all vertebrates have some subjective experience, consciousness, sentience, or whatever you want to call it.[1][2] As you've said though we can't be fully sure.
Do you think any non-humans have this?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness
[2]https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou...
>What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat
He says:
>[what] it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat
The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?
Maybe this would be useful for long haul trucks or something where they have large battery capacities and want to save as much time as they can, but it seems like way overkill for any normal person.
>The 1,500kW charging stations are significantly more powerful than Tesla’s 500kW V4 Superchargers
>it charges to 70 percent in five minutes on the new chargers.
By my math this means it would charge to 70% in 15 minutes on the 500kW charger? That's already plenty fast, my car does nowhere near 500kW and it's fine the couple of times a year I need it.
After all, if I can get ChatGPT or Claude to say something false that should count too, right?
I was prepared to say the same thing as you but after reading it seems totally fair.
The key difference is that this would be illegal if a human wrote it too.
I assume the MRL the lowest amount which could possibly cause harm? If so then why does it matter for the rest of the products where the levels are below that?
It could be for potential environmental harm, but then the fact that these are being exported at all should tell you that they're being used, you don't have to test consumer goods.
Their recommendations include this:
>2. Automatically lower all maximum residue levels (MRLs) of non-approved pesticides to the limit of detection to prevent these substances from making their way back onto European plates via a dangerous ‘boomerang effect
But is this scientifically supported?
There are even single celled organisms which will prey upon and eat multicellular animals.
Two other indices changed their rules to allow these companies specifically. Pensions and retirement funds rely on these indices to have continual, stable growth. Often the people whose money is being invested don't even have control over its allocation into these funds.
Coupled with the precarious state of the economy due to all the money already flowing through AI, changing the rules to throw retirement fund money into brand new extremely highly valued stocks with P/E ratios in the hundreds seems like a recipe for disaster. It reminds me of subprime mortgages.
It draws an analogy between us and the skeptical aliens in the original story which feel silly to us, so the obvious implication is that we're being as silly as they were.
But it doesn't really give a reason to accept the analogy, it just asserts it.
There's a big difference between a whole civilization and a piece of software that can output text.
They barely touch on the issues of consciousness, Picard basically says "What if Data is conscious?" and then goes off on a tangent. The judge eventually rules in Data's favor but doesn't give much of a justification IMO.
It's still a good episode, but it doesn't add much to the conversation on consciousness. It's a hugely complicated topic which people have devoted their entire careers to.
It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.
We have OSFP/QSFPDD with 8 lanes and lane speeds of 100Gpbs and 200Gbps for up to 1.6Tbps on a single DAC at the bleeding edge. Although with these signal integrity limits the maximum length to about 1m.
You probably won't see this on a NIC or anything for home use any time soon though.
cat /dev/null | yesBut it's annoying to see the US government find a new way to discourage one of the most clear cut ways to reduce fossil fuel usage. If things were fair, we would be taxing gas for its contribution to air pollution and climate change.
We should be doing everything we can to encourage EV adoption, but the current administration is interested in doing the exact opposite. They apparently found a way to do so which gets bipartisan support.
Many people are going to college primarily to make more money in their adult life, the actual learning is secondary. If you're already well-off or just don't care, you can still get the education for its own sake.
The issue is that we've created a perverse incentive to get a college degree.
Looks like they started doing this senior survey in 2022, so unfortunately there's no pre-COVID info.
2022 20.9% cheating, 31.5% non-reporting
2023 25.4% cheating, 33.6% non-reporting
2024 28.8% cheating, 42.0% non-reporting
2025 29.9% cheating, 44.6% non-reporting
So from this it seems like cheating has been increasing significantly over just the last few years
But if it's going to require phoning home to some Google/OpenAI/whoever then forget it. I don't want a constant connection to my OS from one of these companies.
Anything with voice controls for routine use is a pretty tough sell. Doing this when you're not completely alone would be annoying to everyone around you.
Most of their examples seem like they could have been done with a right click drop down menu so they don't really need to "re-invent the mouse pointer".
So is this thing talking to Google's servers all the time for the AI integration? So it won't work if you're not connected to the internet? Privacy concerns are obvious; now Google wants to have an AI watching literally everything you do on your computer?
Does it cost the user anything for the LLM use? If it's free will it stay free forever? That's quite a lot to give away if they're expecting people to use it to change a single word like in one of their examples. I guess they're expecting to make the money back by gathering data about literally everything you do on your computer.
There might be a killer app for AI integration with personal computers that has yet to be invented, but this doesn't look like it.
I'm not even convinced of the main premise that McDonald's is now much more expensive relative to other things. I think it just feels that way because we had a few years of high inflation.
Despite our excuses that we have to eat unhealthy fast food because it's cheap, we still eat it it once it's expensive. We all talk about how there is an obesity crisis yet we constantly promote and glorify unhealthy food on social media.
>Or maybe no one is fully logically consistent in their views. In the end, people will continue to consume this food even knowing full-well it’s unhealthy and overpriced. And for that, McDonald’s should not be too concerned.