This is absolutely true, but IMO also a much smaller problem than some people are making it out to be.
Without any special car-charging equipment, just with a regular outlet, I'm able to get over 100 miles of range every night (charging only from 11pm to 7am).
This is enough for a pretty long daily commute and it doesn't block car use during normal hours.
Big disclaimer - I'm from Europe, which helps my case because of shorter commutes and faster home charging with 220 volts.
But at the end of the day I think the solution lies in equipping all parking spaces at home and at work with power outlets. DCFC is definitely needed, but should be viewed as a solution for exceptional cases (i.e. roadtrip that exceeds your range), not a gas station for EVs.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
From my perspective, this is a slightly naive opinion. I believe we're not fighting against GMOs because "mutations are bad". When activists point that out, it's because it's the easiest way to reach the general population and convince them to get behind the cause.
The real reason, however, are the political and economical implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.
Bowman v Monsanto deserved to be sued and lose in court. By citing that case you prove you have not dug into the details and don't understand what you are talking about.
I don't understand why you are fighting against GMO. Not all GMO is done by corporations. Golden rice for example was not done by a big corporation.
If Volkswagen's competitors ran around saying that cars aren't dangerous and there's no need to regulate them, and their critics insisted that you're a mark if you accept the premise that cars are a useful transportation method at all, I don't suppose I'd have a choice but to take it seriously. If you know of a similar analysis from a less conflicted group I'd love to read it!
It's a supply-demand gap, but since the reasons for it are very apparent, it's completely reasonable to describe it as "consumers paying for [the existence of] datacenters".
I don't see how? It's much more reasonable to state "all electrical consumers are paying a proportionate amount to operate the grid based on their usage rates". This is typically spelled out by the rate commissions and designed to make sure one power consumer is not "subsidizing" the other.
In the case of your quoted article - taking it at face value - this means "everyone" is paying .02/khw more on their bill. A datacenter is going to be paying thousands of times more than your average household as they should.
I don't see a problem with this at all. Cheap electricity is required to have any sort of industrial base in any country. Paying a proportionate amount of what it costs the grid to serve you seems about as fair of a model as I can come up with.
If you need to subsidize some households, then having subsidized rates for usage under the average household consumption level for the area might make sense?
I don't really blame the last watt added to the grid for incremental uptick in costs. It was coming either way due to our severe lack of investment in dispatchable power generation and transmission capacity - datacenters simply brought the timeline forward a few years.
There are plenty of actual problematic things going into these datacenter deals. Them exposing how fragile our grid is due to severe lack of investment for 50 years is about the least interesting one to me. I'd start with local (and state) tax credits/abatements myself.
You can design a racist propaganda poster, put someone's face onto a porn pic or manipulate evidence with photoshop. Apart from super specific things like trying to print money, the tool doesn't stop you from doing things most people would consider distasteful, creepy or even illegal.
So why are we doing this now? Has anything changed fundamentally? Why can't we let software do everything and then blame the user for doing bad things?
I think what changed is that we at least can attempt to limit 'bad' things with technical measures. It was legitimately technically impossible 10 years ago to prevent Photoshop from designing propaganda posters. Of course today's 'LLM safety' features aren't watertight either, but with the combination of 'input is natural language' plus LLM-based safety measures, there are more options today to restrict what the software can do than in the past.
The example you gave about preventing money counterfeiting with technical measures also supports this, since this was an easier thing to detect technically, and so it was done.
Whether that's a good thing or bad thing everyone has to decide for themselves, but objectively I think this is the reason.
Apple has the technology to bias people towards cats instead of dogs but I find it very unlikely they will bother to do that. The missing ingredient is how it helps their bottom line, which, instead of technical feasibility, is the root reason they do things. For whatever reasons some people REALLY love Apple's default restrictions, most don't really give a damn one way or the other, and the smallest group seem to have problems with it. It's not that Apple can do this so they are, it's users want this and now it can be done.
Perhaps a much more bleak take, depending on one's views :).
What's hard to understand here? Those tools require skill and time to develop. AI makes things like those racist posters and revenge porn completely effortless and instant.
I can agree with parts of this article, but I believe it's missing a large part of the puzzle.
The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.
I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.
If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.
To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.
> It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.
I mean, if someone says "Let's pollute the rivers!" and another person says "Let's not pollute the rivers!", that's a pretty clear cut objectively good and bad position. Or "Let's put people in prison if they jaywalk.", etc.
That's not to say there are no positions that have a clear cut good or bad outcome that can be measured beforehand. For example, putting a tax on sugary drinks. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but you have no way of being sure beforehand, because you can't A/B test reality and the complexity of the system is such that you can't accurately predict human behavior at a large scale.
But the existence of positions that don't have a clear answer that can be determined ahead of time doesn't mean there's no objective way to determine whether it's good or bad, just that we don't have the tooling to do so at this point in time.
Polluting vs. not polluting sounds super straightforward, but then you look outside and we often pollute rivers, so it's clearly not that simple.
Personally, I'm fully with you on not polluting. But that immediately puts us in an ideological position - we value preserving the environment and staying healthy.
A neo-liberal might come along and say we're wasting economic potential. Keeping the river clean means not building a factory near it. If the products from that factory and the jobs it provides offset the negative effects, they'll argue we _should_ pollute the river.
Same with taxing sugary drinks - uncertain results aren't the issue. The issue is we have different opinions on how much a government should be able to regulate certain aspects of life in the pursuit of improving public health.
Even if you have reliable statistical data from countries that implemented such a policy, some people will argue their freedom to drink whatever they want is what's important here and your bean-counting of medical expenses is completely missing the point.
This only works for tasks where the details of execution are not important. Driving fits that category well, but many other tasks we're throwing at AI don't.
Why are we comparing LLMs to media? I think media has much more freedom in a creative sense, its end goal is often very open-ended, especially when it's used for artistic purposes.
When it comes to AI, we're trying to replace existing technology with it. We want it to drive a car, write an email, fix a bug etc. That premise is what gives it economic value, since we have a bunch of cars/emails/bugs that need driving/writing/fixing.
Sure, it's interesting to think about other things it could potentially achieve when we think out of the box and find use cases that fit it more, but the "old things" we need to do won't magically go away. So I think we should be careful about such overgeneralizations, especially when they're covertly used to hype the technology and maintain investments.
Media in this case is a plural of medium — something that both contains information and describes its interface.
I think the idea is a bit different than what you describe. New media contains in itself the essence of old media, but it does not necessarily supersede it. For example, we have theater and film.
This “rule” of media doesn’t help us predict how or whether AI will evolve, so it is difficult to relate it to hyping. It is an exclusionary heuristic for future predictions — it helps us exclude unlikely ones. But doesn’t help us come up with any.
I personally am hopeful that AI will evolve into something else that has more essence to it than mere function. But that’s just hope, which is rather less promising than hype.
Not a gmail invention perhaps, but also not per RFC. That some use it to mean something special is not in the RFC. Actually, a significant number of SMTP servers don't even implement the required parts of the related RFCs, let alone fancy things like plus handling.
You're right. Originally the + sign in an email address was an indicator to the Andrew Message System's delivery agent to process the email in an extensible way. The syntax was +<keyword>+<args>. As an example. you could use
"user+dir-insert+misc" to route the message to the "misc" directory in the user's mailbox structure. An unknown keyword would just get ignored and the mail delivered as usual, giving the behavior as used today.
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
Without any special car-charging equipment, just with a regular outlet, I'm able to get over 100 miles of range every night (charging only from 11pm to 7am).
This is enough for a pretty long daily commute and it doesn't block car use during normal hours.
Big disclaimer - I'm from Europe, which helps my case because of shorter commutes and faster home charging with 220 volts.
But at the end of the day I think the solution lies in equipping all parking spaces at home and at work with power outlets. DCFC is definitely needed, but should be viewed as a solution for exceptional cases (i.e. roadtrip that exceeds your range), not a gas station for EVs.
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