Just cause there is a new slew of "AI doesn't use much water" apologisms around. True if you massage the numbers. But _where_ in the physical world is the water taken and from whom?
Bloomberg.com
The AI Boom Is Draining Water From the Areas That Need It Most
A Bloomberg News analysis finds that roughly two thirds of new data centers built or in development in the US since 2022 are in places with high le...
Also ich wäre nicht böse, wenn sich Can'tzler als Kurzname von Merz durchsetzen würde. #cantzler
Really enjoyed the "Permacomputing principles"
principles
 (via @npub1fkl8...qagr ) Especially loved "Strict utilitarianism impoverishes. Uselessness also has an important place, so appreciate it."
The whole "AI" thing should have reignited conversations on what "creations" and "creativity" and "authorship rights" mean. Like it seems to have settled on "we take it all, stochastic parrot goes brrrr" and "copyright über alles". Feels like a missed opportunity.
The heading is a bit misleading. GPT usage is not "not bad for the environment", many people just have other worse habits in their lives. (Of course there is always a conversation that needs to happen about the outcome: Flying for shits and giggles or flying to meet a dying relative for a last time have the same CO2 footprint but are not the same. Those kinds of cheet sheets evade actual conversations by making everything abstract and without context)
Mastodon
Simon Willison (@simon@simonwillison.net)
I'm glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the "personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment" message https://andym...
Geoffrey Hinton is the literal, proper _worst_. Not only through his baseless boosterism of so-called "AI" with claims of "it will be smarter than us soon" or by training the next generation of hucksters (Meta's LeCunn as well as OpenAI's Sutskever were his students) but by telling people not to study important fields (like radiology) because "the AI will do that". Now we have labor shortages in those sectors (
The “Godfather of AI” Predicted I Wouldn’t Have a Job. He Was Wrong. | The New Republic
) meaning people get diagnoses too late and therefore will die. Just cause some tech dude had a clever idea at some point we should not listen to his rambling on about other topics when he's old. This fucks up our world.
Business Insider
'Godfather of AI' says he's 'glad' to be 77 because the tech probably won't take over the world in his lifetime
Geoffrey Hinton estimated a "sort of 10 to 20% chance" that AI systems could one day seize control, but stressed it's impossible to predict exactly.
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A team from the University of Zurich manipulated people on a subreddit for months with their AI bots to see "if they could change people's minds". Their bots pretended to be victims of sexual assault, pretended to be black people against the Black lives matter movement etc. massively maipulative shit. And they did not inform anyone. Nobody on that subreddit consented to being experimented on. Their excuse "psychological manipulation of OPs on this sub is justified because the lack of existing field experiments constitutes an unacceptable gap in the body of knowledge". When I say that I don't believe that academia is a huge help in us curbing the negative effects #AI will have, this is what I mean. The thing went through ethics boards and shit. Disgusting. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/
"Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs" People would rather buy older processors that aren't that much less powerful but way cheaper. The "AI" benefits obviously aren't worth paying for.
XDA
Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs
It turns out older Raptor Lake systems are flying off the shelves.
"We are the other, and the other is us. If we abandon those in need, we abandon ourselves. We become diminished. You can choose to hate, or you can choose to love—this is the fundamental political choice." (How to reply to Fascists)
Roger Hallam
🗨️ "Why Not?": How to Reply to Fascists
The fundamental human truths that the liberal establishment has long since abandoned, and without which it sinks ever deeper into it own irrelevanc...
Every time I see some person from Huggingface show their prototypes it's the same toxic garbage that OpenAI et. al. are selling. The same patterns of LLM use that will destroy the web and the structures built on it. Why does that company still get all that credit? Just case they host your shit for free?