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Dutch intelligence service spied on phone of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (nltimes.nl)
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Cue the tariffs. Technically it was a Russian hacker that did the spying, the AIVD was along for the ride. What's more interesting is what they found on there, which is probably only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the kind of leverage the Russians seem to have over Trump & Co.
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Well, someone's got to.
The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden (berget.ai)
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Fair comparison. Texas just needs to flood the valleys of its famous mountain chain and collect the melted snow with dams to match Sweden's 40% hydro electricity production.
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They could just finish phasing out their coal for gas, which has been a big contributor to the US reducing carbon per watt. But where would Texas find gas?
Oh. We should probably stop using them then.
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Chat GPT output; do take with a grain of salt. TX generated 4x the absolute solar electricity as Sweden and 5x per person in the last 12 months.
Is getting in touch with nature, appreciating the value in things and protecting complex ecosystems really 'Acting Dead'? I would say 'Acting Dead' is actually sitting at home ordering on Amazon/Temu, watching brainless TikTok/Instagram/Netflix/YouTube videos, and talking to a transformer model all day.
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Both of those are entertainment. What work are either of those accomplishing? People need houses and food, and more people are happening. "Acting dead" is people who are getting in the way of providing for people.
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Ecosystems are incredibly important for human survival. Once they are gone, we are in a lot of trouble.
I think it’s along the lines of “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. These little micro optimizations take your attention and energy away from places that might be less visible and less enjoyable but more consequential.
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Whoever responds "we need to stay within our CO2 budgets, otherwise we'll be in real trouble in 20 years" with "being a hippie and organizing your life around recycling" is really building up some sort of weird straw man and not really usefully engaging in solving the problem.
And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas. Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)
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> And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas. And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.* For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.
Tell you what, I'll keep eating beef, walking to work, and not using AI. Closer to how our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years, so it can't be too off the mark.
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Are you also killing the cow like your ancestors did or are you letting some poorly paid immigrant do that for you?
Where did you get those stats from? Curious.
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A single burger (108g) results in emissions of 3-6kg of Co2 across its lifecycle One AI request is 0.38 g in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas (Tofu is about 0.1 to 0.3kg of Co2, Seitan about 0.1kg of Co2 per equivalent 100g)
and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away. but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.
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Livestock is 14.5% of global emissions. Food is about 1/3rd of each individual's emissions. A plant based diet can cut that by 50-75%. How is that not substantial?
The meat industry helps keep humans alive however, whereas the AI industry does not. I think the argument between the two needs to factor in the actual reason for the emissions. Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.
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Friends have described scenarios where ai has literally saved their life. Like, they were trying to commit suicide, they had no one human to talk to, but they did have AI.
Yeah I don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas. AI isn't latency sensitive. Put them in some remote location surely?
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They need to be near a high bandwidth fiber connection, but with relatively cheap land. So the outer edges of major cities are prime locations, with Ashburn VA being the prime example. There is no reason to put them further out because the added costs don't make sense and the data centers actually have minimal impact on the surrounding population outside of hyperventilating conspiracy theorists, Ashburn VA also being the prime example.
This I Believe (1952) (awakin.org)
It has not gotten any worse. The rapacious greed of politicians in service to their own interest has been universal since the beginning of politics.
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History would have some objections to what you believe. In defense of your position, however, the last 40 years (at least in the US) have been dominated by the ethos you describe, and the eras and the politicians who were not consumed by greed tend to be less common than the reverse.
THIS IS EDITED by the whoever owns the site. Might be slop generated. Few paragraphs are taken out to smooth it out.
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I think that this is the original: https://thisibelieve.org/essay/16630/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
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Results of that still up in the air.
Heinlein wasn't "regressive" but conservative. Your formulation indicates that it is you who might not be progressive but regressive since conservatism - same root as conservatorship - is a legitimate and, especially in good times, logical and effective strategy: keep that which works, change only that which needs changing and be careful not to change it too much or too fast lest you destroy that which worked. Heinlein wrote this in 1952 when the sky wasn't the limit anymore and people were reaching for the "stars" - well, low earth orbit anyway - so he had plenty of backing for his conservatism.
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> keep that which works you forgot the "pretend that everything works" part
That is not what conservativism as political ideology is. Like common, not clearly that and we have multiple years where this was made super clear by conservatives themselves. Conservativism has nothing to do with "conservatorship". They are not trying to conserve, they are trying to force radical change - sometimes to imaginary past and sometimes toward something completely new. And then violently keep it there regardless of needs of other people.
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This is like how Americans of the "conservative" bent use "liberal" as a perjorative, despite holding to liberal (or, occasionally, neoliberal) economic theory. I don't get America at all.
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