I don’t know the answers to a lot of these questions, I assume they heat up the water, and dump it back into the rivers, which causes some disruption to the local ecosystem. Which is fine if you do it in small amounts, but it will disrupt things. (powerplants have the problem for example that some flora/fauna gets attracted to these more warmer waters, risking clogs and more. (so a datacenter does this twice, first via the powerplant generating power, and then to cool the datacenter).

There is also the issue of contamination, while I assume they don’t put extra dirty things in the water, this is not a guarantee, nor will every municipality/gov just go with the assumption that it is clean, I assume that in some places this cooling water will need to be cleaned extra as industrial waste. Esp when there are some odd laws interacting. (I know some of those laws re waste and what counts as waste interact weirdly in .nl causing weird busywork during roadwork so they don’t run into extra costs by accidentally letting the waste count as a different class of waste).

But yes, I think they do not recirculate, and just pump it round and dump it back into the river directly (so no evaporative cooling where the water goes into the air, which you had at some powerplants, the big towers), and I assume they don’t use lead pipes so the water isn’t very contaminated. But these sort of processes do put a strain on the water quality. (In .nl we have some problems with river water quality because our big rivers come from industrial areas of other countries, (Germany mainly)).

I mostly posted it so that we now at least have some indication of the amounts we are talking about, as tech companies are very tight lipped about this. But as somebody who knows nothing, I do not know all the implications of it. I am however suspicious, due to a combination of natural paranoia, them being very mum about it, and me not trusting the big tech places.

But yeah, if they use up 90% of the daily flow of a river and heat it up, that will absolutely not be good for the local ecosystem. And any industrial site downstream who also wanted to use the water for cooling now also in trouble.

Bit like the same reason I posted about protonmail, more an FYI than a sneer (not a huge shock that eventually protonmail would reveal the data if forced by their gov, they always said they would do this, but it is an important thing to take into account if you worry about privacy).

404 media: Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester.

I know several people who are trying to learn new languages for either fun or actually following courses and it is noticable how less engaged with the language people are who use duolingo. Dont think any Duolingo main ever dropped an interesting language factoid on me.

Wonder what would have happened if they had not stopped after 31 tries. Sure it gave a goodish answer once, but was that just a luck of the draw? A proper evaluation imho shouldnt stop when you get a good answer once, esp as bad results tend to not get published. (Also, as always somebody might have found the answer already online).

It is also silly in some ways as I wonder how hard it is for people to evaluate the 31 results and not get stuck in pursuing an earlier false lead.

Always a good sign when people call normal security concerns that. Hackers love that. /s

What a fool. A proper scientist would test for a bigger N. Drop your phone in the pool again Why.

So the water usage of data centers/ai has long been controversial (either a huge issue/a non issue/distraction depending on who you ask) and the lack of real numbers around it made it hard to know more (but data center owners keeping it a secret made it sus). But now the stats of one google data center have been released due to legal pressure. 2-8 million gallons a day

Sorry, I was referring to a part of the Prince of Darkness movie

Words on computer screen: “You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED!”

As that movie has people sending messages back from the future using dreams plot element.

The god Plutonium will save me.

It is amazing in a way, as in .nl our anti piracy org (brein) already went after local AI models for copyright infringement. While people in power still think we should go all in on AI. Sadly people with tech skills are rare in gov (politicians who go after the votes of tech enthousiasts otoh).

Military planners in Taiwan, SK and Japan are prob shitting bricks right now.

Wonder how hard it was to filter out the HOI4 results.

It wasnt just one like almost all of them were bad. The worst one was a vid where they went ‘they did great things with colors, see how the rebels constantly wear yellow and red clothing to symbolize the fire of the rebellion’ only half the outfits they called orange were just brown, and their supporting arguments on this from things which were said clearly were about other thematicnthings which they missed.

I purged them from my history to try and make the algo stop however.

Unrelated to that, also saw a guy do a deep dive on the themes of a movie (not andor). Only to admit he had only seen the movie once. Which is quite a thing to admit.

Considering the war with Iran (and how some people will just blame anything that goes wrong on AI), this is quite the PR mastermove from Altman.

There cant be a bank run if there is no bank.

I myself unfollowed Masnick a while back because I knew I would eventually push back on some of his shit and it would lead to me getting into stupid timewasting discussions. Nice to see im not the only one annoyed.

The blind leading the blind. Because so many stuff on yt is so bad.

(Recently the algorithm decided I wanted some analysis of Andor. And oof).

Seems like it, before they just used to word ‘innovation’ to do the same thing. A think which drives me mad re dutch politics. (We have a problem that our farms produce to much nitrogen, and instead of doing anything about it our govs keep going ‘we will invest in innovation’, which means nothing. It just pushes the ball forward, and more and more stuff gets shut down because of the nitrogen problems (building buildings for example). But the word innovation polls well and feels proactive).

And while this is very specific to the nitrogen problem, people have been doing this with climate change for decades as well. (see also how AI is replacing the word innovation there).

ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

Thats easy.

it’s more complicated than this, sorry, but this oversimplification is basically true

Wait so it isnt true and it is true? Nice to notice your own confusion/reluctance (yeah im a broken record on the Rationalists not doing Rationalism) Also weird way to teach math. This makes me wonder if he understands math at all.

Edit sneer

He also threatens an Anti-Stochastic-Parrot FAQ.

So, he is a crypto Stochastic Parrot?