Not sure I agree with that. I’ll take an unexpected five bucks because of Red Bull’s false advertising that some ingredient doesn’t have literal energy (calories) to it. I wouldn’t start my own lawsuit over it, which may or may not be as successful. More importantly, every class action notice I’ve ever gotten had instructions to opt out and initiate my own legal action if I so choose. Also, if we’re talking about a class that includes thousands/millions of people, there are only so many lawyers involved in whatever specialty.

Tl;dr class actions penalize companies on behalf of those who wouldn’t realistically file their own lawsuit while still allowing those who would.

You sure about that? 👀

I wasn’t commenting on what should morally or legally be. I’m just saying that if there’s, say, 1 million plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit it’s not realistic to expect 3 million dollars (minus attorneys fees) in each person’s bank account. That would be 3 trillion dollars, not including whatever punitive damages end up being. There’s a practical issue to be considered.

I find a lot more “soul” in older electronics. So many devices today are a minimalist thing with a touchscreen (or worse, thing controlled by your phone), probably designed to force you into a subscription. At least consumerism from a few decades ago operated by innovating to make you want to buy a new product, rather than designing it to be a trap.

Going back to the “soul” bit: I recently bought a Bang and Olufsen Beosystem 2500 (look it up) for my office. It’s a stereo from the very early 90s that cost thousands of dollars in its day. It sounds amazing, and has little touches that just make it cool. Like motorized glass doors that are motion activated, with warm accent lighting when the unit is on. The tape player didn’t work when I bought it, but I was able to replace the belt and now my childhood Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego soundtrack tape is playable again! And with an Aux input, I can also use it for modern stuff too to take advantage of what we’ve gained in media playback since ~1991.

I thought the same thing for a moment, until I realized that’s for one person. Now imagine a similar class action lawsuit. Of course it’s not realistic to expect that dollar amount multiplied by that many people, but it could be a pretty significant dent.

I wasn’t expecting good news in the world of AI today, but I’ll take it!

Now the question is, which Jenga block is being pulled?

That will be fake because she’s not saying what I want to hear!

Also, you’ll notice that I specifically mentioned electrical energy. Electrical power is almost universally measured in watts, the product of voltage and current, not joules per second (even if that’s the same thing). So going from instantaneous power measurements to energy accumulated over time, it’s not crazy to use the term “watt second” the way one would use “kilowatt hour”… Even if that’s also called a “Joule”

I generally get skeptical when people go out of their way to use weird units. I don’t disagree with the message, just the way it’s conveyed whether it’s this or giving the price in Zimbabwean dollars (outside of Zimbabwe, of course). If something is weird, one should ask why. And I wish this headline didn’t make things weird leading people to ask why.

@Cort@lemmy.world spoke for me perfectly. When you make things weird, I have to start by assuming malice or incompetence - both of which should be red flags.

No doubt AI is sucking a lot of electricity and that presents loads of problems to consider. But instead of (for example) 5 seconds being converted to an hour running a microwave (because who even does that?) how about 3 minutes being about as much as a typical American home uses in a day? Or something like that?

But they don’t use that either in the context of real-world electricity usage. Maybe in the middle school classroom setting, when you can make up the numbers you work with, but when I’m trying to quantify how much energy something uses at home I multiply how many watts it uses by now many hours it’s running. Divide that by 1000 for kilowatt-hours, and multiply by $.11 to know the cost to do it at home. If I need to do a multiplication/division of 3.6 million when nobody else is, something’s not right.

Similarly, a meter is a standard unit for length, but we don’t use it when measuring the distance to different galaxies because light-years are more practical at that scale. If you start using meters you’d get some funny looks, just as I’m feeling for joules instead of kilowatt-hours. But you know, “almost a kilowatt-hour” makes for a pretty boring headline.

Ok, but when it comes to electrical energy nobody uses “watt seconds” in the real world. Devices use hundreds of watts, and run for minutes and hours. Dividing by 3.6 million isn’t exactly easy mental math to get the unit (kWh) we all see on our electric bills.

Thank you for the conversion. We have a common unit for electrical energy already, and megajoules is not it. Trying to make it sound like a bigger number by changing the unit only muddies the waters and honestly makes me slightly less sympathetic to the issue.

To whose detriment?

Ehhh, I kinda get it. I like humanity; it’s pretty neat. I don’t like slurs denigrating certain groups of humans. I don’t like AI being pushed to replace human things and being personified in its own way. This is one of the rare times that a slur is used against a non-human AND was simply declared to be intended as a slur from the beginning, rather than having some history driving it.

To your point about the motivation being important: what of the motivation do you see as a problem? I see a resistance to AI replacing important characteristics of humanity. That’s a pretty good one, I’d say.

My understanding is that it was a word created to have a similar usage/meaning to the n-word, but towards not-actually-sentient computers. It was never used against any class of people, to my knowledge.

Another thing to check, do you pre-warm the bottle? If not, it will absorb the heat of (ie, cool down) the coffee as soon as you pour it in. But if you get scalding hot water from your faucet or a kettle, pour it in, wait a minute, and dump it you will have a warm bottle that won’t feel the need to take as much heat from the coffee.

focus on the deportation of violent criminals

Just as ICE has been doing, right? All those people charging their cars in Minneapolis without the right skin color - all of them were suspected violent criminals when ICE started asking for their paperwork?

Grams are a measure of weight (well, mass if you want to be really specific). Tablespoons are a measure of volume. In order to do a proper comparison you need to know density.

Because metric plans things nicely, a gram is one milliliter of water. 4 tbsp is 59.15ml. So… Yeah, pretty damn close to 60, but again that’s when working with water. I would imagine chili flakes are a little less dense and might throw that calculation off a bit.

Why the fuck does the floor plan include a gun range?