scarmig

3 ms·

1.
by scarmig 8d ago
You could, you know, stop spreading deception about water usage if it bothers you so much when people call out deception about water usage. At this point, I almost consider it trolling to bring it up: purposely throw in something incredibly
2.
by scarmig 8d ago
No, I don't. If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to at least indicate that they
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by scarmig 8d ago
Sure, let's do a more local comparison. Wasco County, where the Dalles is located: Irrigation: 17.9B gallons/year Fisheries: 9.7B gallons/year So, the datacenter at the Dalles uses a shocking 2% of the amount of water used fo
4.
by scarmig 8d ago
> Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water Compare: > Annual water withdrawals in Oregon since 1985 have ranged from 7.3M to 9.4M acre-feet (AF) https://www.oregon.gov/owrd/WRDPublicat
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by scarmig 8d ago
There was construction of some data center, and someone's well water started looking dirty around the same time. From there it metasisized into claims that it's destroying all the world's water.
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by scarmig 8d ago
Someone complaining about water usage is a very strong indicator that they aren't well-informed enough to contribute anything worth reading, though.
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by scarmig 9d ago
As the sibling comment points out, that is incorrect: they solved a smaller, simpler problem, and OAI solved the actual Millennium Problem. But even if they had solved the actual problem and OAI stole it by digging through chats, that hardl
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by scarmig 9d ago
Yeah, it's been over a week since a Millennium Problem was solved. AI has hit a wall.
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by scarmig 11d ago
Then: "LLMs only cured cancer as a marketing stunt."
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by scarmig 15d ago
The dominant opinion on HN is, apparently, "It's been a full four days since OpenAI resolved Navier-Stokes, they must be hitting a wall."
11.
by scarmig 23d ago
Note that Caplan is focusing on medians and percentiles in his table, not on means.
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by scarmig 23d ago
I do kind of get the point that ensuring Boomers who have a lot of wealth in real estate can pass a paid off house to their heirs isn't a socially valuable goal (especially since Social Security is funded by working people, including m
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by scarmig 24d ago
Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal c
14.
by scarmig 24d ago
But even those concessions have been a shift: at every point, he's been as bearish as possible on LLMs, often past credibility. And if you take it as a given that AI will never be any better than ~~now~~ a year ago, and that anyone who
15.
by scarmig 24d ago
Still a flaw--the SVG should account for how different client devices will render it! Existential doom averted, for now.
16.
by scarmig 1mo ago
That's a pretty crass attempt to shift the burden of proof. You're stating that LLMs are definitively not conscious and never could be; I'm saying we should approach the question with a sense of humility and agnosticism since
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by scarmig 1mo ago
Why? What makes you so absolutely certain? 100% is a lot, which implies you do have at least some privileged understanding of consciousness.
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by scarmig 1mo ago
My argument isn't that current AI is definitively conscious or that it will be in the short term. It's that nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness, and that we should therefore approach questions of what's conscious an
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by scarmig 1mo ago
No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of unders
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by scarmig 1mo ago
Unfortunately, that's not the case in the United States. The LOC only selects around half of published books to be permanently held. The rest are disposed of (usually returning them to the publisher, donating them to a library, or dest
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by scarmig 1mo ago
The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.
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by scarmig 1mo ago
Is your complaint that they follow copyright law, or that they don't follow copyright law?
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by scarmig 1mo ago
Dumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in. Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to s
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by scarmig 1mo ago
Relinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute th
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by scarmig 1mo ago
You've got to compare it to the alternative. Books have a half-life, and the vast majority of these books being purchased are grody, moldering ex-lib copies of books that no one has read in decades. Their other likely outcome is mulchi
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by scarmig 1mo ago
The hypothetical "heroic figure goes and buys last copy of a 1962 guide to Ford cars to carefully maintain it in an appropriately climate controlled library" is vanishingly unlikely. A ten or a hundred or a thousand times to one,
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by scarmig 1mo ago
Yes. Otherwise, you open the door for every criminal to use "oopsie" as their defense.
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by scarmig 1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up A movie fit for our time. You can produce detailed descriptions of the incident, verified by adversarial parties, and some people will still scream "it's a conspi
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by scarmig 1mo ago
California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.
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by scarmig 1mo ago
> we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates Jesus.

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