Well, taking that to extremes, you could have called it 2.01 at IIRC 5:00 AM Eastern time this morning as parts of Kiribati experienced the start of February at that time.
Situation: Relations between Canada & the USA are at their worst in living memory. The Republican party under Trump is broadly hated in Canada and represents an existential threat to our nation.
Conservatives: How about we adopt a bunch of signature Republican policies? That'd be good, right? cbc.ca/news/politics/conservat…
Yes and and. Yes; and LLMs commonly build on IP piracy; and assorted other AI systems are resource hogs; and much AI, using LLMs or not, is used ignorantly, with poor control.
People keep citing water/energy use to me and I remain unconvinced. The single best thing you can do for the planet is to have one less kid. A distant #2 and #3 are avoiding cars and flights: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.…
If you are a vegan monk who never drives and also hates LLMs, good for you: you have my respect and admiration. But I don't think this is what's motivating most people's arguments.
Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT. Simon P. Couch notes that …
BTW I am a childless vegetarian who drives a hybrid but mostly bikes and buses (ask my coworkers – they think I'm very eccentric), but that doesn't matter because that's not what this is about. People just want a rhetorical slam-dunk and they think they've found it.
@simon had a great comment on Lobsters where he pointed out that nobody seemed to care much about these things until LLMs came along, and they still only seem interested insofar as it applies to LLMs: lobste.rs/s/cw6f2s/ai_tribalis…
I'm sure some people have sincere moral qualms, but the vast majority of what I read online reads like bad faith to me; I'm sorry. I don't like being rude, but I will point out sloppy thinking when I think it's justified.
There was actually a really interesting TPAC session a few years ago that explored how the W3C could help sustainability efforts. There's a lot to consider here: hardware production (e.g. e-waste), server vs client energy usage, network costs, etc. youtube.com/watch?v=o8avSFOuT8…
There's now also a Sustainable Web Design Community Group that's put out a set of guidelines, which mostly read to me as sensible best practices around UX design, performance, and accessibility: w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-g…
This space still feels under-explored to me. I'd like to see a breakdown of _everything_ big tech is doing that's counter to sustainability. For example, how much e-waste could Apple save by pushing Safari updates to older iPhones and iPads? How much could Google save by streaming lower-resolution YouTube videos?
And no, this is not "whataboutism" – I'm trying to put things into _context_, because context matters. If you read the article at the top of this thread, you'll see that recycling basically does nothing for climate, even though it "feels good" to do it. How much time did we waste, and how much further along could we be in our climate commitments, if we hadn't been so distracted?
I also won't hide that I'm somewhat pessimistic about all these efforts: at that TPAC session, I mentioned the Jevons Paradox and basically argued that if YouTube were 5% faster, then people would consume 5% more YouTube. Nothing about human behavior that I've seen in my lifetime has convinced me otherwise, although I'm sure there are still improvements we can make at the margins.
At heart I'm basically a degrowther who thinks the only reasonable solution to the climate crisis, species collapse, pollution, and all the rest is to dramatically reduce our consumption of the Earth's resources. But I'm also enough of a realist that I don't think we'll go there willingly – I think degrowth will be forced on us.
This is a very emotional topic for a lot of people, so I don't really want to get into it. And I'm hardly an expert; these are just my opinions based on what I've read.
The only reasonable solution is to do whatever we can to invent better tech to solve these problems. Society will not accept degrowth (not until it's far, far too late), and a solution a society won't accept may as well be worthless from a Realpolitik perspective, even if it would solve the problem in theory.
I think we're doing extremely good work on that front. Solar is on an exponential growth curve right now (and we need more people talking about it), so are batteries, and batteries+solar will, sans environmental regulation, solve the energy problem in most places. In places where there's lots of sunlight and no demand for it, think deserts, solar can be used to capture carbon dioxide. That's extremely inefficient energy-wise, but it's not like people will use that sunlight for anything else, so it doesn't even matter. You can even capture it into biofuels afaik, which is another way to produce free energy that can easily be transported to places where solar won't work. There's also some very interesting work being done in making geothermal more economical and available in many, many more places, and that's basically infinite free energy again. Worst case scenario, we'll just let the Chinese build us nuclear reactors, they're doing a lot of that and know how to do it safely, quickly and cheaply, which the western world definitely does not.
The real problems we need to solve are a lot more prosaic. Making sure misguided environmental regulation doesn't slow down the switch from coal to solar (and accelerate the collapse of human civilization) just to save a rare species of frogs is one of them. Incidentally, this is the reason why Texas is building out far more solar than California for example, but this is far from just a US problem. We need to make sure there are no tariffs on Chinese solar, Chinese rare metals, Chinese batteries and Chinese EVs. In parallel, we need to make sure we're building all of those ourselves in the western world, and that there are no misguided regulations solving a small problem but causing a bigger one that prohibit us from doing this. We need to start building out nuclear now, because nuclear takes a long time to build. We might regret this in the future, but better to waste money building something we don't need than to not build it and have to use non-renewables. We have to figure out what to do with existing coal mines (in places where they still exist) and how to close them down as quickly as we can, despite the miners and their labor unions. We need to make sure that the government-associated, monopolist power companies aren't doing anything stupid to slow down the deployment of consumer solar. And when we've done all of that, we should do a carbon tax, to make it more economical for companies to invest in renewables than to stay where they are.
And re: LLMs specifically. Unlike basically any other technology, LMs have very light bandwidth and latency requirements, so you can plop an AI data center in the middle of Saudi Arabia and serve the world from there. If we're so concerned about LLM energy use, we should encourage companies to set AI datacenters up where energy is free and abundant, instead of in places where the regulatory environment is the friendliest.
@simon I remain conflicted in my feelings towards LLMs. But one thing I know for certain is that I'm not any more concerned about copyright infringement in the era of AI than I was at any other time.
The copyright argument personally hits me very differently. I feel very conflicted about that one but also kind of feel like the toothpaste is out of the tube.
I personally feel quite strongly that copyright, and patents are a net negative to society. But I still feel like the plagiarism machines shouldn't be allowed within our current framework. Unless we get Mickey mouse in the public domain, OpenAI shouldn't get to treat all our shit as a public domain.
I personally don't care if people who write code using LLMs get the benefit of any and all of my published code having been included in the training data, even without attribution. Let that code be used by any means to create more accessible user interfaces. And yes, I should have been explicit about that by dual-licensing AccessKit (my main open-source project) under Apache and Creative Commons CC0 rather than Apache and MIT. Just wasn't thinking about that in 2021.
At the same time, I worry that code that I write with the help of LLMs may be tainted because of the uncertain legal status of the training data. I especially don't want AccessKit's adoption, and hence its effectiveness in making more user interfaces accessible, to be hampered in any way by such concerns. So I may just not use LLMs at all when working on AccessKit.
So I guess my copyright concern ends up being more practical than ethical.
Spent an absolute age pulling network cables through conduit today. Does anyone have any tips for how to make it stress-free? I’m going to try cable lube next time.
A very nice first day at FOSDEM. I spent time at the @matrix booth and met overwhelmingly enthusiastic people, then left it to our fabulous team of volunteers.
I’ve met Allan and @jsparber at the @gnome booth, got one of those fabulous systemd T-shirts, said hi to the @postmarketOS gang, got a T-shirt and brainstormed with @pabloyoyoista, got to thank Proxmox and OpenTofu for the great tools they provide.
Provided to YouTube by DistroKidSo Unfair · Sophia James · Sophia James · Mason Sacks · Chad Wackerman · Sophia JamesSo Unfair℗ Sophia JamesReleased on: 2025...
#Meta is blocking links to ICE List, a public website that documents ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents using information the agents made public about themselves. Users of #Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are now prevented from sharing the site. link.mail.beehiiv.com/ss/c/u00…
Me to Alexa: "What's the score in the Kentucky mens' college basketball game?" Alexa's response: "Kentucky is leading Arkansas 85 to 77 with zero milliseconds remaining in the second half at the end of the second half." Uh, somehow I seriously doubt anyone's gonna get anything done with what, by her definition, must be at most 0.00099999999999999999999999999999… seconds left on the clock.
Not only does the public not support ICE’s current brutal tactics, there is no public support for mass deportation beyond criminal migrants. In this poll, and it is consistent with public opinion going back 20 years, Americans oppose deporting long settled undocumented immigrants by 65%-22% open.substack.com/pub/roberthu…
Okay, here's a silly poll, length one day. If you do not eat either of these for any reason, please don't vote. Also you can boost for reach if you want. Which of the following do you prefer?
oh darn. I can't resist a new release. I just made Spanish sound a hell of a lot better. Gosh darn gosh darn. I fixed sharpnesses in words like "notification" and the "SH" sound now has more lippyness, not just teethy.
Has anyone used a Pebble K380s? Even though logi options is installed function keys do not work for sending things like f4 f3 and others without having to hold down the function key. Is this fixable or am I just totally fucked here?
now that we know #JeffreyEpstein was paying m00t to keep #4Chan open and available for pedos like him and that he specifically requested to keep /pol/ going no matter what, let me bring this oldie but goodie:
❝ QAnon was created by Trump’s fascists to take attention away from the Anons working on Opeation Death Eaters and the Jeffrey Epstetn case.
Send a message right now to the Department of Homeland Security’s #Tribal Affairs Director demanding that Tribal citizens #stop being terrorized by #ICE’s #racial profiling and that ICE release any Tribal citizens in ICE detention now. click.actionnetwork.org/ss/c/u…
Minnesota has 11 federally recognized Tribes and due to ICE and CPB’s racial profiling, Tribal citizens are increasingly reporting being stopped, questioned, assaulted, and detained by federal agents.
I did something goofy at work today: we found a tactile drawing set, which includes a tactile protractor with a movable pointer in the middle of it. I was talking and moving the pointer in the middle of the protractor, according to the loudness of my voice, as though it were a VU meter!! People around me must’ve thought I was nuts ha ha ha. #proAudio #homerecording #WomenInSound
Lol this is how you know you're a true audio nerd. I don't think I'd ever come up with an idea like that on my own, but I've done stuff like pretend whatever surface was in front of me is a piano and try playing it. Not entirely sure what the point of doing this was, there was no sound obviously, but I could just hear it in my head so that part didn't bother me. No idea if anyone could see me, but if they could I'm sure they thought I was a little weird
I just fixed up Spanish really well. It can now say the Palatal G sound correctly. It does not say "pay-ro" for pero. It's really nice now. Spanish SpeechPlayer is rockin' it. The palatal G phoneme tuning will help languages like German too in words like Icht.
Lately I've started doing laps around the house for exercise. Tonight I did 5 and a half laps at a speedwalk. Almost 6 when all was said and done. It may sound silly, but wow, that was a workout!
My friend took the bed that was in this room today! So now this is the cello room. It is the room where I will be playing cello. I’ve been playing very consistently for two months now so it was time to settle down.
Does anyone know what has APple done with recording videos in the Camera app, particularly with its “spatial recording” feature? When recording videos, it does something weird to the stereo field, sometimes putting things right in the center, at other times switching to some sort of pseudostereo. What am I missing?
Kinda wishing I was in Brussels right now. Of course, if it would be Austin -> NYC with a long layover -> Lisbon -> Brussels, like last time, then it wouldn't exactly be a short flight.
I decided that I was going to take a look at how much I'm spending and where. UFCU (my bank) automatically places my withdrawals into categories that it displays when I look at my recent transactions, but it sometimes gets things wrong (it thinks that Austin Current is travel, for instance, rather than a local news publication.) Regardless, I want my own categories, and I also need to look at Paypal and FNBO (for my credit card), neither of which define the same categories as UFCU, so UFCU's categories are useless to me. So now I have a tab-delimited file listing my expenses for the month, along with their dates and amounts, and I have a script that puts them into the categories that I want and tallies them, optionally for a specific date range, or, optionally, it can tally what I've spent at a specific place, rather than the category that I've placed it into. Most of my transactions are through FNBO, and I can download them to a .csv, and I also have a function that takes the csv and converts it to the format that I want, so now I have a semi-automated process for keeping the file up to date in the future. Anyway, I know that ynab exists for instance, and I have no idea how it compares to what I have, but I like my script.
For users of my Super Mario Maker 2 soundpack for #FastSM, another update has been posted, at the same link as always. This time, I've added the mention earcon, the same used in Tweese Cake, when you scroll over a post that mentions you, as present in the very latest FastSM commits. The pinned post sound has been changed as a result, now using the small, echoing ding that has previously been used as the geo tweet sound. x0box.xyz/uploads/soundpacks/S… @soundpackcentral
Very sleepy. Not sure y'all, might wait on an update for Speech player, kind of cool we're entering February so my "2.0" version can kind of match up now, will take a break from new releases until we've built up some improvements first.
Sean Goedecke wrote a thoughtful analysis of the recent Anthropic paper on AI and coding skill formation that has been going around: seangoedecke.com/how-does-ai-i…
@Bri It's an automagic door system that you swipe in with a fob and it opens. something somewhere is tripping it. I get about a day of normal functionality and then it stops. So now you can just...push the door open with your hand.
@Bri This is the third time it's happened, and each repair has taken about a month to get fixed. Haven't had a properly working door since November now.
5:45 and still nothing. Weather nerds say it could take another hour. This storm is hilarious. The radar looks like an unzipped jacket with the open space being dry.
Listen to ‘The Slow Rush’ now: https://TameImpala.lnk.to/TheSlowRushID Listen to more Tame Impala: https://TameImpala.lnk.to/TameImpalaID See Tame Impala on ...
so it's hardly a fucking surprise, but having the latest epstein dump confirm that the anti-SJW movement - and the whole anti-trans accusations of 'grooming' children - was orchestrated by and for the benefit of rich pedophile sex traffickers, framing us for their crimes, has me extremely angry.
next time someone brings up that shit I'm going to ask them point-blank how many degrees of separation they are from epstein.
If you're #ActuallyAutistic, you know just how much of a problem these things can be. For me personally, having the information about lighting and how to get service in advance would be a huge help.
Plan your visit at businesses and locations with sensory information and instructions, for and from the autistic community. Noise, lighting, smells, human load, payment methods, toilets and how to get service.
I'm sitting in the rocking chair in my living room. My cat has decided that she needs to lay down on the back of said chair, probably not even two inches from my head. Every 2 seconds she will swing her tail and wack me in the face. Lol
If you see an invitation to participate in a trans or genderqueer study sponsored by Northwestern University, steer clear. It's a rigged, unethical scheme to undermine access to care. Spread the word.
Jayson Smith
in reply to Tamas G • • •