WTF is this garbage in the Graurdain? “Let’s assume!” is a terrible premise for even an opinion column to begin with, but “let’s assume Musk is right and AI could allow us all to not work” is… bananas for the Guardian to publish. Even before considering that the author’s bio says he’s a business owner of a technology and financial management services company.

Hormones are so weird.

Do your feet hurt more quickly than other people when you stand for a long time? I’m imagining that you might be less able to distribute the force compared to your size 10 shoe friend.

Did the huge phase of Trump small-hand mockery really suck for you?

This is what bothers me when I see the phrase “Trump’s war on Iran”. It both diminishes the responsibility of all of the other people making it happen and erases the atrocities occurring in other places directly affected by the conflict.

I’m glad Lebanon is finally getting some coverage but dismayed that it took so much violence to get around to that. I also wonder how many more places and people are getting no coverage at all. While it’s a largely separate conflict, the near total silence about the war in Sudan is a good example.

I noticed that too which is an extra reason why I figured I’d drop the link and name in. His posts about receiving an LLM-generated happy birthday is something I think about surprisingly frequently.

I’m not telling you to tolerate intolerance. I’m telling you that what you have attacked is something entirely unrelated to their intolerance, and actually perpetuates some of that intolerance.

It’s not like I’d be spared from concentration camps either, I’m part of a few demographics which have been some of the first targets of fascism too.

Dehumanization is a core mechanism of fascism. It’s not possible to eradicate fascism by using its tools. Your statement also stands in stark contrast with your position that empathy is the most important part of a person.

The problem is, we’re all capable of atrocities, even if some are much more easily convinced to participate than others. It’s an uncomfortable truth of being human. But we have the choice to attack the parts which are actually contemptible - their words and actions. Alienating people based on their physical appearance equally alienates the people who perceive themselves to have a physical similarity, even when they hold entirely opposite views. That collateral damage is neither necessary nor desirable.

I don’t doubt they hold ghoulish views, but it has nothing to do with their appearance. They look like older women fetishizing a revolting idol while subscribed to white supremacist ideals about youth and beauty. Describing them as “things” is dehumanizing in a similar way as they would likely dehumanize us. The more ideologically revolting members of our species are still people.

had their Nazis exterminated (not all of them, but “enough”)

Did they though?

There were 177 defendants at the Nuremberg and other trials, 142 were convicted and 25 sentenced to death. But the The Office of Chief Counsel for War Crimes had identified 2,500 major war criminals, and the United States forces arrested almost 100,000 Germans as war criminals.

Even if we assume that 2500 number is truly the number of major war criminals responsible for the genocide and enslavement of millions, that comes out to a 5.68% (142/2500) conviction rate, and 1% death rate (not all 25 died by execution).

It seems unlikely that the genocide and enslavement of over 10 million people was the responsibility of only 142 people, let alone 25.

What happened to the rest of them? Many of them used the Ratlines. Germany may never have recovered from it’s Nazi problem, it may simply have exported some of it.

People. They’re people. Objectionable people with grotesque views, but people nonetheless.

It was very good, and I’m glad I clicked through to the link to Robert Kingett’s story “The Colonization of Confidence”, which deserves its own highlight.

Even if the constant reminders that I’m trapped in the machine are painful.

Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade

In the 1930’s, IBM subsidiary companies were responsible for the census data and concentration camp cataloguing systems in Nazi Germany (and it’s invaded territories). The numbers tattooed on prisoners were five-digit IBM Hollerith numbers, corresponding to their dedicated punch card. With an estimated 40k+ camps of different types, the machine leases would have been very lucrative for IBM. They won’t say how lucrative, and they made sure they had complex financial setups through “neutral” countries.

IBM systems also underpinned the concentration “internment” camps in the US holding people of Japanese background. But of course, they’re much louder about their 1930’s history in winning the US Social Security contract - older SSNs were also Hollerith numbers.

It would be amusing that punch cards were a more secure system if history didn’t look like it was rapidly repeating.

I have an acquaintance who was interning at Block until a couple of weeks ago. All of the team they were on was laid off except the manager, and everyone who remained got a pay rise. They’ve taken out the people who actually do the work and kept the managers, who are arguably most effectively replaced by AI… It makes so little sense.

There was a controversial article in Slate from a decade ago about “double hit” drivers killing people because of the perception that paying the compensation for someone’s death was cheaper than paying for someone’s lifelong disability care, might that be it?

But even if true, that still seems a little different than what “paying to get out of murder” implies.

They executed Bai Tianhui a few months ago for taking $156 million in bribes in his role as a financial services manager. If he couldn’t buy his way out of a bribery conviction, I’m not sure how much buying your way out of a murder would cost.

They also jailed the former justice minister 3 years ago for life for concealing his brother’s crimes and taking bribes, so I’m guessing that even if it used to be a popular option, it might be a bit harder now.

Ok, now I understand, thanks for the crash course on dc cooling!

I assumed scale was my issue but having only second-hand knowledge of coastal larger-scale cooling systems was the big part of my problem. Then I couldn’t understand why they were building them inland, especially with the mineralization issue when drawing from inland reservoirs. So I thought that might be a tax jurisdiction reason, plus comparative cost of metal or pump heat exchange setups, especially because Altman said they weren’t using evaporative cooling (not that he’s a trustworthy source).

But this made it all click:

both of these mean extra capex and/or energy use, but evaporating water is cheap, so it’s done instead. it doesn’t help that one of dc ratings is ratio of how much energy gets into dc to how much energy powers actual silicon.

They were always optimizing for the cost, but I didn’t know about this regulation. Water usage is probably either absent from the regulations or a minimal contribution to it, so they’ve used it as the trade-off without adequate (if any) modeling for impact. They’ve probably since done a little of that and found it’s pretty catastrophic. A little extra reading indicates the 2-8 million gallons is the supply per day by the county, and not total (re)circulating water in the dc, which implies evaporative cooling and aligns with what you’re saying about it being the cheapest solution.

Cool, everything is yet again awful, but at least it makes sense on some level. I have been educated, and I again thank you for your effort in that.

Ok that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

The data center nearest to me works a bit differently, I know they use sea-water for their HVAC because they share the pipes with other buildings using it for the same purpose, and I was lucky enough to get a tour of the system in one of those buildings a few years back. It’s multi-storey so perhaps I simply didn’t notice the windcatcher parts in the architecture.

But that obviously means it’s also near the coast and therefore not the driest biome from the start. I don’t doubt it still impacts the ecosystem but at least it’s not draining the potable reserves at the same time. To me this begs the question of why they’re building these data centers so far inland.

As a side note, it’s pretty amazing we still do the windcatcher setup. They’ve always been fascinating to me, but I can’t help but be amazed they’re still relevant even in the highest tech buildings.

Reposting the comment I made in the other thread here too:

The bottom half is a cropped section of the top, which unfortunately detracts from the very real tragedy of the far too many people pictured.

Thanks for giving it a go, I mostly hoped there might be someone who had some experience in the area who could shed some light. But the numbers were certainly interesting. Then the pivot to AI post went up 30 mins after I posted and shed a little light on the while thing too.

It would seem odd to put the heated water back instead of cooling it off and re-using, but I don’t have faith in any kind of sustainability designed or built into the system, so that would make sense for impact.

If they’re being quiet about it, it means one or two things. Either they’re actually considering it proprietary new tech, but there would almost certainly be patents filed somewhere for that case, and/or they have something they’re not proud to announce. I have no idea what words would be used for a patent here, being an area well outside my expertise, but I’ve not heard any patents mentioned, so I’m going to assume it’s squarely the shame reason.

The protonmail thing… I just assume nothing I do is private and keep all my services as decoupled as possible to make me more annoying to track down, should the situation arise that I become somehow not boring. One day I’ll set up something more private and annoying, but I have a long list of todos that never become todones…

Imagine saying that in a Slack channel filled with journalists and thinking it wouldn’t be leaked.

Because they’re using them in their products, or the non-public infrastructure that keeps the product running, or their teams are using them internally.

Check the licenses of the projects you listed. If they allow free commercial use, you can assume those products are key to the software somewhere.

Don’t underestimate how much of big tech is made of OSS - companies will always take free stuff. They pay them because if the projects die or are compromised, so are their paid products.