Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • These charges are complete bullshit but it’s not a bad thing to have one political party investigate TF out of the other one and bring charges ASAP when they’re in power! That’s their job!

    Both parties will say the other one is corrupt and oftentimes they’re both right! If there’s laws being violated, prosecute TF out of them as quickly as possible.

    The whole concept of we’re not going to investigate or bring charges against our political enemies (who have committed wrongdoing) is bullshit. The only way for “a country to heal” is to prosecute the criminals and malfeasants.

    And since they’re politicians serving the public, their punishments should be the max! 😤




  • WTF? Have you ever been in a data center? They don’t release anything. They just… Sit. And blink lights while server fans blow and cooling systems whir, pumping water throughout.

    The cooling systems they use aren’t that different from any office building. They’re just bigger, beefier versions. They don’t use anything super special. The Pfas they’re talking about in this article are the same old shit that’s used in any industrial air conditioner.

    For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a data center uses 10 times more cooling as an equivalently sized office building. I don’t know about you, but everywhere that I’ve seen data centers, there’s loads and loads of office buildings nearby. Far more than say 10 for every data center.

    My point is this: If you’re going to be bitching about pfas and cooling systems, why focus on data centers (or AI, specifically) when there’s all these damned office buildings? Instead, why don’t we talk about work from home policies which would be an actual way to reduce pfas use.

    This article… Ugh. It’s like bitching that electric car batteries can catch fire, pretending that regular cars don’t have a much, much higher likelihood of catching fire and there’s several orders of magnitude more of them.

    Are Pfas a problem? Yes. Are data centers anywhere near the top 1000 targets for non-trivially reducing their use? No.

    Aside: This is just like the articles bitching about data center water use… Data centers recycle their water! They have a great big intake when they’re done being built but then they’re done. They only need trivial amounts of water after that.


  • If that’s all we hear - is that the end? Not thimerosal. Not aluminum. Not MMR. Not Hep B.

    Correct! It’s not caused by any of those things. Just like it’s not caused by:

    • “Refrigerator mothers”
    • Not enough hugs
    • Trauma during childbirth
    • Being raised in an orphanage
    • Sugar
    • Food dyes and preservatives
    • HFCS
    • Eating too much fast food
    • WiFi or 5G
    • Humors
    • Fluoridated water
    • “Chemtrails”
    • Living near power lines

    So on and so forth. Maybe—just maybe—there’s no universal cause and it’s just something that can happen.

    Can there be things that increase the likelihood of an autistic child forming in a mother’s womb? Surely! But that’s the kind of thing that relies on statistics. Ya know, that thing you obviously don’t trust because you never let go of the “vaccines cause autism” bullshit.

    I have no doubt that after many, many decades of research—and maybe with the help of some big data/AI—we can figure out what sorts of things actually increase the likelihood of autism. It’ll be probably something like: If you have these three genes and your partner has these other three genes then you should avoid eating venison while also consuming saccharine.

    Maybe we’ll get something better than that but if my experience with big data are any guide, the correlations are going to be wild and crazy like that… And they won’t really give you “an answer”, just places where a scientific investigation might be warranted.




  • Anthropic didn’t lose their lawsuit. They settled. Also, that was about their admission that they pirated zillions of books.

    From a legal perspective, none of that has anything to do with AI.

    Company pirates books -> gets sued for pirating books. Companies settles with the plaintiffs.

    It had no legal impact on training AI with copyrighted works or what happens if the output is somehow considered to be violating someone’s copyright.

    What Anthropic did with this settlement is attack their Western competitor: OpenAI, specifically. Because Google already settled with the author’s guild for their book scanning project over a decade ago.

    Now OpenAI is likely going to have to pay the author’s guild too. Even though they haven’t come out and openly admitted that they pirated books.

    Meta is also being sued for the same reason but they appear to be ready to fight in court about it. That case is only just getting started though so we’ll see.

    The real, long-term impact of this settlement is that it just became a lot more expensive to train an AI in the US (well, the West). Competition in China will never have to pay these fees and will continue to offer their products to the West at a fraction of the cost.



  • Also, stuff that gets mis-labeled as AI can be just as dangerous. Especially when you consider that the AI detection might use such labels to train itself. So someone who’s face is weirdly symmetrical might get marked as AI and then have hard time applying for jobs, purchasing things, getting credit, etc.

    I want to know what counts as AI. If someone uses AI to remove the background in an image or just to remove someone standing in the background is technically generative AI but that’s something you can do in any photo editor anyway with a bit of work.


  • Meh. Nothing in this article is strong evidence of anything. They’re only looking at a tiny sample of data and wildly speculating about which entry-level jobs are being supplanted by AI.

    As a software engineer who uses AI, I fail to see how AI can replace any given entry-level software engineering position. There’s no way! Any company that does that is just asking for trouble.

    What’s more likely, is that AI is making senior software engineers more productive so they don’t need to hire more developers to assist them with more trivial/time consuming tasks.

    This is a very temporary thing, though. As anyone in software can tell you: Software only gets more complex over time. Eventually these companies will have to start hiring new people again. This process usually takes about six months to a year.

    If AI is causing a drop in entry-level hiring, my speculation (which isn’t as wild as in the article since I’m actually there on the ground using this stuff) is that it’s just a temporary blip while companies work out how to take advantage the slightly-enhanced productivity.

    It’s inevitable: They’ll start new projects to build new stuff because now—suddenly—they have the budget. Then they’ll hire people to make up the difference.

    This is how companies have worked since the invention of bullshit jobs. The need for bullshit grows with productivity.


  • AI adds too many details. When a person draws an anime/cartoon character they will usually put in minimal details or they’ll simply paste the character on to an existing background (that could’ve been drawn by a different artist).

    AI doesn’t have human limitations so it’ll often add a ton of unnecessary details to a given scene. This is why the most convincing AI-generated anime pictures are of one or two characters in a very simple setting (e.g. a plain street/sidewalk) or even a white or gradient background.

    Humans can tell when art was put together by different artists. Such as when the background is a completely different style. AI doesn’t differentiate like that and will make the entire image using the exact style given by the prompt. So it’ll all look like it was “drawn” using the same exact style… Even though anime/cartoons IRL aren’t that uniform.