Lvxferre

This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

I know that I shouldn’t, but here’s what I think about this whole deal, illustrated with a single image macro:

Get wrecked, Microsoft.

I think that the article does a good job highlighting how much of a trainwreck this is, because Microsoft is not to be trusted. The Windows users hysterically complaining about this are not expecting Microsoft to behave in some outrageous way; they’re expecting Microsoft to behave as usual.

Not just corrosion, but also to prevent precipitation in evaporative cooling systems (the most common ones).

Evaporative systems require constant input of new water; if you’re adding saltwater the salt will concentrate and it’ll become a saturated brine, and once the brine evaporates a bit the salt precipitates. It’ll happen mostly on the cooling fills (that will need to be replaced more constantly), but the main issue is that some precipitate does get carried by the brine and clogs the pipes.

So instead of “look ma, I’m cool”, it’s “look potential hirer, I’m profitable!”.

Then it makes sense why they’d translate their stuff in EN/RU/AR even being potentially not speakers of any of them - because their hirers might.

They can be closed-loop as in your region but they usually aren’t - besides the problem that you mentioned, a closed loop increases electricity consumption (as you’ll need a heat pump instead), and electricity consumption is also a concern. Not for the environmental impact (corporations DGAF), but price.

That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).

Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always

• oversimplifying complex matters
• showing blatant lack of reading comprehension, and distorting/lying what others say
• vomiting certainty on things that they assumed, and re-eating their own vomit
• showing complete inability to take context into account when interpreting what others say
• chain-gunning fallacies
• “I’m not religious, but…”

always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.

Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.

(Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)

“Could”. More likely it was closed loop.

Nope. Here’s how data centres use water.

It boils down to two things - cooling and humidification. Humidification is clearly not a closed loop, so I’ll focus on the cooling:

• cold water runs through tubes, chilling the air inside the data centre
• the water is now hot
• hot water is exposed to outside air, some evaporates, the leftover is colder and reused.

Since some evaporates you’ll need to put more water into the system. And there’s an additional problem: salts don’t evaporate, they concentrate over time, precipitate, and clog your pipes. Since you don’t want this you’ll eventually need to flush it all out. And it also means that you can’t simply use seawater for that, it needs to be freshwater.

Water isn’t single use, so even if true how does this big number matter.

Freshwater renews at a limited rate.

What matter is the electrical energy converted to heat. How much was it and where did that heat go?

Mostly to the air, as promoting the evaporation of the water.

Can you say non sequitur ?

More like non sequere than non sequitur. Read the whole paragraph:

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects. This will only get worse as households move away from using fossil fuels and rely more on electricity, putting even more pressure on the National Grid. In Bicester, for instance, plans to build 7,000 new homes were paused because the electricity network didn’t have enough capacity.

The author is highlighting that electrical security is already bad for you Brits, for structural reasons; it’ll probably get worse due to increased household consumption; and with big tech consuming it, it’ll get even worse.

I’m checking the Xitter page of the alleged source of the attacks, SN_Blackmeta. But what caught my attention the most was another message. And overall the account.

• Their group was formed in April 2024. It’s an extremely new group.
• Their targets overall seem too “random”.
• They’re using Xitter dammit. Do they not care about their own security?
• Whoever wrote the English version of the text speaks Dutch or German. Probably Dutch, as their spelling corrector is “fixing” words like “beginning” into “beginnen”, “witne[ssed]” to “witten[seed]”, etc.
• Don’t trust me on what I’m going to say as I don’t speak Russian, but there’s also something off with their Russian version of the text. Typically Russian doesn’t use a comma after time expressions like “в этот день” (on this day); you could argue that it’s there due to that parenthetical expression (7 апреля 2024 года), but even its presence feels off. Also the fact that they spelled out “года” instead of just “г.”.

If I had to take some bets: the group is from Western Europe, not Russia or any country where Arabic is the dominant language. They’re likely skript kiddos trying to take the “glory” of attacks conducted by someone else; if they aren’t, my second guess would be that they’re doing it just to call attention to themselves (“look ma! I’m a haxor!!! I’m so cool!! X-D” style).

Modlog to the rescue. It stinks scam from a distance. And spam. Scam spam.

And I supposed to care that the poor SEO assholes that need to get their ads more visibility weren’t being given all the instructions on how to do that by the search engine?

No. You’re supposed to care that a company is pointlessly* lying, thus it’s extremely likely to deceive, mislead and lie when it gets some benefit out of it.

In other words: SEO arseholes can ligma, Google is lying to you and me too.

*I say “pointlessly” because not disclosing info would achieve practically the same result as lying.

I’m almost sure that they use the same model for Gemini and for the A"I" answers, so patching the “put glue on pizza” answer for one also patches it for another.

If they’re going to keep this, they need it to cite its sources at a bare minimum.

Got a fun one for you then. I asked Gemini (likely the same underlying model as Google’s AI answers) “How many joules of energy can a battery output? Provide sources.” I’ll skip to the relevant part:

Here are some sources that discuss battery capacity and conversion to Joules:

• Battery Electronics 101 explains the formula and provides an example.\
• Answers on Engineering Stack Exchange [invalid URL removed] discuss how to estimate a AA battery’s total energy in Joules.

The link to the first “source” was a made up site, https://gemini.google.com/axconnectorlubricant.com. The site axconnectorlubricant.com does exist, but it has zero to do with the topic, it’s about a lubricant. No link provided for the second “source”.

Don’t get me wrong, password managers are fucking great. But sometimes you need to remember a password. (Including one for Bitwarden itself.)

I don’t know how you’re meant to remember that “Works” and “Mighty” are capitalized

Refer to step 1, please: pick a quote that you know by heart. And you’re still confusing the example with what it exemplifies.

At this rate it’s rather clear that you’re unable to parse simple sentences, and can be safely ignored as noise.

I’ve run into more password validation prohibiting a 13 character password for being too long than for being too short

This problem is even worse with the method that the EFF proposes, as it’ll output passphrases with an average of 42 characters, all of them alphabetic.

But if you disagree - when do you think 77.5 bits of entropy is insufficient for an end-user? And what process for password generation can you name that has higher entropy and is still easily memorized by users?

Emphasis mine. You’re clearly not reading the comments within their context; do it. I laid out the method. TL;DR: first letter of each word + punctuation of some quote that you like, with some ad hoc 1337speak-like subs.

On how much entropy is enough: 77 bits is fine, really. However, look at the context: the other user brought up this “ackshyually its less enrropy lol” matter up against the method that I’ve proposed, and I’ve showed that it is not the case.

With EFF proposing it (plus xkcd proposing something so extremely similar that they’re likely related), it’s actually worse. If passwords like this get common enough, all that crackers need to do is to bruteforce the words themselves, instead of individual characters.

The EFF list has 6⁵ = 7776 words. If you’re using six of them, you get (7776)⁶ = 2.2*10^23 different states, or 77.5 bits of entropy.