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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

    8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

    • Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
    • Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
    • A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
    • The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

    850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

    • The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
    • Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
    • The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
    • The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

    So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

    The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

    But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.




  • sorry I can’t come up with anything more humane but here it is: my safe-ish idea would be to get a large clear plastic box, and drop it (opening facing down) on top of the pears and wasps. If it’s large enough you’re likely to be able to do this without angering them, and as long as it falls flat-ish they won’t be flying right back at you.

    From there you can just leave them, or come back a while later and place something heavy on the box so it doesn’t fly with the wind.

    There’s a chance some of them might escape but if they do it will be one by one manageable) and otherwise they’ll keep feeding on the rotting fruit until weather or lack of water takes care of them.





  • I’m very mildly pro-AI, in the sense that I remain optimistic there will be at least a few cool use cases and I’d love to find them.

    So I tried Dia… And uninstalled it a few hours later. Why would I want to “chat with my tabs”? Even if I didn’t think this was a rubbish use case, every browser comes with a chatbot sidebar/extension/whatever, why would I want to change browsers just for that?

    Heavy pass. Also, after how they abandoned Arc, I don’t think they can be trusted to develop a product and not pull the rug from under the users when it becomes mildly inconvenient to keep working on it.









  • I don’t think it’s only men either, but it’s worth considering the implications and potential causes for what is being said here.

    We have had not decades but centuries of macho culture, where mental health is a taboo for men because “I strong, me no cry” and we know that mental health struggles go underreported on men. This is just adding more evidence to a symptom that we already know, of a society that hasn’t been able to course correct because it’s too set in tradition to allow those who need help to seek it without feeling like garbage.

    While I’m not saying this is a problem exclusive to men, I think the causes and effects on women and men are rather different. We’ve now known for a while that women with mental health issues or disorders tend to go undiagnosed (even more so than unreported). The case of autism is particularly blatant, as women only started to get diagnosed in a meaningful proportion in the 80s (despite autism not being sex- or gender-driven). https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/identity/autistic-women-and-girls

    Similarly, that underdiagnosing came from the stereotyping of gender roles and the fact that being quiet and pretty equated being “feminine”, which is “good”, so can’t be autistic, because autistic is bad.



  • In different ways. For example, it’s very rare for a car to explode in a collision, other than in movies.

    One of the reasons that make hydrogen difficult to work with in this sense is that hydrogen (H₂) molecules are so small that they can permeate most materials, such as steel. Then it can get somewhat easily to wherever there is a spark, and chaos ensues. Annoyingly you don’t even need 100% Hydrogen for that to happen, as it can ignite with a concentration of just 4%.

    After we stopped using Hydrogen mostly as a consequence of Hindenburg’s accident, it’s taken years to perfect hydrogen fuel cells to a safety standard that can be used in cars. As far as I know, its use has been limited to rockets/space propulsion otherwise (where you can just throw millions at the problem to make it safer).