SamBam

Besides the data center itself, many people in the US are against what the data center is bringing: more AI.

Most regular people have not been sold on the idea that more AI will be good for them or their families or communities personally. Instead all they hear is AI taking away jobs, and AI preventing high schoolers and college kids from learning how to read a book and write an essay. Most people think a world with more AI seems bleaker.

So people wonder why communities don't want this hulking, loud, energy-expensive data center whose main benefit is to hasten the arrival of this world they don't want?

And yet the bubonic plague did indeed exist and kill people between large outbreaks.

Even in Massachusetts most people I know tend to know the seasons of many fruits and vegetables, and I definitely mostly eat apples in the fall when they're much better.

When I lived in Europe people were even more aware of the seasons of fruits and vegetables.

There isn't great evidence to suggest that electric toothbrushes are much better at removing plaque than manual. E.g. this metaanalysis [1] found basically no difference.

There are also studies that show that electric is better, like this meta-analysis that found a small effect [2] and this Cochrane review. [3]

What I generally read in articles is that the single biggest thing that makes a difference is brushing for the full 2 minutes, and electric toothbrushes can help with that by having a built-in timer.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38348549/

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34877772/

3. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

I'm curious whether individual-word highlighting is best for people with reading disabilities, or a broad, whole-sentence highlighting might actually be preferable.

When I'm reading my eye is jumping back and forth across the sentence. The demo made this abundantly clear -- it was actually very hard to just track the highlighted word.

Just using the fact that I consider myself a very good reader as an example, I wonder whether there are advantages to the eye being free to skip back and forth across a sentence.

I assume it might be as simple as a user-preference toggle, since you're already highlighting the sentence.

You could also try UIs where the highlighting was more "spread out," focused on the word being said but bleeding into the other words on either side (maybe up until the hard stop of the sentence boundary) to lead the eye toward it. I'm imagining something like the red-blue text color of the BeeLine editor.

If you're in New York and you look due East across the Atlantic, what country are you looking at?

Most people would assume Portugal.

Nope, you're looking (over the curve of the earth, of course), at Morocco. Look just a tiny bit to the south and you're looking at the rest of West Africa. Look Southwest and you're looking at Australia, or even Brazil.

Desktop only (to save you frustration).

I feel like that's the benefit to the creator having made this a dog (even if a demon-possessed dog). As intelligent as a dog can be, can we ever truly understand why they do the things they do?

The Uncanny Valley effect would be too big if a human companion randomly started talking to you while you were sneaking up on an enemy. But a dog? You'd be pissed off at it for a bit, and then forgive it because it's a dog.

It's a heartfelt apology to the UN, but, as the article says, too late.

Ha! I love how all the community highlights are highlighting this.

Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?

I have this same idea about why it's hard to remember dreams, but even more so, why it's hard to remember my kid's or spouse's sleep-talking.

Sometimes I'll check in on my sleeping kid and she'll sit up in bed and say some utter nonsense. I'll find it hilarious, giggle silently to myself, and kiss her goodnight again and she'll close her eyes and lie back.

Why I try to tell her about her sleep-talking in the morning, though, I find that the words she said have completely disappeared from my memory, no matter how funny I thought they were at the time.

In my head-canon, this is because it's dream language, and slips away as easily as dreams. But, like the AI art, it could be because it's bullshit: completely devoid of content, all signifiers and no signified.

That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment.

Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?

1. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c...

> That criticism and feedback haven’t dissuaded The Ocean Cleanup

[One paragraph later]

> the team pivoted in 2019 toward a new model that was first suggested by critics and skeptics as an alternative in 2015.

So.... It did dissuade them away from their original vision and towards something suggested by critics and experts.

I hate it when people cite someone changing their mind about something as a gotcha or a fault. So they switched towards a better direction seven years ago! But the rest of the article is still about how terrible the old idea was, and how it proves that people have an "only I can fix it mentality," when it actually proves the exact opposite!

> their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals trapped with the plastic.

I'm curious to know how many animals die from the plastic. This article seems to think that any deaths caused by cleanup are reason to stop. Just like people who point to dead birds as reasons to ban wind turbines, despite far more wildlife being at risk from a warming planet.

It's quite possible that ocean cleanup efforts do more damage, I don't know, but the article doesn't even try to grapple with quantifying it. It's just a fear-mongering screed.

I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers.

Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."

But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.

Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.

Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.

But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.

That pedantic ship has sailed. In everyday communication people use "AI" as a shorthand for saying "LLM," even if they know perfectly well that other forms of AI exist. You can tell this by context, no need to tell people that there are other kinds of AI.

I think the author isn't a native English speaker? Either that or the writing is just a bit confusing at times, a lot of sentence fragments.

> We poke their website to see - sure enough they are - an angry email to them.

In general it was easy enough to understand the stories, though

Find a country. I tried it again and the very first country was St Lucia again. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/fuhO0lh

Do they even have any idea that their ads are showing up for the specific competing doctor? Isn't Google the one deciding where the ads are most valuable?

Similarly, the story Lena by qntm.[1]

It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.

1. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

This looks really good, but sometimes it seemed like there was no country to click on for the tiny islands?

For St Lucia, for instance, the closest visible country was (I think) Puerto Rico. I clicked on it, and then it showed me where St Lucia was in the middle of the black ocean. As far as I could tell, even zooming in, there was morning to click on there.

Same thing happened with Micronesia. There are very few islands in the Pacific visible.

No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.

For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.

Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.

What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.

There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.

Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.

As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.

It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.

Is there a mode to run through all the countries, instead of just 20?

A while ago I practiced every day on an android app, and the pleasure I got when I finally got 196/196 was extremely satisfying.

I'd also like to recommend that flags of different aspect ratios be shown correctly.

You can't have discovered this same color, solve it requires specialized equipment to see it.

The color in the Wikipedia article is just a rough approximation.

Except that this requires extremely specialized equipment to individually trigger specific cone cells in your eyes, so I expect they have a pretty damn good idea of who has seen this and who hasn't.

OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions of dollars that they may never recoup forcing the building massive new data centers in the face of widespread protest.

You think GitHub ought to match that?

Plenty of people in cities commute less than 10 miles and can bring their bikes into their work to keep them safe.

Why? Why bother not using your brain (and so therefore not actually "playing") and ruining it for the people you're playing against?

Nice emoji buttons! I think that works well.

You knew you done goofed when the adult site you opened on your family computer was opening new windows faster than you could close them...