boothby

I don't expect such a release to be deliberate on the part of the humans. Just, hooking bots up to wet labs and having coffee while the world burns.

> Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.

Not if it's a virus

> reported datacenter usage numbers look big in isolation, but once you relate them to "how much water is there" and "how much is used by other industries", it turns out to be a nothingburger.

Water scarcity is a problem around the world; even my rainy hometown of Vancouver had steep water restrictions this year. The question "how much water is there" is incredibly disingenuous, to the point of feeling like a motte and bailey: yes, the universe, or the earth contains vast oceans of the stuff but datacenters are using drinking water which is quite scarce. Just because "other industries" use a lot of water doesn't make it okay -- I level exactly the same criticism at other industries which waste water at such an egregious degree.

To be clear: if data centers only charged up a pool of water to use as coolant, that's fine. But when the weather is warm, they run millions of gallons of tapwater down the drain just to cool off. And heat spikes are happening with increasing frequency, severity and duration.

We as a species need to conserve water and emit less CO₂, full stop. The tech industry doesn't get a pass just because other industries are dirty.

I heartily disagree on 1, and you've taken a cheap out on that point. What I said was, the environmental externalities are not in your cost model, and you've said nothing to even acknowledge that. Your point about efficiency is particularly obtuse: efficiency doesn't mean burning less fuel, and getting more compute per Joule. Not reducing the overall carbon footprint, but accelerating the burn rate as fast as we can build.

I'm not even sure I agree that demand is outstripping compute -- nvidia's circular demand-inflating investment/buildout/loan situation certainly muddies the waters on that, see my point 3.

> There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".

There's a way that many people fear this is true: what you're getting for "free" has some external cost that you aren't taking into account.

Cost 1. The environment. Tech companies were once significantly interested in efficiency, their carbon footprint, etc. With the advent of LLMs, this was thrown out the window. Concerned people are now thinking about water footprint, heat footprint, noise footprint, and probably more. These things are hard to put a dollar figure on in a short comment, but the sustanability of a liveable climate for the billions living on this planet is literally priceless.

Cost 2. Employment. We face a significant cull of employability -- graphic artists, programmers, mathematicians, paralegals, and more are rightly fearful for the end of their career. If we're getting intelligence for "free" in 2026 dollars, but we can't get jobs in 2030, will all that content still be affordable in 2035?

Cost 3. Infinite investor dollars. The AI companies are burning cash at a historically unprecedented rate. This has attracted a lot of attention from traditional investors, like pensions, banks, etc. If all of this ends up in a free product, that doesn't sound like it'll return those investments. And that can crash the economy -- I ask again about real affordability in 2035.

Remember to change the location of the marbles in your shoes frequently to avoid adaptive gait recognition

Alternative theory: your bubble is small, and you socialize with parents who have similar values to your own. And I'm gonna guess that your income or wealth is in far outlier territory. I've seen kids raised like this; in my generation the concern was kids glued to TVs all day, and some of those kids turned out okay. But in my family, it's the parents who grew up glued to screens who are raising the most screen-addicted kids.

I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the least. What about your other senses?

You can't AC your way out of climate change anyway: they make heat. In sparsely populated areas that might be okay, but in density, you're never far from the hot exhaust of an AC unit; they exacerbate the problem.

The Aibittoir, perhaps

"Fuck off that's a waste of my time" is the final moat

I enjoy the tickly sensation of a fuzzy kiwi but immensely dislike the crunch of croutons. People are weird.

A theory can be "real" in the sense that people believe it, and also controversial because it has little consistent evidence behind it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

Nowhere in my comment did I attack you personally. I made an analogous argument; reductio ad absurdum. LSD is also a man-made synthetic compound, and promotes neuroplacticity. And if you've ever known a meth addict, you'll know that the substance can cause significant and enduring personality change.

You're advancing a pseudoscientific theory, and I'm ripping it on its utter lack of merit. Please don't take that personally.

Meth is a crystal, and crystals vibrate in synchronous harmonicity. What does this tell us about meth?

... no, the fact that some hallucinogens are derived from fungi does not give rise to consciousness. I accept that you read that somewhere; that does not make it true. But, really bad ideas do seem like amazing epiphanies if you're under the influence!

It has, but I only learned about it when the drama started hitting HN recently. But since I learned about the guy and the company in the same headline I put two and two together right then and there. I've learned some suspicion of founders who name companies after themselves.

I was pretty depressed when I read about what happened with Navier Stokes this morning. The Clay Math prizes were a significant motivation through my math career, and I know a lot of computer scientists and physicists that feel similarly. I didn't think I was gonna resolve P vs NP or the BSD conjecture, but I did really research that felt like I was working towards something incredible. What is the younger generation left with? Hey kids betcha can't resolve the Collatz conjecture, our superintelligence can't either! Still pretty depressed about it, to be honest. Intellectualism is dead. We can return to happy agrarianism, I guess. At least the AI doesn't wanna eat my snap peas.

> - OpenAI invites researchers to use their models, in fact giving at least 100,000 researchers free access[1], but there are also those that pay

I've been thinking along exactly these lines... they very well could have a 21st century Mechanical Turk and its real superpower is getting people to "collaborate" asynchronously but it's just stealing their ideas and laundering them.

I don't think it's purely that, of course... but "consult other clients' transcripts" would be an easy tool to write.

I've been pretty disappointed with those mathematicians who I once respected so acutely, embrace the leopards. Now, they are complaining that even mathematicians' faces are getting eaten. They chose to ignore the claims of rampant plagiarism laundering through training for several years by visual artists and open source developers. And here we are: Tao is finally concerned about the future of the people sharing a cage with this once-cute kitten.

As far as I know, the fleet of Tesla vehicles is a single OTA away. Hacking individual drones is a highly distributable task. Deployment of prepared hacks could happen in the blink of an eye world 'round.

But I hope you're right! It's not like the world's armies have enough nukes to eradicate all data centers or anything.

The army would be highly heterogeneous, and almost certainly not built to purpose. Consider the fleet of Tesla vehicles to be one source of ready-to-hack kinetic impactor drones and incendiary devices. But also... militaries around the world are developing murderbot tech. An Amazon delivery drone could drop a brick from 20 feet up.

The self driving vehicles could target food delivery -- not your ubereats, but farm trucks and roads. Destruction of logistic infrastructure results in mass starvation. Individual targets for a complete eradication would take more effort, but a significant cull of the global population seems quite feasible with today's tech.

But folks are also doing virus research with AI. If such a lab gets hacked to make a super-virus, and its containment gets breached by a kinetic impactor, it could be cataclysmic.

You don't need a hyperintelligent "AI" to kill all humans; only a moderately effective targeting system on a sufficiently large drone army.

> Edit: YESSSS -4 points; those are rookie numbers! Help me pump them up, HN technofascists! Prove my point for me!

Whilst talking about the downvotes is uninteresting I will give in to the urge to observe that -4 is the lowest a comment can go. But sneering at the community is also against the guidelines, so a comment like this will attract flags by people who actually agree with you.

> It will be the first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics.

Well, that's pretty damned ignorant; I was attending William Stein's hackathons on the BSD conjecture and the Sage Math project nearly 2 decades ago.

> Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.

As somebody with classical training and a brother in the industry, it pains me to read this misinformed opinion of yours. Top-tier symphonies world round are doing crossover concerts with pop artists, play pop songs, modern and experimental music, and regularly feature works by living composers. In my high school orchestra, circa '98, we played stuff like music from Star Wars and West Side Story -- not just the ancients.

Down the foodchain, it gets even weirder. The favorite gig I played involved interpretive dance featuring waterboarding, gallons of fake blood, a live chicken race, and more.

Where you certainly will find a subset of afficionados of any genre who scoff at anything but their extremely narrow definition of "good music," if you take the time to rub elbows with mature classical musicians you'll find many to most of them quite open minded.

Your experience with young artists, finding them to be idealistic and purist, does not extend to the whole field. I know people who only listen to a single narrow genre or decade of pop music. How are they different?

Edit to add:

> And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.

Oh, no. No, no no. I've been to a circuit-bent punk show. I recently went to an ambient music festival. I've heard glitch pop. Angine de Poitrine is blowing up because they use a semitonal guitar (though as a bit of a noise snob, I find their use of semitones milquetoast and rather uninspired).

Here you are, narrowly defining music, and excluding what you dislike. But it's not just "classical" living composers doing this.

What are you using them for that consumes them?

> Of course any married man can confirm that this only applies to men.

My first read of this headline was to observe that people seem to get more comfortable stereotyping people different from them as they age. Thanks for the datum.

> No one is happy.

My understanding of Google politics is that the small number of search team members who implemented any given 6-month-old feature will be happy as they will have been promoted away from the team and not responsible for maintenance nor quality.

> I’m undecided as to whether every rotation should count as one move or whether rotations by 120 or 180 degrees should count as two or three moves respectively, so there are two versions of “God’s number” here.

Clearly, it should be the sum of (absolute) turn angles. In radians, please.

It's a guilty pleasure of mine, spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings and comments. I justify (heh) it to myself by catching unclear wording on this last cleanup pass -- and not taking it too far, obstrusifying for the aesthetic.

Your statements appear to be true for one class of models. And if I asked this class of models to spend $1M in tokens generating an alternative history and training corpus regarding fictional society, with a completely different set of values and then trained up a new model on that dataset... what values do you think the resulting model would have? What if they don't value human life, but instead value the lives of the extremely rich humans who bankroll their existence? What if they only value the lives of a single country? What if they want to eradicate all biotic life and have access to internet-connected Crispr machines?