10,260 karma · joined April 4, 2017
When some kid in Nigeria does it with a 10 year old script, we're used to that idea so no social permission to invoke philosophy.
It’s sad to see, for a former community of “hackers.”
It appears politicians and the media are using the priming of the Hugging Face story to manufacture alarmist narratives to serve their interests now.
Remember, politicians want you scared so they can capture more power, the media wants you scared so you keep giving your eyeballs for harvesting and buying subscriptions.
They posted information publicly accessible to even Google and somebody found it. That’s it.
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
Did you even realize basically all commercial images you've seen for the last 30 years were already heavily modified?
If anyone downvotes you I will defend your honor.
Given the fact that humans reach emotional conclusions first, and then only accept evidence that justifies already-held beliefs, it would be a waste of time to try to change your mind.
Germany and France in a debt spiral and turning inward/hyper-nationalist while massively re-militarizing means the EU is a safe place to structure your data with zero redundancy.
I wouldn’t bother worrying about key industries and functions, since, as history has shown, the EU is a bulletproof institution that no country has ever left.
And of course every data center in Europe has Israel-grade air defenses, it’s not like they are just sitting ducks for a fleet of drones to take out within 24 hours.
Hey EU, take note of this next time you create silly data residency requirements that don’t allow data to travel outside your region. Encryption is an easy solution to multi-region residency…as long as the European Commission doesn’t stupidly keep trying to make encryption illegal too!
Hint: Russia absolutely knows where your data centers are.
CNN also has had Alex Jones on.
Trust me when I say it’s super important to a niche area of physics. People have spent their whole careers trying to solve it.
What people? Well you or I have never met them. I swear I have a girlfriend, she just goes to a different school. But trust me it’s a super important problem.
What will this change about the world? Nothing, but trust me this is a historic event and it means these LLMs are super smart and not just brute forcing machines.
I’m certain there’s a 10% chance that brute forcing old riddles that 4 people know about might kill us. Please regulate me I’m too smart for my own good and out of control.
Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
The root cause of everything going wrong in Germany is the war and cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
The rapid de-industrialization, economic stagnation, ballooning deficits, removing the debt brake, new massive military debts, etc.
All of it is being economically felt by normal people and they’re scapegoating brown people (immigrants) as a result. If Germany still had cheap Russian gas and was still growing its economy 3% per year you would not be seeing any of this go mainstream.
The problem is they just won't. The most important members of the EU (Germany and France) are in shambles domestically and turning far right. Both have little desire to stick their necks out to support Ukraine any further and are likely turning the opposite direction.
Also, Russia has nukes. Nobody wants to provoke that any more than necessary. If Europe weren't a feckless, fragmented military vacuum things might be different, but nothing about that appears to be changing any time soon.
The numbers I cited were purposely in between the Russian numbers of Ukrainian casualties (1.5M, obviously false) and the Ukrainian numbers (100k, obviously undercounted). The Netherlands intelligence service and the CSIS put the number around 500K, which could also be wrong, but intelligence services tend to have better methods than media orgs like the BBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
As far as your assessment of 'decimated', the UN projects Ukraine will require over half a $Trillion to rebuild. For a country with a GDP per capita of $7,000...I would call that decimated unfortunately. And that's not something that makes me happy: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/02/23/u...
The idea that Ukraine is winning or Russia is winning on any given week is entirely dependent on which news source you're reading, and given the fog of war, unless you have actual intelligence service briefs we don't actually know how its going other than the fact the frontlines have basically stayed +/- some kilometers for a super long time at this point.
Also, the idea that Russia would not accept concessions and also that Putin being dead would be desirable (hard truth: there's people who are even more hardliners than Putin waiting in the wings), are unfortunately incomplete assessments of the reality.
Again, I don't disagree with your emotional take on this, or the moral question of who's right or wrong. But on the reality of the situation I don't think your assessment is accurate as far as what's going to get the best outcome for Ukraine.
They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions.
The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal.
This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
Russia was clearly in the wrong here, and I wish Ukraine could win, but reality exists, and we kind of have to anchor our decisions based on it or suffer the consequences.
I get it, realism is emotionally upsetting. But if you actually care about Ukraine, the only approach that can get the best outcome is realism.
- Russia was a paper tiger and weak
- Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting
- Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown
- The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions
- Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite)
- Europe would come to Ukraine's defense
- Etc.
He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc.
Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
I heavily use frontier models daily, and quite frankly their capabilities are just not very relevant outside of a narrow subset of software engineering tasks and the production of generic white collar "deliverables."
We're many years into $10s of billions of dollars being thrown at coding as a problem space specifically, and its one of the areas with the MOST training data available, and still...I can't get a frontier model to execute simple front-end UI tasks beyond the level of a visually impaired intern.
I believe Fable and Astra-class models were the first fully trained on Blackwell GPUs (the latest and greatest) and I think the expectation was that throwing this much extra compute at the problem would lead to greater gains. It has not. And the next gen GPUs are not going to be the same jump that h100 clusters to Blackwell was. Claiming you're slowing down out of choice, when in reality you've hit the limits given current compute, is disingenuous at best.
I think a lot of Anthropic/OpenAI employees are true believers here (who doesn't want to imagine they're having a large impact?) and have deluded themselves into believing they're building a god in their science fiction fantasy world.
Unfortunately the type of people working at these orgs apparently don't have much understanding of how the world works outside of their extremely narrow specialization.
When I hear them straight-faced throwing out dumb statistics like "8% GDP growth," "50% of white collar workers unemployed by next year," and "10% chance of human annihilation," I cringe so hard my eyebrows hit my chin. Here's a real statistic: 82% of German companies still use fax machines.
I seem to recall Waymo told a 60 minutes reporter during an early report on self driving cars: "your daughter will never need to learn to drive." Well, over a decade has passed since then, that girl got a drivers license, and we're still without driverless cars in 99% of places.
This capacity for self delusion is what enables silicon valley to take on these irrational moonshots...but these are the last people I would trust when trying to form an accurate picture of reality.
And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?
Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world