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It is possible that that land shouldn't be used for anything. If we ate less animal products, there would be more than enough land to grow everything we need.

When it comes to surveillance, it is not enough to say "difference in degree, not in kind". The difference is the degree. Memorising someone's face is not surveillance, building a database of faces is. Seeing someone you recognize go into a store is not surveillance, writing down everywhere they go during the day is.

> For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle.

No, they don't. Methane is not absorbed by plants and is not part of any cycle. The only reason it is not a catastrophe is that it breaks down in a relatively short time. If we stopped producing methane in this way, no other process would replace it and the planet would cool down.

> A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up

Sorry to say, this is a very basic misunderstanding of chemistry. Methane is produced by the cow from carbohydrates in the grass. It is not present in grass, and the grass did not get it from the air. If we stopped producing methane in this way, no other process would replace it and the planet would cool down.

What does that mean?

Ridiculous comment. The human body is not designed at all, and is very much capable of surviving without milk and meat. It's not even very hard!

I am not vegan, but I found dropping beef and lamb to be literally the easiest modification to my life possible. Dropping dairy is much harder, but as I am now discovering still incredibly easy to reduce.

> farm plants are a further 18%

Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.

I despair. Is it that hard for us to imagine eating less meat?

Companies that attempted for a brief period to pretend to care about climate change. That is a very left wing position among companies!

How long do you think the loop will remain closed? 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years?

I am not! You said that there are certain tipping points which, when reached, mean that your local water source might be "consumed" - meaning it does not regenerate and goes away permanently. By contrast, in the link you gave (and everywhere else), water consumption means that you used some water. It doesn't say anything about whether you are near a tipping point. They are totally different concepts!

This comparison sounds to me like it is downplaying the significance of the numbers. California's almond-growing is another gross environmental crime, which is regularly controversial in California.

> Imbalance the system, and you have indeed "consumed" your local water supply.

Right, but this is not what is reported by "water consumption". It would be much better to have some kind of index (probably multiple) that estimates how close a particular feature of the water system is to a problem. Is the temperature too high, is there too high a concentration of some contaminant, etc etc.

You can't find new artists because art already exists? I feel like you're ignoring my question. It is not a good solution to "art is slop" to decouple yourself financially from all human artists. Your choice is making human art less sustainable.

Why can't you just find authors you like and respect, that you trust not to write slop? Why go all cabin-in-the-woods about it?

They are being built to support an industry which is itself an adverse impact.

Why would you believe anything posted on X? The platform deliberately promotes misinformation, and has for years.

This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).

Of course there isn't a physical distinction. This is a bit like saying there isn't a difference between a novel and a poem, because they're just words on a page. The distinction is nonphysical, but it is also obviously not rhetorical either. I said "intuitive" distinction, I'm not sure why you didn't criticise that directly since it admits that the distinction is not completely precise.

What exactly are you doubting? Is the word "harmony" meaningless gibberish in your opinion? Are there any nonphysical words you admit are meaningful?

Please explain in your own words how "virtue signalling" differs from "expressing a moral position" and how the difference is visible in the comment you're replying to.

AI writing tics usually also make text hard to read. I figure you mean "tics which don't affect the readability" but these are pretty rare.

I think they would obviously be happy with the alternative wording "it's about what was created" or just "it's about the product". I don't think they care about any aspect of how it came to exist.

> unless you believe in blood and soil

Not true, there are obviously other ways. There is an intuitive distinction between living in harmony with natural systems and simply dominating them with technology. That is all you have to believe, it doesn't have to be grounded in ethnonationalism.

Humans are unquestionably part of the environment, and everything humans do bends the environment to their will, but it would clearly be at odds with how we use words to argue that say a nuclear power station is just as much "part of the ecology" as cultivation of soil.

Care to give an example?

It is far, far less effective than deriving the solution yourself. Don't take my word for it:

> If you absolutely cannot do it then go home and think but for heavens sakes don't look it up in a book till you give up. Looking it up in a book is giving up. > > Paul Halmos (https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~adutta/blog/quotations-powerful...)

Without any way to access the corresponding text, this is unfortunately an idea I hope never gets any significant adoption.

I wonder if there is a way to make the underlying text accessible. OCR could presumably attempt to get at which letters correspond to which glyphs. Can a drawing be annotated in SVG as representing some character, as in an illustrated manuscript? If so, maybe this can be saved.

> You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow.

I think this is less "it's using jargon" and more "it's explaining incredibly badly". It is very common that the explanation, while correct, is almost written inside out, with the point buried behind 3 paragraphs of "you've hit on the core seam" and "you're right to push back, let's reinforce the load-bearing model".

I think people have an incredibly limited capacity to follow long winding exposition, and they're too embarrassed to admit it. I have started sending stuff back to coworkers just saying "I don't think this is wrong, but I can't parse it, can you?" and getting back "no, but claude managed to generate a fix from it".

I am prepared to admit that the model usually doesn't get things outright incorrect (unless you ask it to count letters). But the solution does contain a lot of nonsense. Not false nonsense, but meaningless or irrelevant sentences that make understanding the core of the fix much more difficult.

> Reading and Debugging 1.5 1.0 > Code Reviews 0.75 0.75

Since these numbers are made up, I may as well throw my personal anecdote in the ring. I find reading and reviewing far harder with coworkers who are using AI. Tickets contain about 5x as much meaningless junk as they used to, and testing notes - while far more thorough - are often now multiple pages in length. Reviews also contain much more code, people try to do more drive-by fixes because the models can generate those fixes so quickly, and people understand the code they're submitting far less clearly because the model is able to generate fixes they simply couldn't previously.

I feel less productive than I was a year ago, and I don't see my team shipping more features than they were previously. But everyone reports that they're far more productive. I don't get it.