This is a 5-year-old article, and it's still very pertinent. This past summer I did a lot of bike-riding around Loudon County surveying trails for the Park Service (volunteer) and it's like riding through a cyberpunk future out there. Endless windowless buildings humming loudly, lots of electrical substations, and wires crisscrossing everywhere. The Washington Post reported that Dominion Power is now running electrical lines deep into West Virginia and bringing defunct coal plants back online to meet the energy demands (1), but a recent independent report found that it won't be enough as energy demands are going to double at a minimum (2).
I live in eastern Prince William County and the spread of datacenters is a hot-button topic here. People living on the Western side of the county, near Loudon, are getting rezoned for data centers, which means dramatic increase to their property taxes. The same report that highlighted energy demands also found that the increased tax revenue and jobs created are only really during the construction of the buildings, once completed they don't take many techs to maintain them.
I feel this last point may underestimate the jobs created because it doesn't consider all the folks connecting to these data centers to do work. For example, Amazon is expanding here to be close to the datacenters and my friends who work for Amazon have to be within driving distance of the campus. I could be overestimating this effect though.
(1) Gift WaPo article: Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal
https://wapo.st/40A4SBm
It's not just the UPFs, we need scientifically-backed truth-in-advertising for all foods. For years I thought I was eating very healthy, but then my blood tests got worse and worse until my doctor wanted to put me on medications. I asked for six more months, and spent that time reading the labels on all the "healthy" foods I was consuming. It was eye-opening. So much added sugar, saturated fat, and simple carbohydrates spiking my blood sugar and driving up my cholesterol. I dumped all the processed foods, went whole-foods, Mediterranean Diet, pescatarian, and blew my doctor's mind when all my tests came back healthy.
We have an epidemic of declining healthspans forcing most of us to spend the last decades of our lives as invalids, surrendering our life-savings to the medical industry after the food industry is done ruining our health for profit. This is not about personal responsibility. This is about a food industry that is lying to us about the health effects of eating their hyper-palatable, hyper-processed foods. Corporations lie to sell us food engineered to make us addicted, render us sick, and then sell us the medications to keep our hearts beating so we can continue to consume.
1. Sugarless Protein Bars: just last week I found one they claimed 30 grams of protein on the front of the package, but hidden in the nutrition facts is that it has four-times the daily recommended saturated fats. These will give you heart disease and are found in the health food section of convenience stores.
2. Pretty much all advertised "health food" snacks will make you exceed your daily saturated fats and sugar limits. If it's not a food in its purest form, it will have added sugar and fat. How many products slap a "high in fiber" sticker on their package, when in reality they have very little fiber or are selling you that fiber with a huge dose of sugar and fat?
3. "lean" meats: This one shocked me. Advertised as high in protein, health youtubers promoted it to me all the time, but actually very rich in unhealthy fats and getting more fatty every decade as cows and chickens are bred for more fat.
4. Rice, Pasta, and other simple carbs: I started monitoring my glucose and these had to go after watching incredible spikes in blood sugar after eating them.
What do I eat now? Whole grains and Legumes daily, leafy greens daily, fresh and frozen fruits, and fish three times a week. My blood sugars are stable, my lipid profile is great, and I'm getting the best sleep of my life as tracked by my fitbit. I look around me at the epidemic of metabolic disease and then I look at how 95% of every grocery store contributes to that and I want to see public policy change on this issue.
Try making socca chickpea flour pizzas. So quick to make, so much good stuff (protein, resistant starch, fiber). You can get organic chickpea flour from the bulk bin for cheap too.
I agree in some regard - I do wish there were restrictions as protein bars, snacks, beef, processed chicken, etc are not healthy. But it’s different for everyone what is healthy - IE I need a ton of simple carbs for long bike rides and missing those would cause issues. Some people don’t need those though and I don’t trust consumers (or agencies) to make good decisions.
I've posted on here before but I'm concerned with the current 'off label' practice of using glyphosate for crop desiccation (basically spraying it on the crop prior to harvesting to kill it and dry it out sooner) when most studies of glyphosate have been for the standard use to kill weeds much earlier in the process and the lower residual levels the standard use leaves.
I realize this headline means nothing, but there is something to nuclear power futures. I live in Northern Virginia and my recent 20 mile bike ride in Loudon county was nothing but massive datacenters and crisscrossing powerlines to support them. The western side of neighboring Prince William County is now being consumed for data centers. The Washington Post recently had an article on how the demand for electricity for these centers is getting so desperate that they are running powerlines deep into West Virginia and bringing coal plants back online to meet the demand. Estimates are that it's going to take multiple nuclear powerplants to meet future demand in just this locality.
I have very mixed feelings about this. I love the possibilities of all these datacenters and their potential, but I'm worried about the massive amount of energy they are consuming. If this is all just so much hype and marketing, then it's incredibly wasteful.
So your solution is to power these datacenters for another 1-2 decades with coal power while you wait for new nuclear plants? Because that's the realistic timeframe for any new nuclear. Vogtle 3 took 14 years to build.
Of course, any "advanced nuclear" that doesn't even have a prototype yet will take longer than that. If it will ever happen.
Don't know why you're saying "your solution" like that guy is in charge of us energy policy, but Virginia already has nuclear reactors. And Dominion has the permits and plans and facility to construct another 1500 megawatts.
> my recent 20 mile bike ride in Loudon county was nothing but massive datacenters and crisscrossing powerlines to support them. The western side of neighboring Prince William County is now being consumed for data centers.
Is this actually true or hyperbole? Ireland has the same size and population as Virginia is described as a major ___location for data centres, but all the data centres on the island combined take up less than one square km [0]. By comparison, Dublin Airport is 10 square km.
Sounds like Virginia needs to be two orders of magnitude more dense in DCs, or have them developed exactly in a ribbon along your route, to really dominate the landscape like that.
What does Ireland having the same size and population as Virginia have to do with my comment? Virginia is a state and I was specifically referring to Loudon and Prince William Counties, which are very tiny in proportion to the entire state of Virginia. Look up "Loudon County Data Center Alley" to understand the proportions and density of this project.
It's hyperbolic of course, but there is an ongoing NIMBY battle over the next datacenter. And it is a huge datacenter, dont get me wrong. The company bidding recently said it would convert a shitton of the land it would be given into greenspaces that yon biker could bike through. And we can be clear here too, if you can afford to bike in Loudon then you work for one of the companies directly requiring this new datacenter, so not sure why he's "conflicted" (nimbyism)
I don't follow your reasoning. It costs nothing to ride a bicycle in most of America. We have bike paths everywhere that are free for anyone to enjoy. You also don't have to live in a locality to enjoy the bike paths there.
For the record, on this specific outing I was doing volunteer trail-surveying. I live in Prince William County. I think the Data Centers are awesome and I love them, the tax revenues they bring in, and the jobs that come with them. It was clear from my comment that I am conflicted about the incredible energy-consumption, not the data centers themselves.
How many times in history have we regretted over-building this kind of infrastructure? We have no shortage of good ways to use electric energy. If AI turns out to be a fad, others will benefit.
Pollution is a concern, but I think don't think that anti-growth or anti-consumption sentiments are useful. All this money pouring in is an opportunity to invest in clean energy.
Hello. Author of this 17-year-old blog post here. I was a little shocked to find this throwaway post from my ancient history making HackerNews today and I just want to make a couple of notes:
1. If I were to write the post today, I would draw a comparison to Bryan with Oil Companies disputing the science of Global Warming. Global Warming is real, but Oil Companies attack the science when really they disagree with the policy conclusions being drawn from the science. I also see this with modern nutrition, where companies producing unhealthy food are flooding the world wide web with attacks on the science to convince people to keep consuming their products. Bryan was doing the same thing. He abhorred eugenics, but rather than attack the policies, he attacked evolution as a science in the courtroom. That is what he is remembered for and there's a history lesson there that's going to repeat with these modern examples of anti-science.
2. I apologize for the formatting. I upgraded Wordpress and PHP three months ago and lost all formatting on all my posts and the images are messed up. So it's hard to see that much of this is a direct blockquote from the science textbook being referenced. I believe science is real, but I keep a copy of that textbook on my shelf to remind me of how science can be used to justify horrific public policies.
As a follow up I am curious as to whether the topic of eugenics was central to the trial or merely incidental and significant in hindsight?
My understanding (the textbook narrative) is that the trail dealt more with questions of traditional faith versus modern science and the policies derived from either were never touched upon. Admittedly I have never read the full court room notes (which are quite long - https://profjoecain.net/scopes-monkey-trial-1925-complete-tr...). But I was unaware that Bryan brought issues with Eugenics into play. This seems like a pretty big revision of the standard narrative. I would really appreciate any excerpts from Bryan's case to this effect if you have them handy.
The objections to evolution on the grounds of racism and eugenics were in Bryan's closing statements. These were never read in court because the defendant did not give a closing argument. He never uses the term "eugenics" but that's clearly what he is referring to at times, especially in his references to Nietzsche:
At a public speech given right after the court case and just before his death, one of his arguments against evolution is because the theory was being used to object to vaccinations, asylums, and many medical treatments for fear that these measures were allowing the unfit to survive:
To be clear, I want to reaffirm that I do not agree with the theological arguments and absolutely accept the Theory of Evolution. I'm only sharing this information because the debate over evolution was very much about ethics as it was about science.
The copyright law portion of the lawsuit is interesting and I'm curious about how that will go, but the NYT has a second argument that every article I read completely ignores: ChatGPT routinely attributes falsehoods to to the NYTs. It's a problem I've had with AI since the beginning, you have to fact-check everything it tells you because it will confidently make up references and facts all the time. It's one thing for ChatGPT to quote a NYT's article verbatim, it's another thing for it to completely make up stories and then attribute them to the NYT. Balancing copyright and fair use is an interesting debate, but when your AI "hallucinates" a completely fabricated article and attributes it to your organization, that's damaging.
I agree with you. It's hard to see how OpenAI wins the trademark portion of this NYT lawsuit. There is no fair use clause to trademark law that covers attributing hallucinations to a trademarked entity.
LLMs likely don't need proprietary data to train effectively. However, as long as the training data includes references to the NYT, misattribution issues may arise.
We certainly need measures to prevent defamation by LLMs, or any text generators, and their creators. It's challenging to determine where to draw the line—from decryption tools that decipher random bits, to web browsers displaying text, to simple text editors, to n-gram Markov chain text generators, to shallow RNNs, to GPT-1, and beyond. Should we hold the tool creators or the tool users accountable for misuse?
In my view, the worst outcome of the NYT winning the lawsuit wouldn't be OpenAI halting progress in generative text tools. The real concern is that OpenAI, with its resources, might find technological solutions to these issues, while startups and hobbyists with limited resources could be forced to stop operating entirely.
I have only read the first quarter of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; this is notoriously a "difficult book" to understand, particularly given that it takes an unreliable first-person POV, is anachronastic, and seems to be narrated by a mental invalid (and lacks normal punctuation, particularly quotemarks).
----
...so I asked ChatGPT to help me understand the first chapter (80 pages). The chapter ends with the narrator being called "Maury," so I asked AI "is TS&tFury narrated by Maury?" It responded "no, it's Benjy" (which was initially more confusing than just reading Faulkner).
But upon further questioning (without actually knowing, for certain, as reader), it turns out that it does arrive at [I presume correctly..?] the correct response, which is that Benjy IS Maury.
----
So while it was overall helpful, it took coaxing from a not-even-done-with book avid reader. I took the AI's last piece of advice, which was to purchase a human-authored companion reader for TS&tFury =P
Vox had an apt comparison of Musk to Trump in a recent article. They noted that Musk and Trump both overwhelm the public with their flood of scandals and falsehoods so that we can't even keep track of them anymore (I had forgotten about many of the incidents in this article). A celebrity or politician involved in one scandal is always remembered and villainized for that scandal, while public figures who are perpetually in the news for their scandalous behavior get normalized--even idolized by many.
Isn't the difference that where Trump is selling the past, Musk is selling the future? And in some ways, their vehicles are delivering. In the end people can look past a lot of things when they think the perpetrator will help their cause.
Everyone is selling a future. We’re gonna build a big beautiful wall, we’re gonna drain the swamp, we’re gonna make America great again. This is selling the future. Even if it’s tinted by the past. A fake past mostly.
You can become more specialised; but that will only take you so far. Coding will soon become no more than a means to an end. Which it always was. The only way out for developers is through expanding their vision beyond that of the tools made available to them. Why does something need to be coded? What does the end customer expect? Did they vocalise their need properly? Contextual knowledge can hardly be reproduced and is the best way to beat a ChatGPT-like tool.
This is the content I clicked for and I feel like it's pretty vague and poorly-articulated, but there's a seed of truth here. Coding is a highly-technical profession and Chat-GPT does seem to trivialize it somewhat. With Chat-GPT automating out some of the developers, you will still need some developers around to understand and review the AI's output. The developers who remain will be the ones who are high-functioning: the ones who can communicate with both technical and non-technical staff, understand the business logic, and fill-in the blanks of what the customer needs.
In this future, Chat-GPT replaces some technical staff positions. So how does that work? In my experience with the tool, getting it to write anything multidimensional--like a board game--requires hours of back-and-forth articulating and re-articulating the interface, the business rules, and how those things interact. In this sense, it's like those developers who throw up their hands and complain about the requirements documentation while other developers stay in constant contact with the stakeholders during the development process to deliver the business needs. I don't think the later need to worry about job security.
Insightful comment, but you are assuming that the capabilities of this type of technology will remain static. Maybe that was also a premise of the article.
But we know that these systems will not stop improving. Just in recent weeks there are scientific papers documenting LLMs with improved capabilities as well as clear reports of more capable models in the business pipeline. And papers describing major upgrades to the models such a as adding a visual modality to the data.
But beyond the last few weeks, there is an exponential trend in the capabilities of the hardware and systems. And a clear track record of creating new paradigms when there is a roadblock.
In the next several years we will see multimodal large models that have much better world understanding grounded in spatial/visual information. Cognitive architectures that can continuously work on a problem with much better context, connected to external systems to automatically debug or interact with user interfaces in a feedback loop. Entirely new compute platforms like memristors or similar that increase efficiency and model size by several orders of magnitude. All of this is well under way.
Love the Tron soundtrack and am happy to learn about Wendy Carlos. Unfortunately, she has fought tirelessly to keep her music from being digitized and available online or streaming. I did however find this delightful collaboration she did with Weird Al Yankovic remaking Peter and the Wolf:
There must be a balance point between greed and control vs letting people enjoy your work. I understand the need for artists to earn a living, but being to restrictive will paint you in to a corner.
In a way she is doing the same to her music as she did to her self; hiding it away from public view
Here's the journal article that the OP is based on. It's not concrete, but it does identify several kinds of distracting information. After reading the article I did begin deliberately ignoring much of my social media and low-quality news sites:
I have social anxiety disorder, which I deal with in the workplace by putting on a "Customer Service" persona. So in any interview, I consider the interviewer as my customer and I want to make them happy. In an interview for a previous job, the Lead Architect was very aggressively putting me through several technical questions and at one point he told me I was completely wrong in one of my answers. When I politely tried to explain why I believed my answer was correct and offered to demonstrate on my laptop, he got angry and stormed out of the interview, leaving his two embarrassed looking coworkers to continue.
It was a bad experience, but the other two interviewers were very nice and I really wanted to work for this non-profit, so I sent a follow-up email apologizing for upsetting the Lead Architect so much, saying that I thought it was just a misunderstanding, that there were multiple correct answers, and provided some documentation to further explain why I answered the way I did.
I got a job offer that afternoon, and two weeks after I started they fired the Lead Architect. That same week, I went out to lunch with the team, where one of the interviewers told everyone about how I made the Lead Architect look so stupid during the interview and that I was so incredibly nice about it that they knew they had to hire me. Turns out it was a workplace where everyone highly valued politeness and the Architect had been antagonizing and bullying everyone for years. Ended up being one of the friendliest places I've ever worked.
I live in eastern Prince William County and the spread of datacenters is a hot-button topic here. People living on the Western side of the county, near Loudon, are getting rezoned for data centers, which means dramatic increase to their property taxes. The same report that highlighted energy demands also found that the increased tax revenue and jobs created are only really during the construction of the buildings, once completed they don't take many techs to maintain them.
I feel this last point may underestimate the jobs created because it doesn't consider all the folks connecting to these data centers to do work. For example, Amazon is expanding here to be close to the datacenters and my friends who work for Amazon have to be within driving distance of the campus. I could be overestimating this effect though.
(1) Gift WaPo article: Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal https://wapo.st/40A4SBm
(2) 2024 Data Centers in Virginia Report https://jlarc.virginia.gov/pdfs/reports/Rpt598-2.pdf