> you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability
Since you are talking about culpability specifically, what exactly can they do about it? Or, more to the point, what have they done so that it it is their fault?
Vote political parties into power that put a price on emissions and honestly work on reducing it.
The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive.
The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.
If there are no parties mainly concerned with climate sustainability, then that is very likely because voters are not sufficiently interested in such platforms, and are more receptive to messages like "will fight immigrants", "will fight use of incorrect pronouns" or "will prevent trans-women from fighting in womens MMA".
Speaking for the US: climate sustainability (as main focus) was up for election 25 years ago, and about half the nation did not even bother voting, so it seems unsurprising to me that focus has shifted away from this issue (and fair to blame voters for that).
The wiki explicitly mension the typical sans disadvantage: "One potential source of confusion in Calibri is a visible homoglyph, a pair of easily confused characters: the lowercase letter L and the uppercase letter i (l and I) of the Latin script are effectively indistinguishable."
So while I prefer Calibri as TNR has been the default for longer and hence is more boring to me, I can understand people might prefer a serif font for readability.
While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version.
You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
It would be nice if the instructions spelled out what to do, then I could do it. Otherwise I have to guess what author meant. But all in, a nice small exercise, thanks!
First, if this is private vs corporate, they are probably using a separate laptop, likely with a VPN. Second, doing this kind of shadow profiling is a lot of work with potential legal consequences with little gain, at least for support teams. For fraud detection, that is a completely different thing.
So I think a simpler explanation is more plausible: they are selling AWS at such a premium that they can afford normal human customer service and still make a lot of buck.
Unfortunately many people are unable (unwilling?) to grasp this logic and mistakenly assume that if something works for them, it obviously has to be the same way for others.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, developments like Deepseek are clearly marks of progress and practically a gift to the society, and it's a good thing. The Chinese are also creating and maintaining many valuable open source projects (although they might not be that popular in the West due to security concerns, which is a different lengthy topic). So everybody wins, right?
On the other hand... People in the West rarely get the taste of what happens if someone deeply immoral gets to the top. The closest we got is Trump who might be an arrogant egoistic asshole, but he's very far from deciding to kill thousands of people to fulfill his ambitions. Nevertheless, normal sensitive people feel abhorred when they hear or see how immigrants are treated and so on. Imagine this developed decade after decade, also using modern tech, into a cold machine an ordinary person is powerless against.
It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it but imagine your whole life, and often of your family, can be destroyed in an instant because you found yourself in a wrong place, you made a wrong comment, you expressed your opinion too openly. You were relaxed because maybe you did similar things in the past but you still lived a normal life; then at that particular moment it ended abruptly and there is no recourse. Nobody can save you and you know it's all finished. In the West there is nothing close to that.
Well, actually, the whole cancel culture dynamic is a softer alternative to what you just described. And it doesn’t even require you to be the actor — it can be your spouse, your child, whoever. One tweet and you can lose your job, your house, your marriage, especially in an economy like this it hits hard. It really is the same idea: "your whole life, and often your family’s life, can be destroyed in an instant." You won’t go to jail, but your life can still become miserable.
Of course, the big difference is jail time — and that matters. I'm familiar with cases where a 30-year-old woman was sentenced to more than 10 years just for donating $20 to Ukrainian forces (she was traveling to her mom's funeral and got caught).
And at the end of the day, all of this is politics. If you're smart enough and in Russia or China, you can learn to navigate it. But there's never a guarantee. You can still end up as "лёд под ногами майора" ("ice under the major's feet"), as the famous Russian punk rock singer put it.
> If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people.
Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.
I feel that we’re reaching a limit to our context switching. Any further process improvements or optimizations will be bottlenecked on humans. And I don’t think AI will help here as jobs will account for that and we’ll have to do context switching on even broader and more complex scopes.
I think the limit has been exceeded. That's the primary reason everything sort of sucks now. There is no time to slow down and do things right (or better).
IMO, cyber security, for example, will have to become a government mandate with real penalties for non-compliance (like seat belts in cars were mandated) in order to force organizations to slow down, and make sure systems are built carefully and as correctly as possible to protect data.
This is in conflict with the hurtling pace of garbage in/garbage out AI generated stuff we see today.
Here in the EU cybersecurity is actually being regulated, with heavy fines to come (15 million euros or 2.5% of global turnover!), if it wasn't already. Look up the CRA and the NIS2.
Things may well reach a point elsewhere in the world finding out that some software is for sale in the European Union is itself a marker of quality, and therefore justifies some premium.
These are good developments, but it remains to be seen how much of impact they will have. Software developers will have to follow a bunch of “best practices”, but there isn’t a requirement that they are good at them. There are no fines for producing insecure software, only fines for not following the rules.
Software providers are also likely to be specifying narrow “fit for purpose” statements and short (ish) support window. If costs go up too much, people will be using “inappropriate” and/or EOL stuff because the “right thing” is too expensive.
To be clear, this is a step in the right direction but is not the panacea.
that, and instead of increases of productivity reducing people's need to work, what might (I think, will) happen is that we will actually have to work more for worse results and lower incomes, for the whims of the executive class and increased energy requirements for LLMs. compound this control over channels of communication (google, facebook, xitter), means of production (microsoft, amazon), with force of social-emotional manipulation of LLMs and we have a really "winner" technology.
I do not think the executive class is actually in on the power of AI to increase productivity, but rather to increase reliance.
Socrates allegedly was opposed to writing since he felt that it would make people lazy, reducing their ability to memorize things. If it wouldn't be for his disciple Plato who wrote down his words, none of his philosophy would have survived.
So I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I also am not too pessimistic, either. We will adapt, and benefit through the adoption of AI, even though some things will probably be lost, too.
> Better “thinking” computers will breed worse thinking people, huh?
I actually think that will be the case. We're designing society for the technology, not the technology for the people in it. The human brain wasn't built to fit whatever gap is left by AI, regardless of how many words the technologists spew to claim otherwise.
For instance: AI already is undermining education by enabling mental laziness students (why learn the material when ChatGPT can do your homework for you). It seems the current argument is that AI will replace entry-level roles but leave space for experienced and skilled people (but block the path to get there). Some of the things LLMs do a mediocre but often acceptable job at are the things one needs to do to build and hone higher-level skills.
> Whenever any progress is made, this is the logical conclusion. And yet, those who decide about how your time is being used, have an opposing view.
Exactly. Some people forget we live in a capitalist society, which does not prioritize or support the contentment of the masses. We exist to work for the owners or starve, they're not going to pay us to enjoy ourselves.
> shut the fuck up Marx, everyone is tired of you.
That's objectively false, but I understand. I too went through an obnoxious libertarian phase.
> nobody is forcing you to work for "the man," man.
You actually think that's true? Sure, no identifiable person is pointing a gun at our heads and shouting "work," but that's not the only form "forcing" can take.
If there is 1 job at a university. And there are 10 researchers applying. And 1 took this improvement in research speed to do more research, and 9 took the change to play more piano and take more walks, then most likely that one will get the job. This competitive nature is what has driven society forward and not kept us at just above subsistence agriculture.
I mean with our population increase in the last 100 years these numbers are showing a massive decrease in poverty with sub Saharan Africa holding the highest remaining areas of poverty.
Not really. It's a very recent fad to treat "research" as some kind of mechanical factory process that need simply optimize units research per unit time.
When you sit down to think about it, what does it really even mean to do "more research"? What concrete phenomenon are you observing to decide what that is?
Across the journey from "subsistence agriculture", there have been countless approaches to nurturing innovation and discovery, but abstracting it into an abstract game measured by papers published and citations received is extremely novel and so far seems to correlate more with a waste and noise than it does discovery. Science and research is not in a healthy period these days, and the model that you describe, and seem to take for granted or may even be celebrating, plays a big role in why.
Eh the more problem space you explore the more energy is required to explore it. Looking at the last 300 years and saying 'look at all the low hanging fruit we picked' doesnt describe where we are now.
We started offshoring manufacturing and growing the service economy?
Now the service economy is turning into the sharing economy, I think the only thing we are sharing is the greater profits and they are taking the lions share.
> if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information
You assume the aim here is for you to find relevant information, not increase user retention time. (I just love the corporate speak for making people's lives worse in various ways.)
Since you are talking about culpability specifically, what exactly can they do about it? Or, more to the point, what have they done so that it it is their fault?
reply