cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Something that people need to understand is that AI companies (let’s talk about them instead of “AIs” that have no agency) are on a race to use less energy and less water per request for a very simple and selfish reason: it costs money.

    I agree here; left to their own devices, money is generally what matters to for-profit companies. Which is why they are mostly continuing to build datacenters (including those that are primarily for “AI”) where they do, which is almost entirely in places where they are competing with others for scarce water: because the alternatives are even more expensive.

    Underwater experiments in 2020

    That’s a neat idea, and maybe will be widespread one day.

    However that particular experimental project from Microsoft was conceived of in 2013, deployed in 2018, and concluded in 2020. Microsoft is not currently operating or planning to operate any more underwater datacenters: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/

    Among things they’re doing instead (specifically for AI) is restarting a decommissioned nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a state with (like most states) a long history of conflict related to water scarcity and privatization.

    Real world deployement in 2021

    This appears to be the only currently-operating (though the most recent news about it I can find is from 2023) underwater datacenter project, and it is in a certain country where it is somewhat easier for long-term environmental concerns to supersede capitalism’s profit motive. It would be great if they can make it an economically viable model which becomes commonplace, but until they do… datacenters today are still extremely thirsty.




  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoAI@lemmy.mlAI Needs Your Help!
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    18 hours ago

    Did you even read the second part of my comment before getting mad?

    yeah, i did. you wrote:

    So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water

    if you think it should be easy enough, what is your explanation for why datacenters are continuing to be built in locations where they’re competing with agriculture, other industries, and/or residential demand for scarce water resources (as you can read about in the links in my previous comment)?










  • i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:

    The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)


  • The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)






  • IMHO free speach is let people write what they think, moderate misinformation only when there already is no clarification from others so that it’s clear to everyone that a message is misinformation.

    imho “free speach” is a typo, and one often made by people with the funny idea that free speech means any form of content moderation is a violation of their rights 😏

    I don’t see any misinformation on the deleted messages, if you can see in the ones that I’ve screenshotted, please tell me which one.

    look again; two of the comments in your screenshots (and many more that i deleted) are explicitly claiming that futo makes open source software:

    click to expand for screenshots of your screenshots

    and, the rest of them are discussing and/or promoting futo, which, again, is a commercial product which many people incorrectly believe to be open source due to its maker’s now-recanted false statements to that effect, and therefore offtopic (“spam” would also be a fair label for some of it) in a community about open source.

    also, note that i did not even delete 100% of the comments about futo in that thread! i left enough that any good-faith reader should be able to see why further discussion of futo is offtopic there, and, i even linked to this thread you started, to give anyone who wanted to discuss it further a place to do so.

    if you still believe that deletion of (most, and not even all in the thread) offtopic/spam comments is a free speech issue… ok, i don’t know what else to tell you. all the best to you too.



  • But over that, I think that deleting those messages is censorship. I still believe in free speech and I can’t see any hate or misinformation in those messages.

    I believe in free speech too, and I think moderated spaces for discussion help enable it. (Think about this…)

    Nobody claimed there was hate in any of messages in that thread; you observing that there wasn’t is knocking down a straw man, and using the word censorship here is just hyperbole.

    There are however unambiguously factually incorrect assertions in some of the offtopic messages I removed from that thread.













  • removing the comments to leave only the remnant of it that is “truth” is often not the best way to handle it

    i totally agree that it is often preferable to allow misinformed comments to remain so that they can be refuted.

    in the case of futo, though, i feel like there are often actually some bad-faith actors who just want to keep the discussion going, and will continue to repeat their misinformed arguments in the face of any and all evidence.

    and, in this particular case, it is even a thread in the Open Source community so any discussion of Futo is inherently offtopic. (and all of which is also effectively promotion for them; again see succès de scandale.)

    The way the conversation looks right now is just confusing

    the thread as it is now has lots of comments about open source keyboards, and a link to this thread for anyone who wants more information about all the deleted comments than they can find in the modlog. if you think it would be better if that thread was still mostly people arguing about Futo… well… i’m glad you’re not a mod there.