Aurornis

I might believe that if the protests weren't being organized on Facebook and then posted to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

It's more like garbage dumps. People don't want to moderate their production of garbage, they just don't want any consequences of it to be too close to their house.

The interesting thing about the anecdote wasn't the timing. It was that there was no reason to build a data center there but they felt compelled to make it their top priority.

especially when small towns are so easily exploited due to income and infrastructure.

Small, remote towns without electricity or data connections are not easily exploited for data centers.

The original claim is not wrong. Thinking hard does not burn significantly more calories.

If it’s really hard to measure because the amount is so small that it requires precise equipment, it’s not significant relative to the rest of the body’s energy expenditure.

On the other hand, my wife wouldn’t have survived to this age if not for technology that wasn’t available in the 1900s.

I can answer those emails from my air conditioned office or house.

I have time to answer them because we’re not spending all of our effort just trying to survive or working the farms.

Seems like a good trade to me.

People in comfortable positions wish that other people would stop competing to take them away.

Organizing the whole world to stop competing only sounds nice when you imagine that it means you get to lock your position in life in place and stop feeling threatened.

It becomes much less attractive to most when you look at what it would actually mean to stop competing and have everyone revert to the average. Global average income is around $10K per person. If you make more than that, you’d have to give up a lot. That’s not even accounting for the sharp drop in production of things you need that would happen if the upsides of working hard were removed, leading to people working less.

They probably would be awful to have a house next to, but which if the hyperscale data center proposals are near residential areas?

The really large data centers have to go into areas with a lot of land and utility connections. These are usually zoned commercial or industrial already.

I agree that I don’t want a data center in my backyard either.

What’s missing from this strange conversation is discussion about how many data center proposals are near residential areas.

I tried to look for one in my state and a few surrounding areas and couldn’t find any. There was an amusing story about how data center protestors had to organize expensive bus trips to get the protesters out to the data center site because it was so remote.

There was another story about a small town without any major electricity or communication infrastructure coming together to impose a moratorium on data center construction. There were no plans to build data centers in their small town and no reason to consider it at all, but they felt so threatened that they needed to convene and put on a big show about banning it.

The social phenomenon of the data center construction protest movement is really fascinating. My assumption is that it will run its course and then be mostly dropped when the next current thing comes along.

There are some actual concerns about using natural gas instead of trying to utilize the optimal power sources or locations, but they’re mostly overshadowed by bogeyman complaints like thinking that a data center is going to end up in your backyard or water consumption that is negligible compared to golf courses and swimming pools.

Same seems to be happening with AI, people are just working more rather than less.

In the last big AI productivity thread I read on Hacker News the most common anecdote was people saying they weren’t more producing more at work with AI, they were just getting the same work done faster. After that they’d relax or switch to working on side projects.

I don’t think that’s going to last for everyone, but I do think it is a common response to AI. I don’t agree when you say that people are working more. I think, at this moment in time, most people are using AI to compress the time spent doing their work. Some people pick up extra tasks with some of their new free time. Others don’t.

I don’t think AI is leading to increased working time other than in the LinkedIn and X hustle and grind bubbles where posters are bragging about having 10 agent loops running constantly to launch their startup.

It doesn't matter what they spent excatly

If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.

The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.

The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.

Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.

Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying.

That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed.

That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.

Are you using the free ChatGPT tier? You might see an ad separate from the response.

Do you pay $20/month or more? You won't see any ads.

The judge already ruled that training on the books does not constitute reselling their content.

The authors were only owed money for the piracy.

I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is for the free tier, not their subscriptions.

OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.

It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.

Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.

The people who care about open versus proprietary models or even care about using good models at all aren’t using the ChatGPT free and ultra low cost tier, where these ads show up.

Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.

The judge already ruled that it was fair for Anthropic to use books for training if they acquired them legally.

They actually did this.

Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books

The lawsuit was a mixed blend of individual authors and publishers.

It was started by a group of authors, not publishers.

This is a settlement that the authors and Anthropic agreed upon.

They agreed on the amount last year. The judge approved it now.

The lawsuit was for the way the books were acquired. They already ruled that it's not infringement to use the books.

The award was $3,000 per book, which is about 100X higher than it would have cost to buy the books.

It's never going to appease the people who demand companies be sued into collapse, but given that both parties came to an agreement and the damages are 100X higher than what a book costs, it looks reasonable to me.

The proposed CSAM scanning used perceptual hashing to try to identify CSAM material known to law enforcement.

It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.

TL;DR: Instead of measuring the percentage of homes that are owned by people who live there, they want to measure the percentage of adults who own a home.

Feels like an apples and oranges situation. The two numbers each have their own value but they’re measuring different things.

One is calculated based on the number of houses, the other is a measured based on the population of adults or households. Both measures have always existed. Trying to replace one with the other doesn’t seem right because they both have value for different reasons.

If you are a collection of 5 companies with annual net income in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the debt is actually still their problem.

Everyone likes to repeat this tired cliche but skips all of the steps that would have to happen to get to that point.

I like all the different comments in this thread saying that most companies do X, where X is a different answer from each person: LiteLLM, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code.

GitHub Copilot is the sticky product in your org.

You can choose a selection of different models within it, but you're not using Codex or Claude Code.

That's a good question. Some of the perspectives in the book can be helpful. The limitation is that the scenarios and themes in the books are always a little too perfect to reflect real life.

Like you're watching a movie and everything is going disastrously wrong, then the hero shows up and the tone completely changes for the better. Everything starts going right.

The most valuable parts are probably reframing the situations and looking for different perspectives as a way to broaden your thinking. I try to take them as as additional perspectives to have available.

I think the thing I disliked the most about having the books applied to me was when they were treated as an instruction manual for all situations. People would read those books and then start to fit every situation into something from the book.

The Team Topologies book that another comment brought up is a common offender. For years you could tell when someone had read the book because they'd try to force every organization to fit into the prescribed team and interaction formats. If it wasn't working out they'd switch to one of the other formats instead of thinking critically about what we needed for our unique situation.

I feel like there could be a lot of value in understanding the psychology of teams and using it to build an environment where they can thrive.

However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.

You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.

So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.

I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.

For personal use I agree.

For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work.

So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time.

Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not necessarily motivated by the better product, mostly the price. My wife's company keeps switching their tools out from under everyone every year or two. Just when they get everything stabilized and everyone familiar with the new tool, some new contract is signed that moves them all to some other company's suite.

It’s a sneaky statistic. You could say that 100% of the startups I worked at used Windows laptops because at least one person had a Windows computer somewhere.

If you saw the engineers you’d see 80% Macs and 20% Linux laptops.

The statistic would technically be true.

I use Chinese open weight models a lot, but they’re not what I reach for when I’m doing important coding work.

There should not be errors during normal use at rated speeds.

With non-ECC RAM running a memory test and getting any errors means it’s not stable. The memory tests run at maximum bandwidth constantly so a few days of full bandwidth memory testing might produce as many transmissions as your months of regular server use. Seeing bit errors (even if corrected) means something is not right.

The ECC can correct it for a while but I would want to RMA that stick if it’s in warranty.

potentially negative affects to sensitive groups such as people with neurodiverse conditions

People with neurodiverse conditions are not sensitive to power lines. Hard to believe we’re seeing this type of claim on Hacker News.

Modern high voltage DC transmission lines also don’t have 60Hz emissions because they’re DC.

Anyway, the land where these transmission lines are built usually isn’t running through high population density areas. They’re not slapping a HV transmission line right in the middle of a residential corridor if they can avoid it. It’s going through farm land and empty space if at all possible. It’s a hundred times easier to build the towers in those locations instead of near population centers.

Parent comment didn’t say anything about data centers.

Getting power from the areas with high renewable energy density over to the population centers is a good goal to have.