JuniperMesos

I have never had any interest in live sports and I was genuinely unaware of this use case.

I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.

I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.

I never got into the habit of listening to "the radio", in the sense of an AM or FM station broadcasting over the air on some frequency in a general metropolitan area. I remember listening to the radio stations my parents liked to listen to in the car as a kid. But by the time I was old enough to drive myself, I had already owned an mp3 player for a while, and if I wanted to listen to music in (my parents') car I could plug it into a cassette deck adapter - it's not like any local radio station near me was gonna play the Final Fantasy VII OST or a mix that went from Eve 6 to Jethro Tull to Blind Guardian to an bluegrass version of the Bubble Bobble theme I found on OCRemix. Plus, no commercials.

And if I wasn't actively driving a car at the moment, I probably had something I could be doing with a computer, perhaps involving a YouTube video, or just listening to my own extremely idiosyncratic music choices, that was more interesting than a local radio station, even if I technically owned some kind of device that could receive an FM signal.

Soon enough I had a smartphone and then a smartphone with a mobile internet connection whose cap was generous enough that I didn't need to think hard about how I was using it. And it turns out that having the entire internet available to me on a handheld device subsumes everything I might get out of listening to a radio station - including the modality of listening to audio while I'm doing something else, which might well come from an internet radio station anywhere in the world.

It occurs to me when I listen to a podcast while I'm working out at the gym or driving a car today (via my phone) that the actual auditory experience of this isn't drastically different than how people were consuming talk radio shows decades ago (down the fact that many of them have ads). The techniques for speaking in an engaging way to an audience, or having an engaging conversation between multiple people, are still valid; many podcasts I listen to address listener messages on the program, just like a weekly radio show might do - some even try to replicate the experience of a listener calling in live on a phone.

The business models that work today are of course drastically different than the ones that worked on radio decades ago, and the fact that audience isn't at all limited by physical location means that the sorts of audio content that gets streamed over the internet today are systematically different from what would've been the case on a radio show. I think this is mostly for the better though - more variety, more democratic access to the medium, and no FCC to regulate what you can and cannot legally say on regulated radio spectrum.

As far as I'm concerned, everything that's good about the content of AM/FM radio has been replicated on the general internet, and I have no particular reason to care if the radio signal carrying it to my ears comes from a licensed FM station or the 5G connection from my phone to a cell phone tower.

I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.

Engaging with someone's ideas isn't the same thing as throwing yourself behind that person. There are a number of public writers associated with rationalism (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander probably being the most famous), but the social scene isn't defined by following them as leaders or thinking their ideas are correct.

My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.

The skeptics didn't think the paranormal was an easy target they were punching down at, they thought it was a corrosive, poltically-powerful, and immoral force in US poltics that was leading towards bad ends. Also what you call the paranormal they call "institutional Christianity in US poltics" - even that choice of words has poltical valence.

There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.

I think this is you personally simply having a somewhat different set of poltical concerns than the skeptics did (in part because time has passed since their heyday, and the landscape of American poltics has shifted some), and wanting them to care about exactly what you are about and not about what they cared about, without wanting to claim that their object-level concerns were necessarily wrong.

This is a really underrated point, law enforcement that doesn't operate in your jurisdiction isn't a threat to you in the same way that law enforcement that does operate in your jurisdiction is, regardless of what specific thing you say to get on their radar.

Look at that Texas judge who threw a guy in prison for 30 years simply for moving a box of political contraband [2].

The guy in that case was sentenced for attempting to hide evidence that might show that his wife was associated with an activist group that had vandalized an ICE facility and shot a cop who came to investigate. It's possible that this is in fact an overreach of existing laws defining what counts as attempts to conceal or destroy evidence in court cases, but the legal justification for the prosecution was grounded in evidence and court procedure law for a legitimate prosecution (it is good to legally prosecute people who vandalize government facilities and then shoot cops who come to investigate; unless you genuinely support completely overthrowing the local government and replacing it with a different one through violence), not based on the political content of the pamphlets.

Look at the state department's recent report that labels everything from the DSA to the Black Lives Matter movement as secret agents of Cuba [3].

Is it incorrect that secret agents of Cuba have attempted to increase the influence of American leftist movements like the DSA and Black Lives Matter? That seems plausible to me; and it doesn't contradict the proposition that there's also substantial organic domestic support for these movements by people who are generally unaware of or unconcerned with Cuban intelligence involement; or that it is and should be legal to voice support for domestic political movements in general even if some foreign intelligence agency thinks it's in its interest to also support the same movement.

Sometimes it works out like in the Brendan Eich case but other times it doesn't.

I think it's unclear whether the Brendan Eich case "worked out" or not, depending on what exactly your stance is with respect to his original political donation, and what you think about the trajectory of his career after he was forced to resign from Mozilla. I certainly know queer activist types who are not happy that he is still in tech, and still the CEO of a browser company.

There are news reports about how the owner and property manager gave formal permission to ICE to search the building: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/02/04/chicago-... ; as well as additional reports in the months after the raid claiming that the building had been poorly-maintained and plagued by squatters for a long time previous to the raid: https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2025/11/07/judge-orders-tena... and https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/17/city-wants-residents... . Finally, in December, all remaining residents were legally required to leave: https://chicago.suntimes.com/real-estate/2025/12/12/last-rem...

It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing. Obviously it's disruptive for the existing legal tenants; but it sounds like it was a building in disrepair - that's why it was cheap enough for large numbers of illegal immigrants to be living there - and in general I think that tenant protection laws in major American cities are an impediment to building more and better-quality housing units.

It's not obvious to me that building a greenhouse industry in Alberta based on waste heat from data centers is a good idea. If it was, why should it be the Alberta government's job to set this up, rather than private industry making a deal with data center operators? If no private enterprise has formed to do this, maybe it's a sign that there's not enough demand for the outputs of that greenhouse industry for it to be profitable.

But anyway why is this datacenter using a bunch of electricity a particularly less good use of electricity than anything else?

That's an interesting quote given that in Slaughterhouse-Five, his most famous novel, he conspicuously avoids doing this. The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is a meta-chapter about the writing of the novel itself, and only in chapter two does the story proper actually begin.

I think there's something effective about the way the book begins, and continually references other parts of itself throughout the entirety of the story; but it's definitely not throwing away the first chapter; or alternatively if there was a "first chapter" to Slaughterhouse-Five that Vonnegut threw away, I wonder what possibly could have been there.

This is bad art; both conceptually and because this prose description of it is verbose and boring to read. And because the subject is a Google datacenter, and because the author Dinnis van Dijken is a working artist, I'm concerned that this performance art is motivated by anti-datacenter political sentiment in some way, which I think is generally bad.

What I think is more interesting is to look at the media outlet that published this article to begin with. According to https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/mission/

Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Zócalo is a unit of ASU Media Enterprise. Over our 20-plus-year history, we have hosted more than 700 live public programs in cities across the U.S. and abroad, have featured more than 2,000 guest speakers and performers, and have published more than 3,500 established and aspiring writers. We work in partnership with cultural institutions, public agencies, and community organizations to develop, curate, and produce high-quality public programs, editorial work, and multi-year series that engage the public.

As a unit of ASU Media Enterprise, our primary source of income is Arizona State University. Our work receives further funding through a combination of grants, programming sponsorships, and public support. Donations made to Zócalo are processed by ASU Foundation on behalf of the organization.

Maybe there are political changes that could be made that would affect Zocalo media's funding model - why are they getting the majority of their funding from Arizona State University? Is this something voters in Arizona might vote to stop funding, if it was made salient to them? What are the incentive systems behind the grants, programming sponsorships, and public support that ultimately lead to Ky-Phong Tran writing and publishing this article?

Why shouldn't people evaluate Anthropic more after seeing this technical achievement using their software product?

Seriously, let's say that every single instance of people using Anthropic LLMs to translate code in an open-source software project from one language to another was deliberately orchestrated by Anthropic's marketing department, with the aim of increasing their stock price at IPO. Even if this were true, why specifically would that be bad? Why would that be some kind of offense that Anthropic as a company committed, that they would need to be held accountable for?

If you think that Anthropic's stock price will be overvalued at its IPO because too many other investors are looking at uses of Anthropic LLMs to translate code in this way, drawing a flawed conclusion from them, and then using that flawed conclusion to bid up the price of Anthropic stock, then you can trade against them in the market. Short Anthropic's stock. If you're not sure enough about this thesis to actually make this trade, then why should anyone take you seriously when you claim that this is some kind of "trick" on Anthropic's part?

Most raw materials cost less than the final consumer-facing good made from those raw materials, because of all the costs that go into turning the raw materials into a useful product to sell to customers - why should ground acai be any different? If those people climbing acai trees in Brazil know what acai costs in the US or know that the product they have is better quality than what gets exported to the US, they can in principle use this information to create a better or cheaper acai export business than the people they're currently selling their ground acai to and undercut them.

Okay, that’s true, it’s one of the available choices. That’s a rather extreme position to take, given the history of slavery, racism, and sexism in the U.S.

Slavery, racism, and sexism have happened in every single human society that has ever existed in some form or another, the US isn't special here. Discrepancies in average outcomes between different ethnic groups as measured by the statistical tools of industrialized states are at least as old as industrialization, and have relatively little correlation with whether a particular ethnic group was acting racistly towards another one in any given time and place.

We know for a fact that outcome discrepancies were caused by racism before 1965.

No we don't.

What reason is there to believe outcomes discrepancies aren’t a problem, given that society generally believes they are?

Societies generally believe all kinds of contradictory and mutually-inconsistent things, because a society is comprised of the aggregate of a large number of individual people who all have different understandings of the world, self-interests, group loyalties, etc. I don't assume that if society generally believes something, this is an unchanging fact about society, or that the thing is in fact correct, or that I should agree myself.

What specific ethnic groups do and do not count as minorities? What specific ratio of people from various ethnic groups admitted to college campuses counts as "proper"? Why specifically do the enrollment numbers at college campuses today count as a "problem"?

The alternative proposal is not treating racial discrepancies in outcome as a problem to be solved.

This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here.

If you're unwilling to have a debate on why achievement and pay gaps exist, then you should be unwilling to assert that systemic bias is a problem, or even that achievement and pay gaps are a problem.

I confess I am not sure what role the katana plays in Nigerian lead battery recycling.

I think it is insane to characterize Anthropic, or Jared Sumner in particular, using Anthropic's LLM to assist with rewriting Bun in Rust as a direct act of hostility aimed at chilling critical discourse about Anthropic's products and marketing narrative. I'm defending Anthropic because I think this is an okay thing for anyone at all to do, and I would defend anyone at all doing it. If any criticism of Anthropic can in principle be chilled by an Anthropic employee using an LLM to rewrite a piece of open-source software in Rust, then that criticism cannot possibly be good.

I disagree; Rust's type system, which supports pretty rich algebraic data types, makes it easier to specify the correct data model for your system than it would be in languages with simpler type systems like C or Python. The ability to define enum types with arbitrary shapes for each variant, and then match on them in code, allows programmers to build better, more-accurate abstractions and have less fear of screwing up and causing a logic bug.

It's insane that you think there's any moral problem with using a LLM to rewrite a FOSS software project in another programming language, regardless of whether or not Anthropic employees are doing it. This is the kind of thing that every free software license worthy of the name allows and encourages anyone to do for any reason.

From my perspective, Anthropic is the party we need to hold accountable here.

It's insane that Ray Myers thinks that Anthropic did anything related to this port that requires holding them accountable; the fact that he used those words makes me want to prevent him from having any influence over AI policy.

I'm actually more skeptical of the politicization of the Wyoming case than of the Georgia case, after reading the linked article.

The thing that Wyoming News describes happening was:

- a construction contractor working on building a data center for Meta was using normal utility water for some construction purpose that might have been related to preparing the building's coolant system for use (the article is actually not clear about whether that was the specific source of the water), and then discharging it into the normal sanitary sewer system

- the local utility district was doing routine testing of their wastewater for fecal bacteria and accidentally discovered "Cupriavidus gilardii is a rare type of bacteria found naturally in the environment, such as in soil and water", which they tracked down to the construction discharges

- because the city of Cheyenne uses reclaimed and treated wastewater for some irrigation purposes, and because this bacteria has a risk of being harmful to immunocompromised people, out of an abundance of caution the utility district banned the construction project from discharging wastewater into the sanitary sewer

- it's still unclear exactly where the bacteria was coming from

These facts strike me as basically having nothing at all to do with data centers being harmful in a way that literally any other aspect of the built human environment isn't. Every construction site for anything uses water industrially and discharges it somehow. It's basically normal for wastewater to have bacteria in it, because it's wastewater - and ignoring the fact that it's not clear the bacteria have anything to do with the construction site being a data center as opposed to any other type of building - it's not clear that this type of bacteria being in the wastewater is actually harmful to anything. Every time I've seen reclaimed wastewater being used for irrigation somewhere I've seen signs posted saying so, in order to prevent people from thinking that the water is potable or treated.

The article says "Instead, BOPU now requires industrial companies using closed-loop cooling systems to construct separate collection systems so any water from cooling equipment or associated floor drains is directed into storage tanks, rather than the city’s sanitary sewer." and I'm frankly extremely skeptical that this is a good policy. It makes constructing a building that uses a closed-loop cooling system more expensive, which includes (some) data centers but also lots of other types of building, and I don't think there's any reason to assume that the health risk from this bacteria being in wastewater justifies the cost, nor that the policy even prevents this bacteria from getting into the wastewater.

I'm sure that despite Meta's public words about "being a good neighbor in Cheyenne", the people actually working on this project are pretty pissed off at the local utility district officials for making their job harder and more expensive, and I don't think they're wrong to feel this way. And I strongly suspect that the reason this story is being spread, and possibly the reason the journalists at the Wyoming Tribune Eagle chose to write about it to begin with, is because it involves the keywords "data center" and "water" and superficially seems bad. Certainly if this same incident happened during the construction of, say, a grocery store, I'd be unlikely to hear about it - unless a lot of journalists had an ideological problem with that grocery store, in which they'd report about it in exactly the same terms they're reporting on this incident.

The author is a socialist, quoting a socialist from 1973 whose ideas if implemented would've made everyone's lives worse. The idea that a lack of equity is worse than a lack of innovation is a core principle of socialism and it's the core reason why socialism is bad.

Data centers don't poison a community's water and the people claiming that they do are lying because they dislike generative AI and want to weaponize populist environmentalist sentiment and state regulations against the institutions doing AI inference and training.

They also don't particularly drive up the cost of energy any more than any other phenomenon in human society that uses energy, and the right solution to this is to build more power generation capacity, which is something we should be doing anyway because abundant energy is the foundation of all human prosperity.

The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development.

Also, if municipal governments "fixed that" by making it possible for more housing to be built and more people to move into neighborhoods served by those currently-good school districts, the odds are good that the influx of new students would make the school district worse. And the people currently living in single-family zoned residences know this - one motivation for NIMBYism is that it helps maintain the high quality of the local school district where your kids currently attend school.

I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school. This reduces the incentive for people who live in a house in a good public school district to resist building any more houses in that school district, lest the inhabitants of that house make the school district less good.

This post is propaganda for exactly the same cause that The Register article is propaganda for.

This is super-neat!