danaris

Nah, moral relativism is bullshit.

Sure, I can acknowledge that there may be values out there that are better than my values. That doesn't mean I have to say that people whose values are antithetical to mine—whose values are essentially "I can, should, and will take anything I want, no matter the cost to other people"—are just as good.

...do....do you think that's a gotcha?

Yes, if we had considered ethics in the past, we wouldn't have committed bloody genocide on the Native Americans. We would probably have tried to open up mutually beneficial trade with them. (Sadly, we probably would still have caused the deaths of millions of them simply due to pathogens we didn't know we were carrying when we met them.) Do you think that would have made things worse now?

In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.

This sounds an awful lot like a "might makes right" attitude: "Sure, they're awful people, but they're winning, so we should adhere to their values!"

No doubt the titans of the AI industry, who stand to lose their shirts

No they don't.

They stand to lose points on their dollar-denominated high scores. If every one of the AI companies went belly-up, their execs would all live very, very comfortably for the rest of their lives even if they never got another job.

I very much understand where the EU is coming from with the DMA. I think that its intent, broadly, is a good one, and something we should be pushing for more. I'm even very sympathetic to the idea that platform-makers/gatekeepers should not just be able to charge ahead doing whatever they think is OK without any countervailing forces.

However, I think their implementation has, at least in some high-profile instances, been utterly boneheaded.

The problem with all too many such things at a governmental level is twofold (well, many-more-fold, but two major issues):

First, they treat "competition" as an axiomatic good regardless of the welfare of consumers. This can be seen in ignoring privacy concerns inherent in giving arbitrary developers access to the data required for this level of interoperability. I'm generally an Apple proponent, and I laud them for their privacy stance, but frankly I'd be more willing to trust Google alone with my data than Google plus Meta and whatever other developers want to farm it on Android.

Second, they barely seem to understand the technical details of the systems they are trying to regulate. As Gruber notes, they seem to be essentially putting themselves in the role of OS designers here, without the expertise to actually design an OS.

Finally, with regard to the DMA specifically, it seems really, really stupid that it's not set up such that an existing or potential gatekeeper can come to them a question about whether XYZ new feature would be OK, and what would be required to make it OK. As I'm sure many of us here know, it's vastly easier to build in interoperability and other similar features when first designing a system than bolting it on after the fact.

To be even clearer, genuine effective age-appropriate sex education absolutely includes education on what it means to be trans, gay, bi, ace, and every other part of the queer rainbow, and that all of these things are just as good and normal as being straight, cis, etc.

Take your bigotry and stuff it.

To be clear, I recognize that there is zero chance of genuine effective age-appropriate sex education being mandated in the foreseeable future in the US, nor has there been any such chance at any time in the past. I'm merely noting some of the things that would actually be helpful measures in combating CSA if it were possible to implement them.

You're absolutely right that, even if such a mandate had already existed, it would've been erased or co-opted by right-wing groups by now.

The problem is, the things that would actually prevent CSA require things like "giving children rights", "widely mandating effective age-appropriate sex education even for young children", and "admitting that it's mostly not scary strangers doing it."

These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything.

Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.

Water price is only one consideration for where to build a data center.

"The data center can get water cheap" is not the same as "water is generally cheap in the area the data center is built."

"Water is cheap in the area" is not the same as "water is plentiful in the area."

You talk like you think economics in the real world works like "spherical-economy-in-a-frictionless-vacuum" Econ 101 terms. I assure you, it does not. There are lots and lots of exceptions.

evaporative cooling takes way less power to operate.

So build the datacenter with a bunch of extra solar panels and batteries.

Or will that cut too deeply into the poor, starving billionaires' bonuses?

The clearest name for it I've seen is the Two Guys Fallacy: you see two guys talking on the same forum, and assume they're the same guy.

they're being built where water is cheap. water is cheap where it's abundant.

[citation needed]

There have already been stories about residents in some areas having to ration water due to drought, but the recently-built datacenters still guzzling water.

And, AIUI, the only reason they use up any water, rather than using a completely closed-loop system, is because it's cheaper that way.

They did, though;

You cite a bunch of changes, but none of them are what people have actually been claiming for the past 19 that Apple will do: preventing us from installing arbitrary software on our Macs.

I still have my MacPorts installation, which works fine, and installs all kinds of command-line tools.

I can still write anything I want on my Mac, compile or interpret it, and run it.

I can still install whatever I want from outside the Mac App Store.

This is a classic example of goalpost-moving.

First of all, the answer is "no, they're absolutely not".

However, the reason for that is that they don't want to. They want to torture these people for the sin of being brown in America.

Second of all, it absolutely does not matter whether they are efficiently carrying out their fascist work. The official, stated purpose of ICE, as it currently stands, is cruel, unnecessary, and almost certainly in violation of international law.

These sorts of things done remotely close to residential areas are very rare in the grand scheme.

I'm sure that will be a great consolation to the thousands of people who have to live near them. "Don't worry, your situation is very rare! That's why we don't have to do anything about it."

As someone who was growing up during the period where the Internet became mainstream...

This was happening before then. The Lions, Rotary, etc clubs in my area made very little effort to reach out and invite younger members. Aside from the Rotary exchange program, I couldn't have named a single event they were putting on that was genuinely aimed at people under the age of 50.

And the few times that they did try to talk to some of us young people about the club, the very, very strong impression I got of the pitch was "you can pay significant monthly dues to come to meetings with old people and occasionally go do volunteer activities out in the community." I already did some volunteering without having to pay for the privilege, and I didn't see the draw of going to meetings with old people.

But a huge portion of what they burned those resources to produce was energy—both to generate electricity, and to power their vehicles.

We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.

No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.

"Voluntary" is bullshit.

You can call these transactions "voluntary", but when a huge percentage of the people in America do not make enough money to save, period, that means that all their income is going to necessities (with "a few small luxuries" also being a necessity for any human being).

Many of the companies making the biggest profits are also the companies that own the highest percentage of their respective markets.

People don't have a choice.

The problem is, the entire right-wing/neoliberal subfields of economics have been utterly refusing to actually compare to reality and make adjustments since Reagan. They just repeat their dogma (like trickle-down economics), and when you point out that it's not working, they claim you're just not doing it hard enough.

This idea that Apple has been plotting this whole time to turn the Mac into iOS, in terms of limiting the software you can run to their own App Store, is a tired meme that makes zero sense given what we've seen from Apple in the past...checks...19 years.

Like, seriously, do you think they need longer than that to do it if it's really what they plan?

If they were ever going to do it, it would've been when they switched to Apple Silicon chips, and...they didn't!

Perpetuating the idea does no one any favors. It's just pointless paranoia.

There's nothing special about Sony's store—the point is that, just for instance, many people own a Playstation of some sort, and want to watch movies through it. For some (nontrivial!) percentage of those people, the Playstation is the only thing hooked up to their television, and thus the only way they can—or know how to—watch a movie on their biggest screen.

Furthermore, Sony is the exclusive source for movies distributed by Sony. If someone wants to watch one of their movies—I don't know which those are offhand—they will need to buy it from Sony (or, at the very best, buy it from some other store and their money still goes to Sony).

In either of these cases, yes, they could choose not to do that. But if you've just gotten home from a hectic shift at your second job, microwaved a ready-meal for yourself and your kid, gotten them to bed, and finally have an hour or two to relax before you have to go to sleep yourself...are you really going to be willing to go out of your way to find some other way to watch the movie you want to watch? And more and more people are finding themselves in these sorts of situations in recent years.

Most broadly, my point is that for any given (major) store, there are people for whom their preferred "small luxuries" come from there, and asking them to give that up in order to try to make a difference that probably won't happen (due to my point (b) above) is likely to be a very hard sell.

You seem to have either misunderstood my point (a), or you have a misguided idea of how important small luxuries are to people, especially people who do not have the means to procure larger luxuries on a regular basis.

I mean, sure; it's much more painful to boycott the only ISP around, or the only grocery store within a 30 mile radius, but just because there are things that could be worse doesn't mean that this can't be bad.

Boycotts don't work nearly as well nowadays because

a) Consumers don't have enough money already, so they're both stressed out and getting fewer things for themselves. These combine to mean that they're less likely to be willing to give up what little luxuries they have left, even if you're just asking them to substitute one media property for another.

b) The companies being targeted are just too damn big. The consolidation that began in the '80s has reached truly ludicrous levels in 2026, meaning that the company can just...ignore drops in profits for months or even years while consumers get worn out.

This has nothing to do with "the market".

This is a handful of incredibly wealthy companies deciding for us all.

It's hardly "changing the subject" to try and establish whether this is actually a proportional effort.

No, that's basically the definition of whataboutism.

We are talking about the problems with datacenters. You are trying to claim that we shouldn't be concerned with the problems of datacenters if we aren't at least equally concerned with the problems of X, Y, and Z other things.

There is no world in which that's a sound argument.

If you want to provide new information into a conversation, source the damn information yourself. Don't tell us hallucinations.

Uh, no?

You get unemployment benefits. For a little while. In some places there may also be something like rent compensation, but generally unemployment benefits are supposed to be all-encompassing. (They are nowhere near enough to be all-encompassing.)

Once the unemployment benefits end, you better have a job.

My wife lost her job in the summer of 2020. We were incredibly lucky that the lockdowns meant extended unemployment benefits. They still lasted....I forget exactly, but I believe it was no more than about a year.

This is whataboutism.

No one's saying we shouldn't care about the impact of other technologies and industries too.

But when the AI industry is sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into building a huge number of datacenters, many of which have already been proven to have environmental and legal problems, sitting there saying, "You didn't complain when we got TV!" or even "You didn't complain when the datacenters were for AWS!" is just transparently trying to change the subject without addressing the very real concerns.

I'm sorry, when individual datacenters are drawing more power than entire cities, and needing to build entire new fossil-fuel-burning power plants to service their needs, you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your "it's just like watching TV" excuse there.

Presumably you're fine with using electricity to heat/cool your house, yes?

Would you, then, also be fine with running three extra air conditioners/space heaters that do nothing but sit outside on the lawn?

"People are OK with the energy usage already happening, so they should be OK with adding 32,767 AI datacenters too" doesn't make sense. It's essentially a reductio ad absurdum. Of course we're "selectively squeamish with computer resource usage"; some usage is obviously useful to us (with entertainment also in the "useful" category—we're not robots!), while for many, many of us, the extra datacenters are having anywhere from a neutral to a profoundly net-negative impact on our lives even before you consider the resource usage.

I think it's fine so long as one fully understands that the LLM is playing games for the human's entertainment.

The LLM does not have fun, because the LLM is not alive.

OK, buckle up.

Nigel Farage is basically like the UK's Trump: he was the head of the UKIP party, which championed Brexit, and then became the dog that caught the car when Brexit actually happened. Since then, the Reform UK party has taken up the position of far-right-practically-Nazis in UK politics, and Farage is the head of that.

Farage is also an MP (Member of Parliament) for Clacton. Recently, he was embroiled in a scandal where he clearly took foreign bribe money. As an MP, Parliament can run an investigation of him for it. So he stepped down—pre-empting that investigation...but immediately stood in the by-election that was triggered. This way, either he loses the by-election to one of the other major parties—Labour or the Tories, which these days roughly count as "somewhat right of the US Democrats and a tiny bit left of the US Republicans", respectively—or he is returned to Parliament with a strong mandate, having defeated whatever candidates those parties sent to oppose him.

Except...they didn't send anyone to oppose him.

This means that he's basically a shoo-in to return to Parliament unopposed—meaning he has no mandate—to face his investigation.

...Enter Count Binface.

Now the options for him are "return to Parliament having faced no serious candidates, right into an official investigation", or "lose to the man with a bin on his head".

Neither of these are good options for Nigel Farage.