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skeaker

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Yes, because it's a matter of scale. Napkin estimate that you can do at home is that there are about 2.7b buildings, and half of them use concrete. 8/1.35b = 0.000000001~%. Compare that to 12,000 data centers polluting 0.1% of us. 0.1/12000 = 0.000008~. That's 8 zeroes past the decimal vs 5, so right off of the bat we can see that a completed data center is thousands of times worse than a concrete pouring.

The buried ledes here are firstly that a concrete building is a one-time thing, where once it's built it is built and that's that. (The 8% of pollution is a yearly recurring thing from the production of concrete, but an individual concrete building is done polluting once construction is finished.) On the other hand, an AI data center contributes its pollution every year continuously forever.

Secondly, the matter of scale. Concrete took billions of buildings to get to its share of the pollution done. You will be hard pressed to find anything in the world period that can be produced at that scale without causing significant pollution. It's almost miraculous that it's only at 8% globally, especially when compared to AI data centers, of which there are only 12,000. You could build a dozen buildings out of concrete every day for the next 40 years and on a global scale you would not move the needle on how much pollution concrete is responsible for. Do the same with data centers and while the math is a bit harder you will wind up being responsible for ~30% of the pollution on Earth.

On paper you can't do this, but in practice the fines for doing so (if they ever even reach your mailbox after you've bribed the local politicians, which you've done to get your center built in the first place) are just a cost of business. There are plenty of videos of people who live near data centers who now have sputtering water from their sinks, or water that comes out brown and unusable.

Not sure about rating them against each other but I've had plenty of success with YouTube Music. Once it learns your taste well enough it starts giving you some real deep cuts. I've found songs I like with it that had less than ten thousand views on several occasions. Notably it has never played AI-generated music for me which is a big plus too. Google can be awful but their algorithm undeniably works.

If your point is that you're trying to parrot Sanders' beliefs in a deliberately stupid way, it isn't working, because this isn't why he thinks the public should have a stake in how AI companies are being run. It's what you think he thinks after not having read the article.

Why? He makes a compelling argument for his stance, and he is of course one man, not a business. If AI companies are going to have such a profound effect on the common man, including both you and me, then why shouldn't we have a say in how they operate? I can hardly say the same for Sanders' belongings.

Who is "we?" A utopian society is what we should ideally be aiming for at all times, not some dirty word like you seem to think it is.

Old Reddit Is Down 2 months ago

This will be true for me. The new layout is just so, so bad. It's hard to believe they found a way to make a worse UI given how many people found the old one difficult.

I feel like this actually isn't that complicated. Just remove any special protections that they get on the judicial end. The judicial is already there with the intention of balancing the powers of the executive, it just doesn't do that currently because they limply decided that the executive can go and do whatever the hell they please.

Fair enough, but I think many people miss that something can be suboptimal in one way and very optimal in another. As an example, plenty of people here hail ffmpeg as the most optimal way to convert videos between formats, and for the technically inclined it sure is. Despite that, probably 99% of people that have ever needed to convert a video haven't touched it/don't know its name and never will because its interface is totally suboptimal. "It is the best and not successful" can be read as a true statement, but it leaves out that it is the best in this one sense and is far from the best in another sense.

To bring this back to the point I have found that AD is well documented, functions generally the same everywhere, and has an intuitive enough interface that you can get not-super-techy interns on the helpdesk up to speed on reseting passwords in it in short order. I couldn't say the same for any Linux management system I've touched, so even though you could say "system management on Linux is the best" and have that be a true statement, you're still missing where it fails and why that area matters to businesses.

Honest question: Why?

Because it works really well for a corporate environment where you require central management for your devices. Yes, the environments of Linux and Windows are different as you said, and unfortunately that means one will generally be better than the other within certain contexts. The corporate workstation use case is a gigantic one that Windows is currently dominating in, and this is terrible for Linux adoption because it means to get a job at a place that uses Windows you are incentivized to use it yourself so you can learn it. It also means that schools (which are often run like businesses internally) are way more likely to use it, so new students that are just learning how to use a computer are coming up on Windows.

Linux is indeed very different from Windows and that's fine, that isn't a problem at all and it has plenty of upsides. What should be clear is that this particular use case is a remarkable downside for Linux, and the mass adoption of Windows in the majority of businesses should make that self evident. Realistically Linux can and absolutely is used in business contexts in the same way as Windows (hence why France is going ahead with it), but it isn't as optimized for it as Windows is, when it totally could be. Macs have had some robust management platforms made for them that I've found pretty similar to AD for example. If someone developed a straight out AD clone for Linux that functioned more or less the same on the front-end it would be huge for Linux adoption in my opinion. Hopefully that answers your question.