The Saturday editorial "Trump's undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere," was the final straw for me. I can forgive an editorial defending Trump's actions--no matter how misguided, but the fact that the WaPo did not disclose Bezos' personal interests in the matter infuriated me bitterly. According to NPR, they corrected the omission on Sunday, but I'm done.
That subscription money now goes to my local NPR station. Anytime NPR covers anything related to Microsoft, they always provide the disclosure of receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is what legitimate news sources are supposed to do.
This is a 5-year-old article, and it's still very pertinent. This past summer I did a lot of bike-riding around Loudon County surveying trails for the Park Service (volunteer) and it's like riding through a cyberpunk future out there. Endless windowless buildings humming loudly, lots of electrical substations, and wires crisscrossing everywhere. The Washington Post reported that Dominion Power is now running electrical lines deep into West Virginia and bringing defunct coal plants back online to meet the energy demands (1), but a recent independent report found that it won't be enough as energy demands are going to double at a minimum (2).
I live in eastern Prince William County and the spread of datacenters is a hot-button topic here. People living on the Western side of the county, near Loudon, are getting rezoned for data centers, which means dramatic increase to their property taxes. The same report that highlighted energy demands also found that the increased tax revenue and jobs created are only really during the construction of the buildings, once completed they don't take many techs to maintain them.
I feel this last point may underestimate the jobs created because it doesn't consider all the folks connecting to these data centers to do work. For example, Amazon is expanding here to be close to the datacenters and my friends who work for Amazon have to be within driving distance of the campus. I could be overestimating this effect though.
(1) Gift WaPo article: Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal
https://wapo.st/40A4SBm
1. Sugarless Protein Bars: just last week I found one they claimed 30 grams of protein on the front of the package, but hidden in the nutrition facts is that it has four-times the daily recommended saturated fats. These will give you heart disease and are found in the health food section of convenience stores.
2. Pretty much all advertised "health food" snacks will make you exceed your daily saturated fats and sugar limits. If it's not a food in its purest form, it will have added sugar and fat. How many products slap a "high in fiber" sticker on their package, when in reality they have very little fiber or are selling you that fiber with a huge dose of sugar and fat?
3. "lean" meats: This one shocked me. Advertised as high in protein, health youtubers promoted it to me all the time, but actually very rich in unhealthy fats and getting more fatty every decade as cows and chickens are bred for more fat.
4. Rice, Pasta, and other simple carbs: I started monitoring my glucose and these had to go after watching incredible spikes in blood sugar after eating them.
What do I eat now? Whole grains and Legumes daily, leafy greens daily, fresh and frozen fruits, and fish three times a week. My blood sugars are stable, my lipid profile is great, and I'm getting the best sleep of my life as tracked by my fitbit. I look around me at the epidemic of metabolic disease and then I look at how 95% of every grocery store contributes to that and I want to see public policy change on this issue.
It's not just the UPFs, we need scientifically-backed truth-in-advertising for all foods. For years I thought I was eating very healthy, but then my blood tests got worse and worse until my doctor wanted to put me on medications. I asked for six more months, and spent that time reading the labels on all the "healthy" foods I was consuming. It was eye-opening. So much added sugar, saturated fat, and simple carbohydrates spiking my blood sugar and driving up my cholesterol. I dumped all the processed foods, went whole-foods, Mediterranean Diet, pescatarian, and blew my doctor's mind when all my tests came back healthy.
We have an epidemic of declining healthspans forcing most of us to spend the last decades of our lives as invalids, surrendering our life-savings to the medical industry after the food industry is done ruining our health for profit. This is not about personal responsibility. This is about a food industry that is lying to us about the health effects of eating their hyper-palatable, hyper-processed foods. Corporations lie to sell us food engineered to make us addicted, render us sick, and then sell us the medications to keep our hearts beating so we can continue to consume.
I don't follow your reasoning. It costs nothing to ride a bicycle in most of America. We have bike paths everywhere that are free for anyone to enjoy. You also don't have to live in a locality to enjoy the bike paths there.
For the record, on this specific outing I was doing volunteer trail-surveying. I live in Prince William County. I think the Data Centers are awesome and I love them, the tax revenues they bring in, and the jobs that come with them. It was clear from my comment that I am conflicted about the incredible energy-consumption, not the data centers themselves.
What does Ireland having the same size and population as Virginia have to do with my comment? Virginia is a state and I was specifically referring to Loudon and Prince William Counties, which are very tiny in proportion to the entire state of Virginia. Look up "Loudon County Data Center Alley" to understand the proportions and density of this project.
I realize this headline means nothing, but there is something to nuclear power futures. I live in Northern Virginia and my recent 20 mile bike ride in Loudon county was nothing but massive datacenters and crisscrossing powerlines to support them. The western side of neighboring Prince William County is now being consumed for data centers. The Washington Post recently had an article on how the demand for electricity for these centers is getting so desperate that they are running powerlines deep into West Virginia and bringing coal plants back online to meet the demand. Estimates are that it's going to take multiple nuclear powerplants to meet future demand in just this locality.
I have very mixed feelings about this. I love the possibilities of all these datacenters and their potential, but I'm worried about the massive amount of energy they are consuming. If this is all just so much hype and marketing, then it's incredibly wasteful.
The objections to evolution on the grounds of racism and eugenics were in Bryan's closing statements. These were never read in court because the defendant did not give a closing argument. He never uses the term "eugenics" but that's clearly what he is referring to at times, especially in his references to Nietzsche:
At a public speech given right after the court case and just before his death, one of his arguments against evolution is because the theory was being used to object to vaccinations, asylums, and many medical treatments for fear that these measures were allowing the unfit to survive:
To be clear, I want to reaffirm that I do not agree with the theological arguments and absolutely accept the Theory of Evolution. I'm only sharing this information because the debate over evolution was very much about ethics as it was about science.
Hello. Author of this 17-year-old blog post here. I was a little shocked to find this throwaway post from my ancient history making HackerNews today and I just want to make a couple of notes:
1. If I were to write the post today, I would draw a comparison to Bryan with Oil Companies disputing the science of Global Warming. Global Warming is real, but Oil Companies attack the science when really they disagree with the policy conclusions being drawn from the science. I also see this with modern nutrition, where companies producing unhealthy food are flooding the world wide web with attacks on the science to convince people to keep consuming their products. Bryan was doing the same thing. He abhorred eugenics, but rather than attack the policies, he attacked evolution as a science in the courtroom. That is what he is remembered for and there's a history lesson there that's going to repeat with these modern examples of anti-science.
2. I apologize for the formatting. I upgraded Wordpress and PHP three months ago and lost all formatting on all my posts and the images are messed up. So it's hard to see that much of this is a direct blockquote from the science textbook being referenced. I believe science is real, but I keep a copy of that textbook on my shelf to remind me of how science can be used to justify horrific public policies.
The copyright law portion of the lawsuit is interesting and I'm curious about how that will go, but the NYT has a second argument that every article I read completely ignores: ChatGPT routinely attributes falsehoods to to the NYTs. It's a problem I've had with AI since the beginning, you have to fact-check everything it tells you because it will confidently make up references and facts all the time. It's one thing for ChatGPT to quote a NYT's article verbatim, it's another thing for it to completely make up stories and then attribute them to the NYT. Balancing copyright and fair use is an interesting debate, but when your AI "hallucinates" a completely fabricated article and attributes it to your organization, that's damaging.
Vox had an apt comparison of Musk to Trump in a recent article. They noted that Musk and Trump both overwhelm the public with their flood of scandals and falsehoods so that we can't even keep track of them anymore (I had forgotten about many of the incidents in this article). A celebrity or politician involved in one scandal is always remembered and villainized for that scandal, while public figures who are perpetually in the news for their scandalous behavior get normalized--even idolized by many.
You can become more specialised; but that will only take you so far. Coding will soon become no more than a means to an end. Which it always was. The only way out for developers is through expanding their vision beyond that of the tools made available to them. Why does something need to be coded? What does the end customer expect? Did they vocalise their need properly? Contextual knowledge can hardly be reproduced and is the best way to beat a ChatGPT-like tool.
This is the content I clicked for and I feel like it's pretty vague and poorly-articulated, but there's a seed of truth here. Coding is a highly-technical profession and Chat-GPT does seem to trivialize it somewhat. With Chat-GPT automating out some of the developers, you will still need some developers around to understand and review the AI's output. The developers who remain will be the ones who are high-functioning: the ones who can communicate with both technical and non-technical staff, understand the business logic, and fill-in the blanks of what the customer needs.
In this future, Chat-GPT replaces some technical staff positions. So how does that work? In my experience with the tool, getting it to write anything multidimensional--like a board game--requires hours of back-and-forth articulating and re-articulating the interface, the business rules, and how those things interact. In this sense, it's like those developers who throw up their hands and complain about the requirements documentation while other developers stay in constant contact with the stakeholders during the development process to deliver the business needs. I don't think the later need to worry about job security.
Love the Tron soundtrack and am happy to learn about Wendy Carlos. Unfortunately, she has fought tirelessly to keep her music from being digitized and available online or streaming. I did however find this delightful collaboration she did with Weird Al Yankovic remaking Peter and the Wolf:
Here's the journal article that the OP is based on. It's not concrete, but it does identify several kinds of distracting information. After reading the article I did begin deliberately ignoring much of my social media and low-quality news sites:
I have social anxiety disorder, which I deal with in the workplace by putting on a "Customer Service" persona. So in any interview, I consider the interviewer as my customer and I want to make them happy. In an interview for a previous job, the Lead Architect was very aggressively putting me through several technical questions and at one point he told me I was completely wrong in one of my answers. When I politely tried to explain why I believed my answer was correct and offered to demonstrate on my laptop, he got angry and stormed out of the interview, leaving his two embarrassed looking coworkers to continue.
It was a bad experience, but the other two interviewers were very nice and I really wanted to work for this non-profit, so I sent a follow-up email apologizing for upsetting the Lead Architect so much, saying that I thought it was just a misunderstanding, that there were multiple correct answers, and provided some documentation to further explain why I answered the way I did.
I got a job offer that afternoon, and two weeks after I started they fired the Lead Architect. That same week, I went out to lunch with the team, where one of the interviewers told everyone about how I made the Lead Architect look so stupid during the interview and that I was so incredibly nice about it that they knew they had to hire me. Turns out it was a workplace where everyone highly valued politeness and the Architect had been antagonizing and bullying everyone for years. Ended up being one of the friendliest places I've ever worked.
So in the game we get to play Bladerunners, which are slave-catchers of the future--except their job is to murder the slaves who escape. It's weird to me that 30 years later people still don't understand that the whole point of the movie is that the Bladerunner is the replicant slave of the bad guys and the other replicants are slaves fighting for their freedom. I love the thought-provoking Bladerunner universe and this looks like it may be a thoughtful production, but playing a slave-catcher is seriously problematic.
It depends entirely on who you talk to. Urban America is taking this threat seriously and locking down for the winter while rural America thinks it's a hoax. In Virginia, our cities are keeping the curve flattened, while the virus is surging off the charts in our rural communities.
Nothing convinces them. When a loved one dies of asphyxiation, they shrug it off and say that person died of obesity, old age, or a lack of vitamins. We have nurses telling stories of patients struggling to breath, but who still refuse to believe this virus is real and only cease gasping about the "fake news" when they are intubated.
Complicating this is our HIPAA regulations. The media can't show you what's happening inside our hospitals right now. They can only show the refrigeration trucks for bodies and roads closed for oxygen trucks outside the hospitals. So the conspiracy theorists claim these are for show and that the hospitals are actually empty.
With the complete abdication of leadership at the federal level--where some of our officials are openly urging citizens to fight against policies slowing the spread of the virus, we can do nothing but stay inside and hope to ride this out.
"For there’s the real rub with digital isolation — the problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there. And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get."
One part of this still infuriates me and restricts my behavior on the platform (which I barely interact with anymore): showing my friends what I click like on if it's a public post. I've had politically-impassioned relatives attack me for liking candidates they don't like or if I comment on a public post and Facebook points my comment out to them.
It also works the other way too. I really didn't need to know that my friend's septuagenarian father liked a video titled, "Booty-Jiggling Showdown."
So there are aspects of this we've come to accept, but I think most people have also modified their interactions with platforms like this to protect themselves.
> but so many of the lies spread via social media are easily disproved by consulting primary sources.
I wish this were true. I used to post snopes links and primary sources to Baby Boomer posts on Facebook, but it's hopeless. They either don't trust the fact-check, can rationalize it away, or just don't care. One of the most shocking realizations of my adult life has been learning that a very large portion of my otherwise high-functioning friends will believe anything, no matter how crazy or self-contradictory, if it reinforces their sense of self-righteousness.
That subscription money now goes to my local NPR station. Anytime NPR covers anything related to Microsoft, they always provide the disclosure of receiving funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is what legitimate news sources are supposed to do.