Well of course not. People still need to process information, just like they need to get around.
Imagine, way back when, when trains were invented, and people kept saying “we should stick with horses and carriages!” or “everyone should walk and carry their load on their bodies!”
You can’t reason about this stuff unless you put it in terms of productivity.
Objections to data centers based on energy and water consumption are red herrings. For the most part, people aren’t saying these things because they actually care about these things. They are objecting because either 1/they don’t want to live right next to a data center, 2/they object to DCs being built without the necessary (and ideally clean) generation capacity being built first, or 3/they fear, dislike, or otherwise object to AI for other reasons and don’t want more AI capacity being built at all.
My reply above highlights the unthinking assumption that data is best processed in a centralized manner that runs roughshod over democratic processes.
Imagine, way back when, before automobiles were adopted, if car manufacturers lobbied for subsidies and bought out all supplies of steel for years in advance with a promise to pay with yet-to-be realized profits rather than compete based on merit.
"terms of productivity" indeed. The inefficient mode of transmutation was chosen because I find slop's value proposition dubious. The merest hint of regulation shakes the industry like a rotten tree.
No, my second reply to you was to illustrate the absurdity of the second paragraph of your post to which it replied. If you perceive a flaw in it then it is likely a case of the fox smelling its own hole.
Neither is there any need to sleuth your way to what I "actually" believe. I have already given you the answer.
In the original message I was responding to, you were not alluding to a level playing field. You were alluding to no field at all (“Notice how the comparison is never to the absence of data centers”).
If that is not what you intended, I welcome a clarification.
I expressed my thoughts with clarity the first time and I know I am engaging in good faith. I can't be so certain of you.
It would be less effort expended for you to reread what I already wrote until you understand it than for me to repeat it until you understand. Exercise the principle of charity[0] when rereading, taking care to suppose that the author is writing to communicate something non-trivial and is at least as intelligent as the reader.
AI just today proved that quantum computers are a bad idea, so maybe we will stop dumping resources into that? Surely there will be other knock on effects like this.
That's like saying it would make sense to make Internet Explorer work on all platforms. It doesn't make sense.
The solution is to use user interface toolkits that are available on each platform. For example, wxWidgets or Qt or appropriate bindings to them if you can't be bothered to write UI code for each platform you're targeting.
> That's like saying it would make sense to make Internet Explorer work on all platforms. It doesn't make sense.
Why not? Microsoft released IE for win16, win32, wince, macos system 7 through 9, macos X, Solaris, HP-UX. If it ran on all those platforms, Microsoft probably could have supported it on any platform that had the capability of running graphical web browsers.
Maybe because wxWidgets is garbage DX and UX wise, and Qt isn’t free and doesn’t allow you to reuse web code? One of the value prop of electron is to reuse your web codebase.
How is wxwidgets garbage DX and UX wise? You can literally read the source code and can build the library in 5 minutes, and the UX is native user interface elements of the given platform.
I don't see how reusing web code is an advantage. Web code is for the web. We are talking about a native platform (Windows 11) which has a mature API platform stretching back decades. Why would you need to make it "web"?
Some people might want to get all the apple software off the apple hardware. For example the dossier that macOS builds on users and their family behind the scenes; currently on the front page of this website.[0]
Unfortunately it appears that Asahi has promised to not allow doing that[1] but perhaps it will enable someone else to make it possible.
If you came away thinking I was enthusing about AI slop, it's probably because I was too subtle in comparing it to a food I abhor while saying there are tidbits, non-slop tidbits, that I could appreciate. Apologies for that human generated mischance!
I'm actually rather bemused to see many young folks, arguing against LLMs and ML, and seeing more experienced folks, embracing it.
I'm pretty experienced, and have found LLMs to be quite useful.
Like any new tool, there are deficits and peculiarities, but these are becoming less of a concern, and the utility of these tools is advancing rapidly.
Quite something how many posts here seem to default to "Those children who do not share my opinion, they must have been brainwashed. It's the only explanation."
I mean, fair point. But it sure does smell like the original commenter's kids have been brainwashed. "Booing" a car or having a hateful attitude towards a car without any external influence? I actually don't think the Cybertruck looks good - at all. But all my kids are amazed by it. And we haven't spoken to them at all about Elon.
Conservatives' undermining public education makes it inevitable that slop engines will surpass the intelligence of the average human, then double and treble it as the average human's intelligence continues to decline.
Probably also a huge problem but at least in the last 15 years of working, there was always at least 1 if not 2 people were i question how they were even in the industry to begin with and getting jobs.
It's already much smarter than most humans in a lot of ways.
It's not the same kind of intelligence as humans so it'll probably always have weird areas where it can't do as well (like counting letters in words), but that doesn't mean it isn't smart. If AI were sentient it could point at humans and say "haha look how dumb they are; 99.999% of them can't even write a basic Lean program".
We're way beyond the point where "it's not as smart as humans" is meaningful.
It's maybe minor but the three features that keep me on macOS address iMessage integration with my iPhone, clipboard sharing with my iPhone, and seamless projection to my Apple TV as mirrored or an external monitor.
But if you want the true deals on Linux, I am working on that personally [1]. For clipboard sharing, it should be feasible on Linux if you have AirDrop compatible Wi-Fi hardware, but for iMessage integration, it's possible given Mac hardware identifiers. Apple requires attestations derived from Apple device identifiers to flag spam on iMessage. It would be great if Apple was also allowing deriving keys from the Apple account, so it can allow alternate device to borrow trust from their iPhone for example, but for now it does not seem possible (extracting identifiers once works though, and then you can use iMessage [2]). About Apple TV, idk I never seen this thing irl so I can't tell how that works but I'd guess it's replicable.
It's always "Data centers don't use a lot of energy compared to using a particle accelerator to transmute lead into gold."
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