My conspiracy theory is the whole AI datacenter water consumption outrage is a psyop by state actors to worsen public sentiment around AI, so China and others can catch up. Obviously we should lessen the environmental impact of our technology, while considering it's relative impact vs benefit, especially compared to other technology, in this case in particular to other datacenter usage.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
I'll never understand the people who stand in line for an hour for "Free donut day" or something similar. You really value a $1.50 donut equal to an hour of your time?
If I had to make a guess, it is for the same reason that people will pay more for free shipping: they simply aren't doing the math. Of course, there could also be other reasons, things like people valuing their free time differently. Just because your employer is willing to pay $N/hour doesn't mean you are losing $N by waiting in line for an hour.
> Just because your employer is willing to pay $N/hour doesn't mean you are losing $N by waiting in line for an hour.
Most people do nothing with their time. You're not being paid to watch TV or play video games. Learning is perhaps the only thing that pays, and it's not cash nor immediate.
Don't think that's how most people see it. The worth of "an hour of your time" is basically 0 no matter who you are. If you're doing something specific (like working) then that hour of your time has value which is preset by your employer.
But that doesn't extend into all hours of your life. Your employer will not pay your hourly rate for your personal hours just to live.
You can of course then say "oh but I value my time," but value is subjective while the dollar amount isn't. If you truly believe that, then you also believe that people's personal time has different worth based on how much they're paid, which is a fundamentally wrong way to look at the world imo.
Many people are not salaried and can roughly convert more working hours into proportionally more money, so the comparison does kinda make sense. Why uselessly stand in line for an hour when you could use that hour to make more deliveries, do research on one of your clients cases, or whatever?
In my personal opinion, because that's dehumanizing to yourself. It's the same as thinking every waking hour of your life has a dollar value in terms of dehumanizing.
In reality, every hour of any life is invaluable since you'll never get that back, no matter how much you're willing to pay for it.
But capitalism forces you to think in terms of your employer and bypass that basic humanity, and think of opportunity costs. There is more to life than just work and being "useless" is part of that life again in my personal opinion.
Not every second of your life has to be productive or have a dollar value attached to it. Yes, you can assign that dollar value to any hour of your life by choosing to forgo that free hour and serve your employer (opportunity cost). But the actual value of that free hour is still $0.
Try thinking of it as if the options are watching TikTok for an hour vs watching TikTok for an hour in a line, plus you get a free donut. Standing in the line doesn't cause the person to miss out anything.
Standing in line for an event is fun, even if it's a silly promotional event. You get to laugh and chitchat with the other people in line, and it's something different to do that doesn't require much effort. But also, those lines usually balance out relative to the value of the item, if it takes too long people start realizing it's not worth it and leave.
I had some coworkers who would always find these things and go to them during the day. It was a little outing for their team while they stood in line and talked. No harm in doing something like that from time to time, but I did think it was funny that they wouldn't just put it on the calendar and spend a couple bucks on going to a coffee shop instead.
I wake up every morning in a bed that’s too small, drive my daughter to a school that’s too expensive, and then I go to work to a job for which I get paid too little. But on Pretzel Day… well, I like Pretzel Day
Individualizing systemic failures to regulate businesses is counterproductive. Meaningful change will only come by regulation.
Give me one example, where consumer behavior really changed anything. Usually what follows from large boycotts is political action or the company succumbing to pressure.
Just stopping to spend your money there might make you feel good but don't kid yourself, it barely does anything if you're not turning it into an organized action.
Cancelled my Prime subscription last month after the past year of worsening experiences with Amazon:
Received several orders that were returned items, with broken open packaging and sometimes the item was something else entirely, purely put there for weight by whoever returned it.
When I went to return some things at a major Amazon distribution center, the return area was closed for the week for some sort of construction or renovation, with no indication of that anywhere on the site. The only messaging was a piece of paper in the window once you got there.
At another separate major distribution center, the return area was a small room with pieces of paper taped to a door with an arrow pointing to the Amazon lockers where the returns are accepted.
Orders are now often so delayed that it makes the Prime subscription pointless. Have had multiple orders over the past year that didn't ship for 3 or 4 days.
Amazon listings are almost half Sponsored listings now, and there are unrelated ads on the side of listings.
Half of the listings are some random made-up brand name, like XIJGNU, which is just a Chinese seller selling low-quality products, and when the reviews get bad enough, they re-list the product under another made-up brand name.
Fake reviews were already rampant before LLMs, but now reviews are effectively useless because they are so easy to fake.
At least in the past the sellers branded their whitelabel products correctly. These days you get some random "brand" when you order from an alphabet soup name. It's fun when you have to install apps with it as you have to get the right "brand" app without knowing what "brand" it is as the whitelabel manufacturer has locked it down (though usually only by obfuscation).
In my experience I've received a box for a different brand than the device inside with the wrong app listed in the box for a different unrelated brand. Fun times we live in. And don't bother getting a refund as the listing and company will be gone by the time you try.
I wish they would just sell those products unbranded - then they'd actually provide some meaningful value to those of us who don't want themselves and their house to be an advertising billboard.
As a native speaker the original comment seemed completely fine, ignore them. Also, I never would never guessed that you weren't also a native English speaker.
Agreed. The commas before the sentence-ending 'too' and 'anyway' were perhaps slightly unusual, but not enough so that I even noticed them, and I don't think either is incorrect. All the rest were perfectly normal.
Haha, I actually assumed you were making a joke from the beginning, it'd be funny to think that the habit of using comma prefixed commands will make someone more likely to use commas in their sentences.
I choose to use frameworks in the same sense I choose to use crypto libraries. Smarter people have thought long and hard about the problems involved, and came up with the best ways to solve them.
Why have the agents redo all of that if it's not absolutely necessary? Which it probably isn't for ~98% of cases.
Also, the models are trained on code which predominantly uses frameworks, so it'll probably trend toward the average anyway and produce a variant of what already exists in frameworks.
In the cases where it might make sense, maybe the benefit then is the ability to take and use piecemeal parts of a framework or library and tailor it to your specific case, without importing the entire framework/library.
But it's comical to see the average person commenting online, outraged at new datacenters and their water usage (separating this from legitimate zoning issues), when all their posts are in fact being transmitted, stored, and served by relatively similar datacenters.
Is the average person allergic to asking follow-up questions?
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