Estimates of the carbon emissions and energy use of heavy agentic AI use from an actual climate scientist. It's a fair chunk. 600x simple prompts But also not - 8% of the emissions of a US car www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real-e... We need to decarbonise the grid and not build gas powered DCs

The real energy use of agentic AI

Agents use about 600x more energy than simple AI prompts

theclimatebrink.com

I find arguments that AI can't do judgement or creativity or taste to be especially obviously false in the time of agents. Any long task requires lots of taste, judgement & creativity. I am much more sympathetic to arguments about the quality or diversity of the AI's taste, judgement, or creativity

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

i’ve noticed that a huge number of Ed Zitron followers are actually great people who just got the wrong info a lot of them happily will change their mind given new info i really wish people here would dial back the distain and just focus on information dissemination

I don't call using this app doom scrolling because like sure I get shown the horrors of the world but also cool shit. It's like omg that's atrocious, then some boobs, then some sweet kick ass indie games, and then something cool that everyone's favorite mayor is doing.

Extremely good 🧵

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

Want to stop wasting water? Great! Switching from animal-based to plant-based foods once a day is more valuable than boycotting AI for a year.

Interesting: There’s now an anonymous, moderated list of companies that stop responding after you interviewed with them

Ghosted After a Job Interview? Report the Company

Ghosted after a job interview? Submit an anonymous report and see which companies candidates say stopped responding after interviews.

didtheyghostyou.com

not only are the advice/aita/etc subreddits all LLM slop now, they were previously slop by people who were either hand-writing bait OR filtered meticulously by mod queue for being dramatic, but in an entertaining and not ugly way

Fantastic series.

ver 🗿@ver.ooo · 2w ago

I've been rewatching The Good Place and their treatment of Janet is really, really prescient about agents. She's a superintelligent android? who can be rebooted and have her memories wiped; at which point the guy from Florida falls in love with her and they get married.

I think it may get worse. But the old skillset was being able to look anything up, find any backing source, and judge its quality. The new skillset is using AI to do those things, and judging its quality. Motivated learners have never been better off. Unmotivated ones are walking into a hazard.

derek guy@dieworkwear.bsky.social · 2w ago

Things will get worse as more students secretly use AI to do homework. There has always been a divide between those who care about education for its own sake and those who only care about grades, but AI will worsen this divide, leaving fewer people with the ability to do causal reasoning.

Red Dots

❌ cognitive offloading is a threat to our every prosocial accomplishment and capacity to maintain a society worth living in ❌ cognitive offloading is an unalloyed good, we will concern ourselves with ever higher forms of thought, a golden age is dawning ✅ it depends 🧘

“I’m now forced to spend hours a day figuring out if something I like is AI generated or not.” Counterpoint: No. You aren’t.

ai helped me identify cytokine based depression, found the expert running the trials, and workshopped a solution with me after years of steady mental degradation because no doctor had figured out that i wasn't producing hardly any dopamine anymore.

(as it happens, I _do_ think that gamedev is getting particularly hammered right now, but it's not because of AI, it's because of downcycle pressures, Less Than Competent business operations, and being on the short end of the component stick)

why do all the "just draw things yourself and dont use AI" guys use their digital tablets to draw their self insert characters giving the viewer a pencil

every "fuck nintendo" type who says they're gonna pirate their games never seem to actually play the games do they? it's all performative. title screen pics on their AYN thor or steam deck but then they never actually play the real game anyone who brags about piracy is being performative about it

I have 3 axioms that help me decide when to talk to people I disagree with: 1. To debate a subject is to concede that the subject is debatable. 2. To reason with a person is to concede that the person is reasonable. 3. To ask for evidence of a claim is to concede that the claim might be true.

One profoundly noticeable symptom of extremism (both left and right) is an inability to enjoy things anymore. Everything must be measured up against your ideal worldview, and it is evil if it falls short one iota. This is a recipe for misery.

"Games were better back in the day when they were hard to make!" (Looks at the piles and piles of shovelware and mediocre to terrible licensed games on NES, SNES, Genesis, N64 and PS1) "Yeah I call bullshit"

Good art: "this is what I think and feel, take from it what you will, I hope you sympathize with me" Bad art: "this is what you should think and feel"

How am I supposed to make software to be more productive when I literally don't even know what I want anymore

“But it hallucinates stuff” people have never read a forum post on 3d printer support and explaining someone’s batshit theory of how to fix things.

People have an incredible, reflexive tendency to mock new technologies as unworkable. The easiest filter is just to check if they can go a single step past the snappy answer as to why it’s unworkable

Look, I’m an open source maintainer, and if you want people to use that FOSS software as an alternative to that proprietary software it’s good to understand why people wanted to use that proprietary software in the first place and why they might be hesitant to switch It’s not because users are dumb

the thing about LLMs training on LLM output messing them up isn't true btw. provided the LLM doing the output is good and it is reacting to diverse prompts, this is extremely delicious data

Me yesterday

i increasingly feel like the standard leftist toolkit systematically disempowers compassionate people who take ideas seriously by convincing them that everything that is or could be powerful is impure, and they should abstain from those things

When the U.S. government partners with a company to bring well-paying jobs back to America, Americans cry bloody murder: “Why are you giving free money to evil corporations?” But countries around the world do this all the time.