This is really cool. I maintain a lot of systems that have to be worked on from time to time by far less experienced techs than myself (due to our relationship with the business partners that use the systems) and this sort of thing could be amazing for providing a kind of inline user manual.
Unfortunately, this bill would actually do the opposite. While expert opinion seems to vary on the subject of geoengineering and its attendant risks, it might become a necessary tool for tackling climate change. The standard theory is that we could disperse aresolized materials at high altitudes that would increase atmospheric albedo (reflectivity) to reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed by the atmosphere. This wouldn’t be permanent, but it could buy us time as we work on decarbonizing.
HAHA, LEOPARDS EATING FACES RULES! THIS IS AWESOME!
OH NO, MY DELICIOUS SUCCULENT FACE!
My son has doubled in size every month for the last few months. At this rate he’ll be fifty foot tall by the time he’s seven years old.
Yeah, it’s a stupid claim to make on the face of it. It also ignores practical realities. The first is those is training data, and the second is context windows. The idea that AI will successfully write a novel or code a large scale piece of software like a video game would require them to be able to hold that entire thing in their context window at once. Context windows are strongly tied to hardware usage, so scaling them to the point where they’re big enough for an entire novel may not ever be feasible (at least from a cost/benefit perspective).
I think there’s also the issue of how you define “success” for the purpose of a study like this. The article claims that AI may one day write a novel, but how do you define “successfully” writing a novel? Is the goal here that one day we’ll have a machine that can produce algorithmically mediocre works of art? What’s the value in that?
I guess the value is that at some point you’ll probably hear the core claim - “AI is improving exponentially” - regurgitated by someone making a bad argument, and knowing the original source and context can be very helpful to countering that disinformation.
The key difference being that AI is a much, much more expensive product to deliver than anything else on the web. Even compared to streaming video content, AI is orders of magnitude higher in terms of its cost to deliver.
What this means is that providing AI on the model you’re describing is impossible. You simply cannot pack in enough advertising to make ChatGPT profitable. You can’t make enough from user data to be worth the operating costs.
AI fundamentally does not work as a “free” product. Users need to be willing to pony up serious amounts of money for it. OpenAI have straight up said that even their most expensive subscriber tier operates at a loss.
Maybe that would work, if you could sell it as a boutique product, something for only a very exclusive club of wealthy buyers. Only that model is also an immediate dead end, because the training costs to build a model are the same whether you make that model for 10 people or 10 billion, and those training costs are astronomical. To get any kind of return on investment these companies need to sell a very, very expensive product to a market that is far too narrow to support it.
There’s no way to square this circle. Their bet was that AI would be so vital, so essential to every facet of our lives that everyone would be paying for it. They thought they had the new cellphone here; a $40/month subscription plan from almost every adult in the developed world. What they have instead is a product with zero path to profitability.
If that’s what we’re meaning when we talk about “tipping points”, yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, “We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are.” The idea that passing some arbitrary line like “1.5 degrees” is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that’s what the vast majority of people mean when they say “tipping points.”
And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.
If you’re under the impression that I’m arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I’m arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you’ve missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.
No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better’ is “fewer people die.”
The fight isn’t lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He’s speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.
The comforting fantasy is the idea that we can throw up our hands and say “We lost.”
Losing is easy. It demands nothing from us. Losing has no call to action. If we’ve lost, then there’s no fight left to be fought.
The reality is that the fight is always worth fighting. And that sucks, because it means we never get to give up. We never get to say “It’s over”, and stop caring. Caring is a lot harder.
Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.
The point where the harm could be reduced to “none” is decades past us. If that’s the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.
The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I’m aware of ideas like “Permafrost methane bombs” and I’ve also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They’re flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.
What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.
There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.
Even if we do pass some kind of “tipping point” (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That’s all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.
That’s why it’s an analogy, and not reality.
There is no point where hitting the brakes will not help. We can always reduce the amount of harm done.
That’s not Trump being right, that’s Trump hanging all of America’s allies out to dry. A more serious effort to support Ukraine would make it functionally impossible for Russia to threaten Europe. More staunch support for NATO from the US would forestall any attempt at Russian aggression. The EU are setting military funding targets far beyond what Trump demanded, because this has nothing to do with Trump’s demands and everything to do with his litany of failures.
Let’s be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as “winning” or “losing” the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn’t a game, there’s no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is “too late”. The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it’s “too late” to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don’t blame him for feeling defeated with everything that’s happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
They’re wrong. See my comment above.
Jessie what the fuck are you on about?
The audio clip in that source is just flat out wrong (and I’m pretty sure it’s either AI generated or an American trying to do a British accent. Source: Am British). If you look at the phonetic symbols you’ll see that they’re identical for both pronunciations, and every other source agrees that the pronunciations are the same for UK and US.
Here’s one with audio that isn’t fucked - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-pronunciations/ensign
Seconding this. Itzg’s server is so easy, I taught my 15 year old niece to run one.
In the comments section of another, a TikTok user responded to a thread outlining the current administration’s anti-LGBTQ actions by saying, “None of that has anything to do with us being gay.”
Compliance will not save you, you craven fucking cowards. They have never been quiet about how much they hate gay people, and the fact that they’re focused so heavily on attacking trans people right now is only because they want to pick off the weakest of the herd first.
Bigotry is the enemy of all people. None of us is free until all of us are free.
Being a country singer from Burlington is so fucking funny to me. Like, that is the most middle class, suburban place you could possibly live. The entire city is just an endless sea of overpriced chain restaurants. This man has never smelled manure in his life.
I’m genuinely struggling to believe that you’re being anything other than intentionally disingenuous here, because it’s hard to imagine how anyone operating in good faith could manage to miss a point so completely and utterly.
But on the off chance that you’re serious; the logic is that purpose has far more moral weight to it than means. Punching out a Nazi to save the black man he was trying to beat to death in the gutter is a morally good thing to do. Punching out a trans person because you’re a hateful bigot is a morally bad thing to do. Do I need to elaborate on that? I feel like I shouldn’t have to, but then it feels like I shouldn’t have to be explaining any of this.
If you were in a sealed room with a thousand starving children, a padlocked shipping container full of food labelled “Property of Jeff Bezos”, and a set of bolt-cutters, what would you do? Because if the answer is anything other than “Break the lock open”, your entire moral system is completely and utterly fucked, and I do not know how to explain it to you any more plainly than that. If you actually believe that property rights are more important than human lives, then I honestly think you might need serious and extensive therapy to undo whatever damage has been done to you.
Fits with their dartboard capitalization.