"The reason the water footprint is so much larger than most leaders realize comes down to what happens outside the facility walls. Cooling towers and on-site water systems get the most attention, but the water embedded in electricity generation and semiconductor manufacturing tells a different story."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91591272/ais-water-problems-run-deep
RE: https://graphics.social/@metin/117123760167000114
An interesting result that confirms (perhaps suspiciously neatly) what you'd expect: lack of struggle results in lack of learning; letting the AI do your homework harms later exam performance:
“The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of AI users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, as indicated by exceptionally short homework completion time coupled with high homework scores.”
Haven’t studied the methodology closely (nor am I well qualified to evaluate it) and the results confirm my own expectations, so…grain of salt!
1/2
RE: https://mastodon.social/@MikeElgan/117118934751306123
"OpenAI effectively acknowledged today that it knows which features and attributes cause brain rot, addiction, and attachment — and that it knows how to turn them off"
"Brain rot is profitable because, as users are dumbed down and made lazy, they come to depend more on chatbots to function in their jobs and personal lives"
"OpenAI weighed user harm against its own profit and chose profit"🤮
Hmmm... We've been here before, haven't we? 🤔
“Voters Aren’t Waiting for November to Try Ousting Officials Over Data Centers
As a backlash grows over data centers, more local officials are facing recall elections for their support of the computing sites.”
OMG I hadn't even thought about this part, the sudden demand -- that's the kind of thing that crashes a grid HARD
"Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/18/ulez-better-lung-size-function-london-children
I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people's.
If someone doesn't bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they're trading your time for theirs and that's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn't work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they're saying that it isn't worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That's rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they're saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That's rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They're machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people's time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That's not because person 1's time is more valuable, it's because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It's not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner's time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.
Older dog got some sort of latent craziness gene switched on by the rain. Oops. It's chaos in our household today.
First they derecruited the junior engineers, but i did not protest as I was a senior engineer; my LLM handles all the grunt coding now.
Then they derecruited the QA team, but I did not protest as AI can review and test my code much faster.
When they derecruited the artists I cheered, as clearly—unlike my own special skill—drawing is something that can trivially be performed by AI.
When they derecruited the blue team that made perfect sense, as AI had already found all the security issues.
When the architects were let go it was a no-brainer, since a simple prompt now generates a complete design.
When the bubble crashed and tokens were worthless they derecruited me and hired back the juniors as I no longer remembered how to do anything on my own.
And while I'm on the subject, the text watermarking is about staving off model collapse. So, if you're somehow one of those AI fans reading this: please keep stripping out the watermarks.
There is pretty much an endless daily stream of news stories detailing new deals between the fossil fuel industry and the tech industry.
If you are one of the people still insisting that "data centres help the energy transition" or "AI will solve climate change", you have formally run out of excuses or defences.
Did you know that we have a podcast about developing software for and with Linux where professional developers talk about various aspects of the craft? Did you know that we don't talk about using generative AI, and instead talk about writing code the human way?
Check it out at https://linuxdevtime.com/
Or search for Linux Dev Time wherever you get your podcasts.
I am shocked. Nobody could have seen it coming. Nobody, I tell you! :blobcatcoffee:
https://futurism.com/future-society/college-critical-thinking-ai
> As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
Oh, the humanities!
"Why should we prioritize making this accessible?"
"The short answer is: because people have civil rights. The long answer is: because people have this thing called 'civil rights', you cunt."
A big issue with LLMs:
It makes some people believe they are more competent than they are.
Example: this company sent me some spam. At first I thought it was a scam. Then I dug into the company.
And I realised: oh. No. This company is not a scam per se. No, these people actually believe their own bullshit.
The CEO ran a web server as root. It got owned. He posted about it on LinkedIn. He used Claude to "fix" it. It was not fixed.
Now you see, before LLMs, if you didn't understand a domain, you'd hit a wall very fast. Documentation would use terms and concepts you didn't understand. Tools would require interpretation. You'd have to ask somebody more experienced. That friction produces a very useful insight: "Oh. I don't know this domain very well." So you'd find someone who did, or learn.
The thing about LLMs is that they can remove an enormous amount of that friction. That friction is not noise, it is signal. That friction is telling you that you need to learn the domain you are working with. Removal of this friction is a very, very bad thing.
The LLM can hold your hand, do a lot of heavy lifting for you, use a lot of tools, run a lot of commands, and make things appear to work.
And the thing is, all of the individual outputs along the way might be pretty good and it might look correct.
The issue is in aggregate. Before you know it, you've built a house out of sand.
And worse yet, people can emerge from the experience with a dangerously incorrect higher-order conclusion: "I am now a domain expert in this."
They are not a domain expert. They understand absolutely nothing about it. The LLM did everything for them and it's wrong. And worse yet, they haven't reviewed it, because they lack the competency to review it. Therefore, they assume it is fine. But it's all incorrect. A true expert would see that it is wrong, and correct it, or push back on the LLM, or do it themselves.
And this is how you wind up running web servers as root and getting owned.
Well ouch.
@aredridel I tend to oppose using LLMs because the agenda behind them is monstrous, the economy that allowed them is destructive, the business uses are destructive, the pell-mell expansion of data centers is destructive, the way the industry is collecting sources is destructive and illegal, even the financing looks like it’s going to be destructive, all for something that doesn’t come anywhere near doing what the publishers claim they can do
"iT's JuSt SuMmEr"