Not really, the power involved would amount to 12% of the grid which is possible to do at net neutral and has efficiency improvements as doubling in under 5 years. If an industry that needed petroleum and F150s was a fraction as good with improvement every 5 decades, I don't think its environmental impact would be considered.
There”s a certain way people are more afraid of unfamiliar and new things and complacent about the old and familiar. Also I think environment and energy concerns about AI are overblown because of hype, like they are claiming they are building many times more data centers that are being built. A lot of the opposition to AI is based on critics being uncritical about numbers put out to justify the bubble, just like all the talk about danger similarly drives a false feeling of fomo-urgency.
The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways.
"End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.
I would add: Either you are an engineer that management trusts and whose judgement they value, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, you’re in a bad position anyway.
There's a good article about it. Saying no is a budget. In other words you don't have enough veto power to stop all bad projects so you need to be strategic about spending this budget.
It's on stories like these where I honestly just love the HN community and the comment threads.
I was reading the article, and as it went on I increasingly thought "This is one of those articles that sounds like it's saying something insightful ('it has all the right lingo! ZIRP era! Just-say-no engineers!'), but then when you dig deeper, it doesn't resonate with my experience at all when I was knee deep in software engineering in those years, nor do I feel that it in any way accurately diagnoses the immense changes that are currently happening with AI." In other words, it sounds like buzzword bullshit to me, and in the absence of a downvote button on stories, I'm glad the community is calling it out.
Higher interest rates indicate higher urgency, meaning short term investments with fast payoffs. Throw in LLMs that play into that urgency and you get a mass production of AI slop. It doesn't matter if the AI project is a failure, since it failed fast enough to go and do something else. Doing the right thing from the get go is something that only matters for long term projects with significant initial investment.
A DPI firewall at a place of education had a whitelist of allowed domains that you could connect to from the internal network. One entry in the whitelist was "microsoft.com".
I installed a web proxy on my VPS, which was accessible under a domain name like "computerthings.example", created a subdomain called "microsoft", and voila: "microsoft.computerthings.example" was good enough to match "^microsoft.com.*" and allowed us to bypass the block for the next two years.
Ah, a rare situation where you have to put your URL in angle brackets for it to be parsed correctly here: <http://foo.com/update.exe?> (Not that it matters in this case. Also I would’ve guessed the angle brackets would disappear, but apparently not.)
When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
>The cryptographic module shall contain tamper response and zeroization circuitry that shall continuously monitor the tamper detection envelope and, upon the detection of tampering, shall immediately zeroize all plaintext secret and private cryptographic keys and CSPs.
I have worked on systems that have a thermite charge under the RAM and EPROM chips, wired up to GPIO for 'terminate and stay that way' instructions. It is not an urban legend - just a highly protected secret. Those products which require this feature are not usually discussed in consumer circles ..
"In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries"
I don't think even the ultra rich who own the technology are directly scheming to do that. But they do accept it as a side effect of them getting more money and power.
Yes, the technology is a tool, it's an impressive tool but we cannot ignore who wields it and what they incentives are.
As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.
I feel like one uberhard worker has an unhealthy return.
But a group of uberhard workers have a healthy return - they compound each others hard work and build a prosperous _environment_.
My wife and I work very hard, as do our colleagues. But together we've built a pretty healthy routine, home, and (for now at least) financial situation. This has enabled us to have kids more easily than most, travel, etc.
The hardest workers /busiest folks I know are farmfolk relatives, and they also have a level of social connection and family connection that I envy all the time. It's mostly from them showing up to help with _everything_.
I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.
I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.
Yes, the article acknowledges this in the first paragraph by citing Harry Frankfurt’s „On Bullshit“ (1986). Of course bullshit (as well as even more insidious misinformation/propaganda) have always been around, but the incredible advances in its production and dissemination are worth considering. At some point, sheer quantity turns into its own quality. Indeed I would argue these issues have always been underconsidered. The article is a kind of inoculation against bullshit that every generation requires again and again. People aren’t born nearly skeptical enough, and the game keeps ever changing.
I actually don’t think the article is sufficiently vehement in calling out just how brain-frying this is. And how destructive on a societal level. The razor’s edge between being too uncritical and too cynical is hella narrow.
> I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.
Even if that were true (which I don’t think it is, this is a different kind of worthless content), you most definitely don’t remember it at this scale, and that’s a major point.
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