Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
Everyone’s talking about this like it’s impractical. This is just the beginning! Scientific advancements often start as completely impractical processes!
I’m positive that over time, this waste-to-cookie process will be refined and refined until it includes not only plastic waste, but human waste as well.
The potential is there! We just need to collect the billionaires and get started!
Indirect water consumption via electricity generation made up more than 80 percent of the datacenter’s overall water use
So 80% of this is total bullshit. Do we really care that data centers are causing mild increases in how much water a power plant is taking in from their local cooling ponds‽ That were built specifically for this purpose, so that potable water doesn’t get used.
The real issue with data centers is how much power they use! Talking about their water consumption is a pointless distraction. It’s a topic full of so much misinformation it just turns people away from the real problems once they realize it’s bullshit. “If the water use reported in the media is bullshit, maybe the rest of it is too?”
If it’s part of a fingerprinting lib, then they just fucked it up. Because the fingerprinting can be done in one ~16ms window of time when the script runs and then you can break down the audio objects and pretend nothing happened.
Honestly, this doesn’t sound like spyware. More like absurd optimization. Here’s why: Audio devices often go to sleep (to save battery) and can take a second or two to wake up. That’s enough time that the end user will miss the first second or two of audio.
By keeping the audio outputting something (even if it’s just silence), they can guarantee that their little (often hilariously terrible) product videos will play the way they expect (which is loud and startling, of course!).
This is just one of those stupid tricks that’s bad for energy use but good for ignorant users who might complain that the first second of every AliExpress video is silent 🤷
The reason why I believe this to be the case is because there’s really nothing unique or interesting to be learned from an audio output loop that’s literally sending zeros through itself. If you wanted to use that to fingerprint a user, you wouldn’t need to keep it active. You could pass a single zero (silence) through and be done.
Shit: Is this why people ask me random IT questions and suddenly vent about their lives in chat?
Who better to resurrect a dead computer?
It’s beyond “an arms race.” AI has become a commodity that’s everywhere and it’s being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.
At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.
ColoGuard does sound like an infosec tool 🤔
Someone cut above the rest‽
Massive overkill!
That’s a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:
Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!
I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It’s running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn’t break a sweat.
I did the math and these are the approximate real numbers:
That’s active Linux desktops. That is, they’re being used to browse the Internet regularly enough to make it into StatCounter.
They’re just like any other data center, except bigger because that’s more efficient than building a bunch of smaller ones.
AI data centers have a lot of GPUs and specialty hardware that use a lot of power, but they’re still just big buildings with lots of computers in them. They just sort of sit there, with air conditioners running 24/7.
If they’re not the huge “hyper scale” type, you end up with a situation like in the article: Where they had to cram too many cooling units in too tight a tight space (to make up for the fact that the data center wasn’t built for its current workload).
If you think any more than 0.1% of these physical books would ever have ended up in antique bookstores, you’re dreaming.
Think about how many books out there are things like Donald Trump’s biography, or pointless drivel from non-experts, self-help books that tell people to down “essential oils”, old editions of programming books, or just plain shitty fiction that never sold much in the first place.
It’s ok to throw trash away! Really!
That’s like saying, “they had some failure modes from the synthetic data, so they should just obviously stop trying forever.”
They’ll just fix the edge cases and move on. Like any programming task.
Big AI mostly switched to synthetic training data anyway. The books they’re digitizing are being used to gather knowledge, not writing styles or logic (mostly).
As in, when you ask ChatGPT how long some book is, it can just go check (if it’s in the database). It’s also useful if you ask about that book or about knowledge contained in that book. It’ll even reference books now (if you demand that in your prompt).
It’s not the same as earlier LLM tech which relied on scanned text to figure out how to respond to any given prompt (from a language standpoint). The “language” part of LLMs is a solved problem now (thanks to the synthetic training). At least for English 🤷
Is it really destroying though? They’re digitizing them, and publishers still have the digital copies ready to print more at any time. So it’s not like they’re destroying the texts, they’re just shifting them.
Nobody complained when Google did this over a decade ago 🤷
When you say they’re “destroying the books” you make it sound like they’re erasing one of the last known copy of some important work when in reality, most of these books were purchased in bulk from bookstores and libraries that were planning on discarding them anyway.
Almost all these books were either headed to the dump or the recycling center. They’re just being digitized on the way.
While I sort of agree with you that that is his angle, service jobs that aren’t easily automatable will continue to climb in the “job stability and pay rate” category until the world figures out how to deal with Baumol’s Cost Disease:
The AI paradox: It’s both original (hallucinating) and plagiarizing (copying things, word-for-word).
This is why open source AI is necessary!
Yes but so is powdered wood pulp. You gotta add that plastic, yeasty flavoring!