The “ai bad” brainrot has everyone thinking that any algorithm is AI and all AI is ChatGPT.

I was just guessing (it’s how I’d do it) 🥳

TLDR

Maybe each server shows up as a library. Like “Server 1 - Movies”

Kind of annoying but less so than swapping servers and search should work

“AI”

Sharpening, Denoising and upscaling barely count as machine learning. They don’t require AI neural networks.

Not a thing. From the article:

In some places, the main criticism that residents have about data centers has to do with the amount of water they consume to cool servers. This isn’t the case in Marseille, however, which is well-supplied with this resource. The authorities have even given Digital Realty access to water from the former underground drainage channels of the Gardanne coal mines, located north of Marseille. The water flows into the port, so the firm can use it to cool its systems.

It’s a misleading headline at best, clickbaiting the “ai bad” crowd.

It was inevitable that the bubble built on people being hyped and expecting sentient computers would burst.

AI has applications, but the ridiculous promises of these tech companies haven’t been tethered to reality for quite some time.

AI and machine learning are often used interchangeably.

Neural networks, like the Transformer, are one of the techniques of machine learning.

Though some people only mean ChatGPT and DALL-E when they say AI, even though those are only one application of neural networks.

I usually just use AI and Machine Learning interchangeably. Unless you’re in a group of experts nobody really understands the distinction.

Computer vision to track inventory and expiration of food in a refrigerator could be useful for busy households. A dishwasher could cut its cycle short if it sees that dishes are clean, saving water and energy.

In addition, robots are home appliances that require AI. Robotic vacuum cleaners learn their surroundings and navigate using machine learning, so much so that ML textbooks commonly use them as teaching tools.

We’re also likely to see humanoid robots(or similarly flexible platforms) becoming household appliances in the near future.

It’s not unreasonable for countries to be investing in new technologies and AI is one of the more promising.

They’re talking about instability in the electrical grid. If we could just snap our fingers and have instant fusion power tomorrow we still couldn’t actually use it because the demand of electricity wouldn’t keep up with the supply.

I’m not sure I understand. Our problem isn’t that we have too much electricity, it’s that the demand for electricity exceeds the production from renewable sources and forces us to rely on burning fossil fuels.

If we replaced all of the coal and gas generation with fusion it would be an immediate improvement. The energy output of controlled fusion can be adjusted in real-time to match the grid needs, exactly like fossil fuels generation.

One of the points of space based solar was that you don’t need batteries.

Terrestrial solar needs energy storage technology because the sun doesn’t shine at night. That’s not true for space based solar, it is always in the sun so the power output is reliable and controllable.

That’s not how non-profit profits work. 100% of the surplus might be invested in green causes but that’s after operating costs, salaries and a plethora of minor expense posts are handled using their profit/income.

It is a fact that the company is registered as a non-profit.

Being a non-profit means that the owners of the company can collect a salary but cannot collect profits(income in excess of operating expenses). The owners of the company cannot collect profit, it is a non-profit company.

All of the income, in excess of expenses (aka profit) is given to charitable causes. If it were a for-profit company, the all of the income in excess of expenses (aka profit) would be divided amongst the owners and shareholders.

Every non-profit company in every western country has operating expenses including salaries. Unless you’re trying to say that non-profits don’t exist, then this argument is also nonsense.

If legitimizing polluting technology by saying we’re doing such a great job at combating pollution isn’t green washing, perhaps I’ve misunderstood the term?

A private jet is polluting technology because it directly generates tons of carbon in order to operate. It is used in place of other transportation methods which would generate less carbon

How is AI polluting technology?

Just declaring it is polluting doesn’t make it true. A computer takes in electricity and emits heat and data.

This company generates twice as much renewable energy as they consume. They also plant trees (over 200 million) which capture carbon, reduce aridification and increase rainfall. The net result is that this non-profit adds, carbon free, electricity to the grid, increases carbon capture and storage and adds water to the hydrological cycle.

Sometimes the divide between worldviews is simply too big to try to bridge.

That’s often the case when you consume misinformation.

If tax payers are going to be investing into these businesses and they’re avoiding taxes taking a share of the company is better than nothing.

I mean, it’s socialism, but don’t tell their voters

Yes

You’re focusing on their use of AI, and that doesn’t make sense. AI is a technology that exists. Search engines and RAG is one of the better ways to use it. They are a search engine, why would they not use it?

They’ve planted over 200 million trees, produce twice as much energy than they consume and have given over €90 million to green causes. They’re a non-profit company that gives 100% of their profits towards green initiatives, planting trees and investing in solar. It’s hardly greenwashing.

What does the power usage of their search engine services matter if they’re producing more energy than they consume? Your complaint just doesn’t make sense.

They could offer AI served off of a single RaspberryPi3 powered by a 2 gigawatt solar installation and the anti-AI crowd would find some other angle to attack it. The goal is to get people to think ‘AI Bad’, not any of the other strawmen that they stand up.

Trivial amounts compared to the solar energy hitting the entire surface of half the Earth.

The problem isn’t incoming energy, it’s outgoing energy. Greenhouse gases reduce the amount of energy radiated back into space and that’s what increases the mean global temperature.

Adding a few hundred square miles of surface area wouldn’t change much.

That’s a real genius plan.

You have the same issue with Starlink…

No, because the Starlink satellites are 350 miles above the Earth while geosynchronous satellites are 13,000 miles above the earth. Because of the Inverse-Square Law they can transmit a signal that is orders of magnitude stronger.

In addition, geosync satellites are locked at a single fixed position and received by a single dish antenna so any obstruction along the line will disrupt the signal.

Starlink’s recievers use a 1200 element x-band phased array so it can lock on to multiple sources and track them as they move across the sky. Each satellite link is its own channel. Losing contact with one satellite simply causes the data to be routed to one of the 4-5 other locked satellites.

The people on the call do…

30ms of latency is less than 1/3rd of the latency of most Bluetooth headsets that people use every day to talk on their phones. It is not noticeable at all.

Oh, please explain the complexity to me like I’m a system administrator with only 25 years of experience. I didn’t realize that computers could connect to each other over a network until 3 days ago, imagine my surprise.

You could start with the fact that many online game servers (ex: Valorant, Apex, Overwatch) artificially increase everyone’s latency at the server, except for the people with higher network latency in order to compensate for lag through a technique called lag compensation. So having 10 ms ping and 50 ms ping just means the server introduces a 40ms delay on the player with 10ms ping so both players experience the same latency.

Or maybe you could explain how game state updates happen with a set frequency and the gap between the state updates can also be adjusted by the server for each client so that state updates are sent to higher latency users earlier in the update window. I mean this technique is essentially lag compensation as well, but it applies to how the client updates are sent instead of being applied to incoming packets.

Or, you could avoid all this and simply declare me incorrect by pointing at a game that doesn’t use lag compensation or otherwise move the goal posts so that you don’t actually have to explain the complexity that you were hinting at.