I didn't go and look up the others but this argument by similarity, at least when applied to asbestos says the exact opposite to the claim you're trying to make. It's generally considered that industry/government was aware of the issues relating to asbestos in the '30s (and _started_ doing things about it then) but it wasn't until the 70's/80's (depending on the country) that its use was mostly stopped (and in places like Australia it wasn't outright banned until 2003).
And? That span is within an individual's lifetime, which is not very long in the context of human history. As of now there's zero sign any entity with regulatory power is doing anything about microplastics.
Also, why are you trying to deliver a point without looking up most of the examples I've listed? Do you expect that to be a convincing argument?
Each of us only gets one life. If most of that time is spent being unnecessarily exposed to pollutants with adverse health effects, then we have good reason to be outraged.
Consider also that some pollutants accumulate in the food chain, impacting future generations, for an indefinite time. Such as mercury in seafood.
Good news is tuna is not the only form of seafood you can eat! Perhaps you can try channeling that outrage into real tangible activism, any minute now.
Do you think the problem will go away over time? Are you OK with having fewer things that you can eat without poisoning yourself? Do you realize we only have so many reservoirs from which calories can come from?
Why do you accuse me of being against addressing these issues? I am merely pointing out these are not existential crises because there is currently no evidence supporting such claims. It may change in the future, but until then I'm not jumping on this ship.
Ultraprocessed foods are already poison and most of us, probably including you, are consuming them regularly. Are you OK with that? And what is this talk about caloric reservoirs? Humans 8000 years ago had far fewer options and they still survived long enough to pass cultural lineages down to us. Most of your "caloric reservoirs" did not exist before the 20th century because the science and industry that created them did not exist.
Compared with the other examples you gave, I think one of the differences with micro- and nanoplastic and their growing bioaccumulation, is that if/when we discover that some level of concentration of it causes noticeable issues, it will be very hard to reverse, and it will be globally abundant (i.e. throughout the entire food chain). We'll be stuck with the problem for a very very long time.
It's not like we'll be able to just outlaw it and be done with the issue after a few years. So for this specific polluant, it feels right that we should be cautious and look for solutions as quickly as we can.
Humans 8000 years ago got their food from an environment that wasn't contaminated with ubiquitous, unnaturally occurring, forever chemicals.
Ultra processed foods are a problem and likely contributing to the plastic problem. I do what I can to reduce my reliance on both. Yet the solution won't be the few educated among us stopping ourselves. It must be regulated collectively or we'll remain in a prisoners dilemma as the pollutants accumulate.
> And? That span is within an individual's lifetime, which is not very long in the context of human history. As of now there's zero sign any entity with regulatory power is doing anything about microplastics.
Primarily, I _am_interested with health outcomes within my and my children's lifespan so that's the sort of time span I'm primarily concerned about. If the comparison to asbestos hold's true then we still have a _long_ time (long enough that any potential deleterious effects will be felt by all currently living and soon to be living members of my family) before any sort of regulatory action will be taken regardless of the health impacts.
> Also, why are you trying to deliver a point without looking up most of the examples I've listed? Do you expect that to be a convincing argument?
Because I'm _not_ your fact-checker. You're other examples may well follow a much quicker time-frame between discovery and strong regulatory action; I don't really care one way or the other, since at least one example shows a course of history which would play out poorly for those of us alive _now_ and exposed to increasing levels of environmental plastics.
> Please, (a) for your own sake and (b) for the sake of open source innovation, use the tool that you admit is better.
This is...such a strange take. To follow your logic to an extreme, everyone should use a very small handful of languages that are the "best" in their domain with ne'er a care for their personal comfort or preference.
> for your own sake
They're sticking with Pandas exactly for their own sake since they like being able to use Copilot.
> for the sake of open source innovation
Ohh by all means let's all be constantly relearning and rehashing just to follow the latest and greatest in open source innovation this week.
Tools are designed to be _used_ and if you like using a tool _and_ it does the job you require of it that seems just fine to me; especially if you're also taking the time to evaluate what else is out there occasionally.
Is it really that strange of a take? To use the best tool available for a job. That doesn't sound strange at all.
Doubly so if it involves copilot. There's no way to get training data without people writing it. This sound like a direct application of a greedy algorithm: trading long term success for short term gain. That's not the ideal way to live.
Yes, the greedy algorithm metaphor is an interesting connection!
I also like thinking about this as a feedback loop (as explained by systems dynamics), since it provides nice concepts for how systems change over time.
(a) For one's own sake, please pick the better tool as evaluated over suitable timeframe (perhaps an hour or two, after you've got some familiarity and muscle memory for the API) instead of only a brief evaluation (e.g. only 15 minutes).
(b) Better open source tools (defined however you want), which benefit us all, get better uptake when people think beyond merely the short-term.
The essence of my argument is "think beyond the short-term". Hardly controversial.
Don't miss the context: LLMs are giving people even more excuses for short-term thinking. Humans are terribly tempted for short-sighted "victories".
I mean, maybe deep fakes are _better_ at sowing distrust of information than other forms of propaganda but it seems disingenuous to treat it completly differently.
The reason I submitted this was largely because of something mentioned early on in the article:
"When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”
This rang especially true to me. It's not really about whether its better or worse, but about the path that we're pursuing. The endgame of "information warfare" is not that people all believe you, but that nobody believes anything from anybody - including you.
Don't be embarrassed, its what computers are for! I've done the same thing recently too. It honestly feels like a better use of a high-core desktop CPU than have it sit idle 99% of the time.
These aren't even close to comparable, and I am very tired of hearing people complain about this!
My current Gentoo system seems to have existed since 03/29/21, so roughly two years now. In the time period, the time spent compiling packages has accumulated to 5 days, and my CPU takes ~140W at max load (Ryzen 3900x).
If I did my math correctly, this comes out to roughly 16KWH accumulated energy across two years.
We can compare this to a gamer, who spends 1 hour per day gaming, for 2 years, on a system that takes 300w while running a game, and this comes out to 230KWH in total. That about 15x as much energy spent by a fairly lightweight gamer on a very average system.
It's also worth noting that the majority of packages build in under 1 minute on my system, the vast majority of compile time is spent on things like Firefox, Rust, GCC and a few more.
This is just a very silly thing to be concerned over, and if we are going to be offended at people for being wasteful there are much larger targets than someone building packages from source.
I used it to host several small projects in cheap virtual machines. The setup is very straightforward.
I guess we just need better editing support of YAMLs.
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