It's hilarious that they think it needs to be codified into law. As if the right to do math wasn't intrinsic, and could be even theoretically be revoked by the government, lol.
I think it betrays cynicism about the tendency for single-objective optimizing market actors to rent-seek and cartelize. I don't think it's a stretch at all. On the surface it would be equally preposterous to suggest that breathing could be theoretically revoked by the government, which truly is preposterous but we do have those laws in place depending on whether the air you breathe has "illegal substances" in it. But then again, explicit revocation is a high bar when you can throttle the free use of computational resources by regulatory capture: the AI incumbents could say, for example, that AI is so dangerous that it must be kept out of the hands of the unwashed masses. Another excellent strategy (with a rather high bar to entry) would be to distort the markets themselves by ensuring that your prospective renters can't afford basic compute.
>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
You don't think there's reasons pass laws banning AI...datacenters?
Because what state is banning the concept of AI? They're banning/restricting the creation of a type of infrastructure within their borders because they feel that is detrimental to their citizens. Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
I'm already running an LLM locally. This is just me renting space in a data center. Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things? For the record my local models run off the solar bolted to my roof. Even including the data center I'm using 1/10th of the energy we were using on tube monitors back in the 90s. This is exhausting. My GPU would be demonstrably using more power by playing a videogame right now than when I run a local LLM.
Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?
This question is not the obvious winner you think it is. To me, and I am sure many, it sort of undermines your argument.
Even in the most ‘free' cultures, society has _always_ restricted people’s individual ability to do things that it collectively deems harmful to the whole society.
This is literally why America was founded. Too many people stifle innovation. Move to Europe if you want to be stuck in the 20th century frankly. That doesn't mean we can't take care of folks. But the ludites need to get the fuck out of the way. You're all exhausting.
And people in the late 1700s were just allowed to do anything? (The answer to that is obviously ‘no’).
I’m not even in complete disagreement with your opinion on data centers (like, people are coming up with noise, water use, pollution and traffic arguments about why a data center should not replace a recently controversially closed paper mill near me, which is ridiculous), but your argument doesn’t work. You need to change it if you want to convince people.
Please, don't be so negative about the rest of the world. No one has any idea what would have happened if the US did not create their country the way they did. This is the same level of under-appreciation of humans that the ancient aliens people have when they say its impossible for humans to have built the pyramids. Lets be constructive instead of just hating on everyone else please.
I was born in Europe. I know this for a fact. The difference in "can do" culture between old world and new world is everything. There's a reason Europe still doesn't have a self landing rocket. They aren't even trying. It's crabs in a bucket mentality writ large. I wish it weren't so. Yet it is.
It's partially true but it's not as true as doomers would like. It's not America: innovation=yes, Europe: innovation=no. Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people. It has a lot of very poor people as a consequence.
> Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people
Replace "came from" with "was purchased by" or "was copied by an entity with the resources to push the inventor out of the market" and you're getting a lot closer.
This encompasses rich people telling others what to do, and it also encompasses others doing work they think they can sell to rich people.
I think in Europe, people are just overall a bit more chill, and happy people don't feel the need to join the ultra-competitive scramble to the top, they're fine doing enough work but not an extreme amount.
I don't even agree with that. In many cases the rich people at best paid the salaries of other innovative people and then claimed the IP rights and the overwhelming share of the proceeds.
Elon didn't invent anything about rockets or electric cars. He hired (or perhaps just bought a company that had already hired) smart innovative people and got rich off them.
Pharmaceutical CEOs aren't innovating anything but they get rich off the innovations of others.
Most of the people who innovate or invent a new tool or product don't have the capital to mass produce and market it and end up selling their rights, which others benefit from.
Very few rich people are involved at all in innovations. Technology, which is less capital-intensive to scale than other fields, is an exception where several rich folks actually were involved - Steve Jobs' design sense, Larry and Sergei's PageRank algorithm, etc. but even then most of the people actually innovating new things don't get rich and watch others with more resources copy them, outmarket them, and take the money.
>>when did we restrict people's abilities to do things? That's literally what most laws are, saying what you can and can't do. This is like, a foundational understanding of what government/regulation is.
>>this is just me renting space...
Okay, so a "network effect" is when things have greater impact due to larger usage. So the data center usage that you're talking about does not represent the overall impact of the data center. Saying "I only pour ONE cup of bleach into the ocean, so I don't see why it's so bad to have the bleach factory pump all its waste in as well" is a WILD take.
An absolute free market would, by definition, permit the selling of the service "restrict someone's freedom for me".
Not sure if that leaves it a free market. So if we're gonna be talking holes in the cheese - seems like you're reasoning in terms of a basically self-contradictory notion.
But truly, what do you reckon about the 1st point, in terms of the interpretation of market freedom which you use?
There have always been rules and laws. The US has never been a totally free market. Most of the laws and rules we have were written in blood by people professing a "free market" right to poison our people, rivers, air, and more.
America was largely a free market until the 1920s. Since then more regulations have actually increased the cost of living. The healthcare problem in America has a lot to do with increased regulations. For one we have a fixed limit on how many doctors can graduate every year. That was put in place by the medical lobby in the US. Ever since then healthcare costs have increased exponentially. Tale as old as time. This happens with every single new rule put in place. Rent control does the same thing. Prices just go up. This includes NIMBY laws.
The US does not limit the number of doctors that can graduate. The limit is on the number of residencies funded by medicare. If the private sector wanted more doctors in order to pay doctors less, they could just offer paid residencies themselves. Somehow the free market hasn't solved that one. This ignores that doctors' salaries aren't a significant cause of the problems and insurance companies are the true root of high prices.
Rent control stabilizes prices while more supply can be built, because it is in the interests of society for people to be able to afford to live, and we can't will additional buildings into place overnight. High eviction rates destroy communities and have many negative side effects.
In the absence of regulation, corporations lie, cheat, and steal, and have a massive power imbalance against ordinary people. No one has enough time and energy to research every option for everything in their daily life, and they rely on laws to establish safety measures they can rely on.
Oh you're one of those. You actually believe rent control works in the face of overwhelming evidence that all is does is increase the cost of housing. Fascinating. Pointless talking to you.
Rent control doesn't have to be "you as a landlord can't change no more than $X in rent." It can also be "rent increases on existing tenants in good standing are limited to X%.
What are the holes? There are places today with no government - perfect free markets. If you think perfect free markets are awesome, you can move there and do business there. It's a bit like telling someone who loves communism to go to China.
I don't think you understand the qualifier. I meant in the tradition of liberal free markets that have unlocked human potential on the global scale. I'm saying no it's actually good that you don't have to ask the local government when you want to do something. If American style free markets didn't gain traction we'd still be doing subsistence farming.
The thing is, since we recognized that such a tradition led to the unfettered destruction of the natural environment which we depend upon to survive, we have decided that local governments should be responsible for preserving said environment by regulating the destructive actions performed by the liberal free market. Not doing so will even destroy our ability to perform subsistence farming in the long run.
So far all I hear is complaining about electricity prices. No one actually cares about the "environment". They are just mad that the KW/h is up 3 cents.
Why should we stop there? Let’s ban people flying on vacations, because why should our resources go towards some dork laying out in the sun? Air travel is horribly wasteful. Let’s ban people racing cars, that is also wasteful. We shouldn’t be using our resources to drive in circles.
How do we pick which activities are worth using resources? Which ones are too ‘dorky’ to allow?
Look, I am all for pricing the externalities into resource consumption. Tax carbon production, to make sure energy consumption is sustainable, but don’t dictate which uses of energy are acceptable or ‘worth it’, because I don’t want only mainstream things to be allowed.
I didn't say any of that in my comment nor express an opinion about this whole thing writ large. I'm only pointing out that it's not weird for legislature to preempt a real world use case by way of pointing out similar laws.
>>>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.
What did you mean? Why do you believe there has not been a motivating event to ban data centers when those bans have happened, which is literally what you said?
In the context of the discussion a correspondingly negative event would have been along the lines of "we built a data center and then it exploded, we need to make sure that doesn't happen." Not "we're worried about the effects the data center might have," which is vis a vis to "we're worried about the effects banning ai might have." All I'm saying is neither of those last two are weird reasons to enact a law.
GP was insisting that "rights" named laws always come after some negative event and it is weird that we have this "rights" named law without someone being deprived of their computation or whatever. I'm disagreeing with the premise that that's weird by pointing out laws preempt real world events all the time, in either direction (restrictive or permissive).
> Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.
Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?
> Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?
Because, in this country, we have “local government” wherein a bunch of people who live near each other have frequently banded together to make laws about the places they live. Surely this isn’t shocking news to you? Surely you’ve encountered this phenomenon before?
Why do you think you have a right to do anything you want, anywhere you want, no matter what?
That they live in the affected place makes it their business - I'm not clear why you think it's any of yours based on the thread of your arguments. Perhaps it's better to let people govern themselves and mind the laws where you live instead of whining that they won't do what you want them to in their own backyard?
Because these data centers are at best overstressing utility grids and elevating prices for everyone and at worse running dirty generators and poisoning entire communities, for a start.
If the businesses that want data centers want to pay the full construction costs for the new power plants, great. Otherwise consumers are paying for them in the rates they pay to energy companies.
It should not be considered shocking or controversial that people already hit hard by corporate greed and other effects of late-stage capitalism don't want to pay higher utility rates to subsidize the data centers being built by megacorporations who want to take away even more of their jobs.
No, this is absolutely the system working as intended: The State exists to protect large monied interests and their power, and those entities in exchange will sell out individuals to the State that seek to undermine their power. The State will never not do this.
Like, I realize I'm the rambling anarchist up in here, but show me ANY government ever that didn't Murder and Pillage, two things that we all hate when perpetrated by individuals. There's no amount of democracy that can be injected into a hierarchy responsible for controlling hundreds of millions of people that will inhibit authoritarianism, the best people can hope for (and what many white/middle class citizens thought they had for the last few decades) is not being the target of that authoritarianism.
Cat's out of the bag now and we're doing that thing we do every few decades where we weaponize the State against the citizens.
> The State exists to protect large monied interests and their power, and those entities in exchange will sell out individuals to the State that seek to undermine their power. The State will never not do this.
Reminds me of a certain ideology, can't quite put my finger on it.
I find it funny how many people think that Capitalism and Fascism are compatible or the same... completely disregarding the fact that Fascism is a form of Socialism borne out of the limitations of Communism.
There's a little more to it than that... but what most people ascribe as "fascism" conflates with authoritarianism, which includes the political and economic structures the people talking or using the "F" word generally do support.
There's no communism that doesn't lead to authoritarianism, for example. Which leaves the distinction about economics.
>>There's no communism that doesn't lead to authoritarianism
Unless you believe this because "there's no State that doesn't lead to authoritarianism (based, dope, great take)" saying "this thing is actually the exact same as a thing that is literally the opposite of it" is just whataboutism.
These takes are weak. Here's what I think fascism is (based on like, studying words and theory and philosophy and shit, and not just trying to stunt on my political opposites): It's a far-right, ultra-nationalist, violent, authoritarian world view that SEEKS centralized power and openly opposes liberal and communist parties where it is erected. By design and declaration it seeks to promote violence, masculinity, and a national rebirth to a bygone era lacking in modern decadence.
All this is to say, if you're an Anarchist (hi brother!) seeking to scold the commies for not being Left enough, save that for after the revolution. And if you just want everyone to equate commies with fascists because "then both bad" because you're Right of them, get better at rhetoric.
How many people posting Clash of Kings related content on HN, and what does that say about their user base?
This is a weird metric to determine informational accuracy, as you're talking about a specific use case (reposting content on a 3rd-party platform), you're not accounting for user selection (is the average HN dude more likely to use X or Threads as their primary mico-blogging?) and it doesn't account for the fact that the entire FB/Threads/Instagram ecosystem feeds into itself (I'm never stumbling across X content that I want to engage with because that's now how I use the internet, but I'm constantly clicking something on IG that prompts me to give in and sign up for Threads)
Anything X says at any point about itself is likely to make me very skeptical because I think it's a dogshit site run by a bald, nepotic loser capitalist, that says nothing about the quality of the reporting or how accurate it is though.
Exactly this. If I have 100,000 followers on YT for my software related content, why wouldn't I use that platform to post my content? Some people are also visual more visual learners and while straight text is helpful, having a trusted source going screen by screen/prompt by prompt and comparing to their machine is helpful.
So it's both content and communication preferences. HN is a self-selecting group of a certain type, but not everyone on the planet thinks like the average HN dude
Just yesterday there was a post to one of Geerling's pages where he posts the transcript to a video he's made. He could have just made a text blog and not spent the extra effort of making a video, but that's not what he does. Instead, he went the extra step to make the content available in text only. He could have just as easily left it as video only. (yes yes, creating a text only transcript of video in today's world is trivial, but an extra step nonetheless as it still needs to be added to his CMS to make the webpage)
This story (the demand for Radiologists) really shows a very important thing about AI: It's great when it has training data, and bad at weird edge cases.
Gee, seems like about the worst fucking thing in the world for diagnostics if you ask me, but what do I know, my degree is in sandwiches and pudding.
I think "insular rural folk" are often literate enough to see highfalutin dick-bags like yourself coming and don't want to be associated with that level of disdainful pretense.
I work in project management for a massive multi-national, about as "businessy business" as you can get, and my moon-shining, hog-raising cousins give me shit for being a sellout (we grew up showing and milking cows together) but we all still can sense a vibe about "certain types from the big city" that's more about respect and shared culture that any sort of financial, social, political, or other illiteracy/incompetence.
Um, I'm going to go ahead and point out this, probably not super relevant data point
"While trailing Gen Xers for the beginning of their adult lives, younger American households’ average wealth began to exceed that of Gen Xers at about age 30, reflecting historically high wealth levels following the COVID-19 pandemic." I have a feeling that average wealth adjustment falls very heavily on the home owners, which is only just above half of all the cohort. Had a similar thing happened to boomers in 89, almost 70% would have benefitted.
I think it's also worth pointing out: The share of wealth held by boomers in 89 (why 89? Because they didn't have data before that. It's why the graphs start in a weird spot and why it's not a great study unless you're trying to pull out a "gotcha" stat) represented almost 20% of the total wealth in the country. "Millenials/GenZ" has a hold on only HALF that percentage.
Doctors may hate your one weird statistic, but socio-demographists probably don't...
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