Like generally, if taking any post about how AI users are evil and/or morally deficient and/or entitled manchildren because they don’t care about the environmental impact of their little toy and replacing “using AI” with “watching youtube” (or “playing games online”, or “watching netflix” or “streaming music” or any other frivolous internet activity with a similar level of environmental impact) would make you no longer agree with it, that’s a pretty solid indicator that it’s not actually environmental impacts that you’re concerned about.
@shirtshawaiian well, I *have* looked it up and Objectively speaking it’s “anywhere near” and then some. The most unfavorable estimate for energy consumption from individual AI usage (the one commonly used by people when they talk about how bad using AI is for the environment) is that a single chatgpt query uses 2.6Wh of energy. Watching a 1-hour video on the internet uses 400 to 800Wh, depending on factors like video quality or what device you’re watching it on. This means that the environmental impact of watching youtube (or netflix, or any other video streaming service) for an hour is roughly equivalent to using chatgpt 153 to 306 times.
And like. I am someone who doesn’t use AI or fw the AI Industry, and spends a frankly unhealthy amount of my free time watching youtube. But I’m just pointing out how, once you put the energy consumption of individual AI usage in context of how it compares to the energy consumption of pretty much anything else we use the internet for, and notice how you never see statements like “I’d fw watching youtube if it wasn’t so bad for the environment” from the same people, the way people on here talk about the environmental impact of AI starts looking less like a principled environmental stance and more like a post-hoc attempt to add moral legitimacy to a stance that actually has very little to do with environmental impacts.
[ID: tags. # like generally is being very generous here #i have thoughts on this i wanna come back and type abt it in tags #took me a few rereads to comprehend the post #bc Objectively ai is impacting the environment in a way different from youtube video games etc #like just replacing the text makes the past False #post* not past #like thats just misinformation at that point #then again i could be wrong i will be honest haven’t researched the environmental impact of using youtube etc #but im pretty sure its not anywhere near what Al is doing #i’d fw Al if it weren’t unethically sourced and also so bad for the environment /end ID]
does watching netflix, youtube, etc destroy freshwater sources and the local environment for Black and brown communities, or is the only metric “energy consumption”?
Considering that keeping any of those services running requires relying on the usage of datacenters whose carbon and water footprint had alreadybeen a causeof concernfor years before generative AI was even invented, and that the practice of building datacenter infrastructure near impoverished black and brown communities definitely didn’t get started with the invention of AI, the answer is: Yes, netflix, youtube etc. also destroy freshwater sources and the local environment for black and brown communities, and the fact that you’re flippantly asking this question as a gotcha is further evidence of how people treat the environmental angle primarily as a way to add to the appearance of moral legitimacy over the AI Techbros™ and nothing else.
“irreversible side effects of HRT” all of life is irreversible. i cannot go back a single second in time
also i know what i want. i know the risks. everything has risk. i am already living! why am i living half a life because of what YOU fear? stop talking down to transsexuals
i really think we the U.S. public need to be SUPER FUCKING LOUD about how admirable we think this kind of thing is.
Anytime military members speak up about not liking their orders to be deployed against the american public, or especially REFUSING such orders, the nation needs to hear a great outcry of public support for that act
for anyone in the UK, needing to access discord and unable or unwilling to provide an ID:
ALT
as someone with experience in the discord console, unfortunately they made it a little trickier than just ctrl + shift + i about four years ago, i believe.
specifically what you’re going to want to do is find settings.json in %appdata%/discord or the mac equivalent which is found with finder > go > go to folder. there is a setting there titled “DANGEROUS_ENABLE_DEVTOOLS_ONLY_ENABLE_IF_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOURE_DOING”: and if it is not, copy and paste “DANGEROUS_ENABLE_DEVTOOLS_ONLY_ENABLE_IF_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOURE_DOING”: true into the .json and then, only then you can do crtl + shift + i or command + option + i on mac.
best of luck!
So. ^THIS^ extra-step guide totally works!
When you’ve enabled dev tools and opened Discord’s console, input THIS code:
there’s a scary message in the console about how if someone told you to paste something in, you are 100% getting hacked. and like. that might be true sometimes? but this is pretty simple code and you can just read it yourself and have some clue of what it’s doing and whether or not it’s likely to be dangerous, and… i mean, i’m not a super expert in javascript, but. this sure looks like it does exactly what it says it does, and there’s not a lot of obfuscation here other than being javascript.
A simplified description of what’s going on here, in the hope that this will be useful to non-technical users:
(I make no claims as to whether this actually succeeds, but this appears to be what it’s trying to do.)
wow. that. that’s really good. thank you. that is also what i thought it did, but the color-coding explanation is really helpful.
I get it if you’re not paying attention to the news. It’s scary, it’s exhausting, and a lot of people here are in particularly vulnerable demographics. So I’ll just tell you, now is definitely not the time to stop pushing or despair.
Every major news outlet, including Fox and Newsmax, refused to sign Pete Hegseth’s ridiculous demand for control over what they published from the Pentagon.
Many airports refused to air Kristi Noem’s propaganda video blaming the govt shutdown on the Democrats.
Farmers are furious over the fallout from the trade war with China and now a huge bailout for their direct competitors in Argentina.
A judge in Chicago barred ICE agents from arresting people in court.
MIT, University of Pennsylvania, and a couple other schools have been the first to refuse the administration’s ultimatum to either accept a complete govt audit of classes offered or lose federal funding, and we can hope others will follow suit.
The administration continues to lose legal cases regularly, and now the Attorney General of Arizona is threatening to sue Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for his continued refusal to swear in Adelita Grijalva, who was elected to the House in a special election nearly three weeks ago. She would make the last signature needed on a House petition to push the Epstein case to the next stage.
Steven Miller is selling his house in Arlington, VA and moving, because people kept writing criticism of him in chalk on the sidewalks. Lol.
There is blood in the water, guys. Don’t stop pushing. Find your nearest No Kings protest tomorrow, and put the fear of the people in the hearts of some Republican governors and congressmen.
Coworkers are bitching about teenagers coming to the park during school hours. First of all you do not know that they are supposed to be in school. School is not prison. Second of all who gives a shit. We are in Baltimore and I would much rather these kids come hang out in the woods than. Like. Literally anywhere else. Do not make them feel bad for being outside.
Coworker: We gotta do something with all these Spanish kids hanging around the grounds.
Me: Great idea! :) Maybe we can get one of the bilingual staff to find out what kind of activities they would like us to run in Spanish. :)
Coworker: That’s not what I meant. These kids don’t want to come to our programs.
Me: Then we should really try to figure out what kind of new programs we could offer instead! :)
Coworker: They just want to do drugs!
Me: Oh dang, is that what they said when you asked them? :)
Currently reading Grey Ghosts and Red Rangers, Thad Sitton’s 2010 ethnography of American hilltop foxhunters, which is quite good and scrupulously even handed about both the positive and negative aspects of the hobby/sport/practice/subculture over the past 250 years. Things that stick out to me:
As someone who grew up in Virginia around Jack Russell people, I had idly assumed that most foxhunting in the US historically was a relatively similar sport to the English kind with the horses and the whipping-men and the attempts to keep up with the dogs through any possible means. This is/was mostly not true in America, where foxhunting is much more of a sport of listening to rather than physically observing the hounds and where dogs are usually pursued on foot, if at all, and at a definite distance from the pack. Also, because dogs are generally owned and hunted by Just One Guy, there’s more competition to have the fastest dog sounding off at the head of the pack and to be able to identify your specific hound by voice: neatly explaining a lot of the differences between American and English foxhounds.
In general I had not realized how old the pro-fox, anti-fox-killing factional ethos of fox hunting actually is. For example, I had not realized the extent to which American foxhunters spread red fox throughout the Continental United States (truly significant, people were routinely mail ordering farmed kits and carefully reintroducing them to the wild routinely enough to create guides for doing it that incorporated information on how to use the mail crate the kits arrived in as a convertible den). None of this is to say that all fox hunters were like this, but even the presence of this “fox chasing” subset is wildly interesting to me as a window into the history of sport hunting itself in the US, particularly among people who were not necessarily wealthy.
I had also not realized the extent to which foxes were individually named and cherished over years if they could routinely produce a good chase for the dogs before denning up safe—and not just keeping other humans from hunting them, either, but actively contributing chicken dinners to favored foxes (whose dens were generally known). So far my favorite is Barkin Bet (who used to turn and scream every 500yd or so when dogs were chasing her), followed by Foxx or “Double X”. No wonder there’s no such thing as an American fox terrier: the local hunting culture didn’t use terriers or ferrets for fox at all; they just used little dogs for varmint hunting.
My goodness, this is an autistic man’s sport. No talking, no booze to speak of, everyone shows up and lets the dogs loose and listens intensely and quietly all night to the sound of your special interest, you get bit immediately by the bug or you don’t… yeah, I know the signs of a subculture that is significantly driven by my kinfolk for damn sure.
It is so nice to read about dog culture from the perspective of someone who both clearly likes dog people and also knows how often dog people are absolutely full of bullshit. That is all.
More to come later, maybe, if anyone besides me is interested.
you know, as an American, I think the sum total of my knowledge about anything adjacent to this type of hunting in the US comes from reading the book Where The Red Fern Grows as a kid and learning about coon dogs and racoon hunting
ALT
ALT