Also, it's actually 1-3 years. The Great Barrier reef underwent mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024.

(To be clear on terminology: colony != reef. A coral colony is a cluster of polyps that bud or divide off from each other, all genetically identical and interconnected by the coenosarc to share resources, with each polyp living for a few years. For a plant analogy, the colony would be a a tree, and the polyps, individual leaves of that tree)

Going through mass bleaching events every 2-3 years is not the "whew, let's relax" event you seem to think it is when corals don't hit reproductive age for ~3-10 years, depending on species, with initial reproduction rates being slow and taking time to accelerate (the longest-lived animals on Earth are coral colonies, with certain individuals documented having lived for thousands of years; most live for decades, or in some species hundreds of years). Let alone the knock-on for all the species that depend on healthy coral for their their habitat, which lead to balance in the ecosystem, which is critical to e.g. preventing explosions of coral predators.

It's like taking an old growth forest in an ecosystem not adapted to regular fires, and burning it down every couple years. There will still be "something" living there, but it's just not going to be the same ecosystem it was.

Or they were just healthier to begin with, or more favourably situated. It doesn't mean that they have an inherent genetic advantage.

Corals are not fast growing. They grow about a centimeter per year, give or take half an order of magnitude. The fastest-reproducing corals still take several years to hit reproductive age, while others take as much as a decade. These aren't like bacteria that can quickly get new genes into the mix, test them, and quickly spread them through the population.

Corals need to get off Tiktok and stop with these unhealthy style trends. You're beautiful the way you are, corals!

Apple's market dominance in the U.S. means that people with Android phones face significant headwinds. Being the only Android user in a group chat is its own special Hell. That lack of interoperability works against Apple in places where Android phones are more established. It is hard to convince people that your phone is so much better than theirs when every time you put a picture in a group chat it looks like you took the picture on a flip phone from 1995. Everyone else's pictures look fine. In these cases Apple is clearly the problem, and it is a bad look for Apple.

That doesn't stop iPhones from being a status symbol, and there are certain parts of the population, where all of the rich and powerful people have iPhones, where being part of the crowd is worth the price of entry. However, in a country where 90+% of the population is using Android you have to be pretty darn snooty to justify buying an iPhone. I suspect that is a very hard market to sell into.

woke, adj. - "Not a knee-jerk reactionary like me."

Your legal theory where a person can break into someone's house, take book that the person doesn't have the right to share, photocopy it, and share it, and that this is the VICTIM's liability because their locks aren't good enough to stop the attacker, is duly noted.

Or is this just a good old fashioned human-dupe?

I'm going to attack your post here. But I don't intend this as a personal attack; you may very well be arguing in good faith, just from outdated information. Being even a few years behind - and your citation of a decade-old book suggests you're farther behind than that - means you've missed out on a ton of new information about the practical scale of renewable power (did you know that worldwide we're installing almost 1.5GW of solar power EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR these days?).

> In the USA we've had decades of nuclear fission providing something like 20% of our electricity and with each closing of a nuclear power plant there's increased use of fossil fuels to replace them.

Coal use in the US has been plummeting (down 680TWh in the last decade), and rising natural gas use (up 460TWh in the last decade) is only offsetting about half that fall. You may be interested to read the EIA's annual report: https://www.eia.gov/electricit... (see, particularly, chapter 3). And renewables provide about 3x as much annual energy as nuclear plants do, per dollar spent (using un-subsidized prices: https://www.lazard.com/media/2...). So your argument that spending money on new nuclear plants is reducing carbon emissions is untrue.

> Uranium and thorium is stored energy, stores of energy upon which we can draw from as desired.

Also not true. Sure, uranium and thorium store quite a lot of energy. But we can't draw on them "as desired." We can draw on them with about three days' warning, assuming the plant's fueled, maintained, and waiting to start up. Nuclear power does not provide a backup to a renewable grid, unless that grid already has sufficient storage that you can forecast a need for a nuclear backstop 3+ days in advance. And if you think we're *not* going to have a renewable grid, you haven't been paying attention to how incredibly cheap renewables are. 94% of planned capacity additions to the US grid in 2024 are solar, wind, and batteries. Everything else combined is 6%. See EIA again: https://www.eia.gov/todayinene... But even that is an understatement of how renewables-dominated the grid pipeline is, because it ignores planned retirements. Coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power capacity are ALL forecast to fall this year as new capacity fails to offset retirements. New renewables are not only supplying the new energy required as grid demand rises, but are now displacing existing capacity.

And this year isn't a fluke, it's a continuation of a developing theme: cheap power sources get built. Check out the forecasts through 2027: https://www.eia.gov/electricit... Coal: down 32GW. Gas: up 5GW. Wind: up 30GW. Solar: up 100GW.

> This isn't because people hate clean air and a stable climate but because renewable energy cannot reliably provide energy when and where it is needed.

Why do you think that's true? We have ample modeling from research teams throughout the world all pointing to the same conclusion: there are tons of different ways to provide 100% supply/demand matching with different amounts of overbuilding and/or storage (and some amount of demand response would be even cheaper, but isn't technically necessary) - the "renewables work fine" conclusion is not sensitive to how the build-out proceeds. And we have practical examples of it working in the real world: e.g. South Australia which was 71% renewable-powered over the entire year last year, despite its tiny geographic footprint, weak interconnections with other states, and almost no storage at all. And they're targeting net 100% renewable electricity just THREE YEARS from now, enabled by a connection to NSW coming online, and a bit of new battery development. Fully one quarter of the time, the state's at or above 100% renewables, so clearly the predicted stability and grid control problems are surmountable: it's just a matter of building enough generation to supply the bulk energy, and then some combination of transmission and energy storage to match supply and demand.

And that's precisely what will happen. Any utility that wants new bulk energy will build wind and solar, because they can rely on 'free' load matching from gas plants ramping up and down, so it's extra cheap. The learning rate will drive down the cost of wind and solar even further, meaning they'll continue to be built, even after we've built so much of them that sometimes they get curtailed, because that will still be cheaper than building any of the alternatives. Then, during the day, everything non-solar will have to ramp down to make way for cheap solar power because it has the cheapest marginal cost and ample supply. And that means that plants that can't ramp much (coal) or at all (nukes) will either have to bid less than zero (see what's happening in Australia...) in order to be allowed to run so that they can supply energy into the evening peak, or they'll be forced to close (see...Australia). This happens gradually: their profitability keeps slipping year after year until their owners give up and quit. Note that it's already cheaper to build a brand new PV plant (in much of the world) to generate electricity than it is to simply keep operating an existing already-paid-for coal, gas, or nuclear plant (LCOE for new generation vs short-run marginal cost for coal, gas, nukes).

So now we have renewables and gas, but gas is increasingly expensive because its capacity factor keeps falling and the operators need to pay off their CAPEX. Enter: batteries (and CAES, PHS, normal hydro, etc.) which will increasingly cut further into gas's profitability by relegating gas plants to an increasingly marginal role providing extremely expensive peaking power, but little bulk energy. Which is TOTALLY FINE! A huge fleet of cheap-to-build, inefficient open cycle gas turbines operating for 100 hours a year to get us from 99% to 99.99% served energy is TOTALLY FINE. We just need to stop running them year-round to provide bulk energy.

I've presented this as a series of steps, but of course all these things will be - already are - happening gradually, and together, over the next few decades. The fossil fuel industry is mortally wounded but still alive; in a decade or so it'll be dead but still twitching; hopefully in two decades it'll be fully buried (and/or dug up: did you know that the oil and gas pipelines in the US have enough steel in them to satisfy two full years of nation-wide steel demand? More than enough to build all the wind turbine towers we'll need!).

This is in turn also not correct. All works are NOT automatically granted copyright. The work has to meet certain qualifying standards, for example more than de minimis human creative work. You can't just write "My dog farted" and assert that it's copyrighted; that simply won't pass creativity standards. Some works, such as AI works (which have not been not further human processed or involved in a creative selection process), are automatically denied copyright on these grounds. A wide variety of things are also not available for copyright protection - ideas, facts, short phrases / slogans, government works (with certain exceptions), and so forth are not copyrighted. Also, works posted online - aka, virtually all works anyone in this discussion is talking about - are generally posted on sites with a TOS, which requires the user granting the site at least limited distribution rights (and in some cases, full rights over the work).

And it's BTW a good thing that de minimis works are ruled out, because so much of our online life is basically structured around copyvio. For example, the "Forward" button on an email client might as well be labeled "Violate Copyright" - you're taking someone else's work and sending it to a third party, generally without the author's express consent. The primary defense that one has in this case is to argue that the received email e.g. lacks sufficient creativity, is just facts and ideas, or so forth.

Running your own website may get you past a TOS, but it doesn't mean you can disclaim fair use.

LLM training falls outside many of the tests commonly applied to decide fair use.

If Google can win Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., there is no way AI training would run afoul.

Google: Ignored the explicit written request of the rightholders
AI training: generally honours opt out requests

Google: Incorporated exact copies of all the data into their product
AI training: only data seen commonly repeated generally gets memorized, otherwise it just learns interrelationships

Google: Zero barriers to looking up exact copies of whole paragraphs or even whole pages of the copyrighted works.
AI training: Extensive barriers set up during the finetune; success at extracting said information has required attack vectors, frequently estoteric, and sometimes requiring the attacker to provide part of the copyrighted text themselves.

Google: Product literally designed for one purpose, that purpose being to return exact content
AI training: Literally the opposite; designed for *synthesis*, for solving *novel* tasks. .. and ***Google won***. Google Books was found to be a "transformative use". There is NO way that Google Books is "transformative" but LLMs are not.

Or take diffusion models. The amount of data on the weights is on the order of one byte per training image (give or take an order of magnitude). Meanwhile, Google Images searches return 50 kilopixel scaled copies of *exact copyrighted images*

The simple fact is that the very existence of the internet relies on the fact that automated processing of copyrighted data to create new transformative products and services is fair use.

Back at you.

I'll repeat: they were creating attacks against the models to find ways - often quite convoluted and esoteric - to trick them into doing things that their designers put safeguards against them doing, as you can quite literally see in my examples above.

People who write this sort of stuff remind me so much of the people who share viral messages on Facebook stating that Facebook doesn't have the right to their data, and that by posting some notice with the right legalese words they can ban Facebook for using their data. Sorry, but you gave up that right when you agreed to use their service, and no magic words are just going to give it to you.

(Let alone when talking about rights that you never had in the first place, such as to restrict fair use)

You can write whatever you want; it still doesn't override (A) the TOS of the website they posted on, which invariably granted the site at least a subset of the distribution rights; and (B) fair use, including for the purpose of the automated creation of transformative derivative works and services.

I could write "I have the legal right to murder my neighbor"; it wouldn't actually grant me the right to do so. You have to actually have a right to do something (and not have already given up that right) in order to reserve said right.