Clearly that wasn't spam, because his name is nospam007.

Forced? You think reviewers of writing contests are captives, imprisoned by mad scientists and forced to read story after story, like some sort of literary equivalent of the backstory to MST3K?

It is no more "theft" than you are.

I'll never get over how many people I watch online complain about how they'll never use AI because "it's theft", and then post photoshops they made with pictures they don't own, when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many artists I've seen complain about how AI is theft, and then paint something with "inspiration images" sitting in front of them while they paint, with their painting effectively being a blended composite of their inspiration images - when that's not what the AI is doing.

I'll never get over how many writers I've seen write the exact same derivative stuff that they also read, down to the same phrasings at times, just packaged in a new plot with new characters, and yeah, same story.

Even a person who isn't *directly* copying things that they're literally looking at is still the sum of their experiences. And it's rather hard to say that the breadth of human experience is broader than an LLM (whose "breadth of experiences" is "the whole world's outputs"), outside of the things that relate directly to having a body in a way which a blind / deaf / quadraplegic / whatnot person wouldn't grasp well.

And on that latter note, most people underestimate how well e.g. the congenitally blind actually grasp colours and the like. They're far better at reasoning about colours - similar to the sighted - than they are at knowing what colours things are. One study I read for example asked about polar bear fur. A good fraction of the congenitally blind subjects answered that they didn't know what colour it was. When asked to guess, about half of them answered that it was white so that it could blend into the snow, while the other half wrongly guessed black, but did so on the assumption that they'd want to soak up light to help stay warm. And actually in reality, both are true - to an outside observer, the exterior scattering of visible light without pigment makes them look white, but it's also designed to trap non-visible light up against black skin to absorb it for warmth. A sighted person, just seeing "white fur" and not knowing the latter property, might not have thought to even consider that.

To a LLM, our bodily experiences are akin to a blind person asked about colour: only knowing for sure things that they've learned about them directly, but still quite adept at reasoning about them.

You understand that this was not a sales contest, right?

What should be telling is that people started criticizing the metaphors only after concerns were raised that it was AI.

I do this experiment all the time (as it amuses me endlessly): when some people are hating on AI, I post some masterpiece panting or award-winning photo, suggest it's AI, and then watch them all explain why it's terrible, obviously-flawed, soulless crap. Sometimes I also do the reverse and post an AI image by comparison, say I prefer the "AI image" (actually real) to the "real image" (actually AI), and watch them go on about how the "real" (actually AI) image is so much better and shows so much more human creativity and emotion that AI could never have.

One person did this recently (posted a real Monet, said it was AI) and hundreds of such replies. The funniest part however was that someone took all their replies about the real Monet and fed them (along with the real Monet) into an AI model and had it improve the real Monet to match their criticisms ;)

The problem here isn't scams and grift. It's that by growing the number of bets by orders of magnitude, you grow the number of insiders with insider info by orders of magnitude. Which creates perverse incentives across your entire economy for people to profit off of their status, while simultaneously making it much harder to do so.

Say there's a bet on whether Russia will take the village of Mala Tokmachka by a certain date. Well, now every Russian commander on that front has an incentive to have family members / friends bet against it and then delay / undercut their ability to wage incentives, while every soldier also has the incentive to do so and then do everything they can to spoil the offensive.

Or say the US is planning a major offensive in Iran, and various insiders are betting *on* an imminent attack. Well, Iran can feed Polymarket data into their intel assessments as one factor to help determine when the US will invade in order to maximize their readiness. OR, Iranian intel services could track down US officials / military officers who are making these bets based on insider info and blackmail them in order to get them to cooperate.

Every single aspect of society that gets bet on gets subtly undercut by the existence of these bets. It's one thing to have bets be placed on sports, an action that by definition is entertainment, something that doesn't actually matter. But it's an entirely different thing to have bets on virtually everything in our world. It's already been a problem with stock trading, but sites like Polymarket make it so, so much worse.

JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

Nuclear reactors use most surface water, not ground water.

Datacentres are no pickier. You can even cool a datacentre with saltwater, you just need a heat exchanger.

Also, closed loop does not evaporate. The loop is not closed if stuff escapes from it.

You're arguing with the actual terminology used in the nuclear industry. "Closed loop" or "closed cycle" designs have the water pumped in a cycle through cooling towers. The towers lose water to evaporation, taking heat with them, but the rest of the water is returned to be reheated again. "Open loop" or "open cycle" designs have no cooling towers. The water is heated and just discharged hot. They consume much more water (over an order of magnitude more), but most of that is returned. Closed loop are more common, but you see open loop in some older designs, and in seawater-cooled reactors.

"How often do you think I print?"

Seemingly not very.

I've printed many hundreds of kg on my P1S, thanks.

I do not consider having to write data out to a card and transport it back and forth between the printer and the computer to be the pinnacle of convenience. That's something that would be considered embarrassingly inconvenient for a 1980s printer, let alone a modern net-connected device. And it's designed to be inconvenient for non-cloud prints for a reason.

Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?