Just went there - Thank you sir!

Flock is not a single police officer standing on a street corner. Flock is a network of continuous data collection from every perspective on every road and intersection. Flock is not a camera, it is an AI system that follows you precisely everywhere, it is a data dump without a court order. There is expectation that a police officer will NOT follow you everywhere without a court order just because he is paid from taxes and has nothing better to do, this is stalking.

That's so little that it is completely lost in the statistical noise.

First, a natural gas turbine *also* requires hundreds to thousands of gallons of oil for lubrication every year. All turbines do. So with the exception of solar, no matter how you produce your power, you're going to use about that much oil.

An average onshore wind turbine produces 6 million kWh per year. (Offshore turbines produce more.) Petroleum-based generators use about 0.08 gallons per kWh. So if you used oil to actually produce the power, that generator would use 480,000 gallons of oil. By comparison, even if the fossil-fuel-based turbines somehow magically used a tenth as much oil, that would just mean the oil-based generator uses 479,730 extra gallons instead of 480,000.

In other words, the *tiny* amount of oil changes the greenness of wind farms relative to fossil fuels by about 0.06%, well within any reasonable margin of error.

It's noise.

A nuclear power plant uses 200,000 to 500,000 tons of concrete and produces a gigawatt of electricity. A utility-scale wind turbine might use 1,500 tons to produce 5 MW. So it's about the same amount of concrete per megawatt, to within a single-digit factor, depending on the duty cycle of the wind turbine.

And the foundation can usually be reused for the next turbine, so that concrete also lasts many, many decades, typically. They don't remove the entire structure when they replace the turbine.

Also, you didn't factor in all the extra concrete for building long-term offsite storage facilities for the nuclear fuel, or the concrete for the sarcophagus if things go sufficiently wrong. :-)

If blades are failing after a decade, then either A. something was wrong with them to begin with or B. the company that owns them stopped servicing them after a decade because of expiring tax credits. And that second one actually is plausible, but that's not a failure of the technology; it's a failure of U.S. energy policy. Why spend money repairing it when they can wait for it to completely fail and then replace it and then get the tax credit again?

I would argue that nuclear power stinks on ice. The cost per kWh is considerably higher than wind, and it requires continuous staffing and oversight to prevent things from going horribly wrong, whereas wind farms are almost entirely passive other than minor routine maintenance until something breaks and has to be replaced. Nuclear also requires transporting dangerous materials by truck or rail to storage sites, requires building storage that can safely contain the spent material for millennia, etc.

Also, every 40 to 80 years, the nuclear plant's equipment has to be replaced, and all of the removed material is contaminated, which means long-term storage of the reactor, pipes, concrete containment vessel, etc. You can't even recycle the raw materials like you can with wind, because nobody wants radioactive metal or concrete. And even if your blades are made of a material that can't be recycled easily, you can still landfill it instead of basically burying the entire plant in a no man's land for tens of thousands of years. If you think the waste from wind farms is bad, it pales in comparison with the cost and storage requirements for shutting down a nuclear plant.

If we get fusion working at an industrial scale, then we'll talk, but fission just isn't worth the hassle when there are other, much cleaner solutions.

Oh, that seems like thinking people believe that computer virus' are the same as biological virus'.

Kinda like people calling an attractive female a "hottie", but knowing she is the same actual temperature as all other women, unless she has a fever from some illness. From a bug maybe? 8^). This is really not that complicated, and other than people who feel that everything needs heavy categorization, it really is.

Definitely not compelling! I can't imagine the level of lockdown to get a W11 system to behave itself.

Yeah, Im still dealing with the Windows 11 apocalypse, messing with update breakdowns, and a worrying new trend - the damn computer is working then failing with no update taking place. One of the "fixes" involved setting up a non-internet connected network to run beside my normal network. But most people expect internet access these days.

I haven't read it, but the outlines are a little disturbing.

I've dug into the story, and I don't see any substantive claim that RARE books are in fact being destroyed, other than "someone said this was happening"? Do you know of any?
My questions would be:
1) first, the oldest volumes are going to complicate reading the text by several orders of magnitude; from the shit-quality of the printing to the actually-different use of & inconsistent characters, as well as 'creative' spelling all needlessly increase the challenge for AI to get anything useful from it. How does it help if Claude's AI sees that there are (in the old works) 14 different spellings of "plow"?
2) why are LLMs eating books in the first place? My understanding is that it's mainly about learning broader human concepts, logic, and syntax than they can mine from 140 character posts or reddit. Do we think they're ACTUALLY going to be getting that from Pepys diary from 1660? It certainly won't have historical knowledge that can't be more easily retrieved from elsewhere and the syntax is borderline useless.
2) moreover, what could the "age" and "rarity" have to do with anything besides raising the costs? I have a 1st edition of Thoresby's Letters. It is ideally worth nearly $200. (Mine's nearly falling apart, so it isn't.) Or, Anthropic's AI can suck up the free online text of it in 0.001 sec clearly, cleanly, and for free.

So no, to me this sounds like someone floating a trial balloon of "what's another reason we can get people to hate AI and Datacenters"*, which then leads me to wonder why the effort?

*I think there are plenty of tangible, obvious, and simple reasons to be upset about the current surge of AI and datacenters, without inventing rather-obvious bullshit complaints from thin air.

My $0.02.

Agreed; the spans of time are so vast as to be incomprehensible. Looked at it that way, it would be hard to believe that if there ARE other pathways to "life", that pretty nearly all of them hadn't been explored, and even if failed, explored repeatedly later.

4.6 Billion Years Ago: Earth forms from cosmic dust and rock.
3.8 to 3.7 Billion Years Ago: First single-celled organisms (prokaryotes) and microbial life appear in the oceans.
2.4 Billion Years Ago: Cyanobacteria develop photosynthesis, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere (Great Oxygenation Event).
2.1 Billion Years Ago: Complex cells with nuclei (eukaryotes) evolve.
1 Billion Years Ago: Multicellular life begins to form in the seas.
540 Million Years Ago: The Cambrian explosion brings a massive surge of diverse marine animals.

So (as far as we understand) it was 1bn years to go from *a ball of magma floating in a vacuum* to a primitive but active ecosystem of organisms self-selecting to opportunistically gather whatever they needed (energy, really) from the existing environment.

And we've been here for FIVE of those spans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "(45:21) Interviewer: But theoretically, couldn't AI and biotechnology help you come up with a counter measure?
        Schmidt: Um, I had thought so, and that was the argument I made until I... I do a lot of national security work. And there's a term called offense dominant. And an offense dominant is a is a situation in a military context where the attack cannot be countered at the same level as the attack. In other words, the damage is done. And most people, most biologists who've worked in this believe that while the model can be trained to counter this, the damage from the offense part is far greater than the ability to defend it, which is why we're so worried about it."

And Mo Gawdat on ways to help prevent that:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it.
        Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026.
        He explains:
* How AI can give you a 400-point IQ boost, and why most people are wasting it
* Why Mo actually wants a machine smarter than all of humanity to take control
* Why Sam Altman said AI will "likely end humanity", and what he chose to do next
* Why capitalism breaks when AI replaces the workers who buy the things we make
* Why AI unemployment could trigger civil unrest before governments are ready for it"

Which all relates to my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And also this essay I wrote: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
      "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Having lived through the 80-90s myself, there were indeed a lot of great things about them -- but don't forget living in the shadow of nuclear war and "The Day After" and also "Peak Oil" and "Club of Rome" fears of running out of resources. Advanced of technology like PV and EV and 3D-Printing have made a lot of new things possible (both for good and bad) -- and as Mo Gawdat says we need to upgrade our social perspective and political discourse to use them wisely.

Personally, I feel it is plausible that the direction we come out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction going into it. So it is absolutely imperative to get our social house in order before developing AI -- and that means building a more compassionate, wiser, sustainable, and just world *first*.

The back story is occasionally we'd find actual bugs inside electronics. Extended from there to include surveillance devices, which were often small bug like things.

It's a nickname - Sorry that it is not understandable.

The first mistake was to abandon hunter gatherer lifestyle for an agrarian lifestyle. We've been doomed ever since.

Seriously though, students have always cheated - and these were caught, just like all the rest.

Humans have been performing genetic modification ever since we abandoned Hunter gatherer days. Technology is a genie that won't go back in the bottle. A lot of people think the USA "invented" the nuclear bombs. A fission weapon was inevitable after Uncle Albert figured out mass-energy equivalence, with the simple formula e=mc squared. Others knew the formula. Others knew it could be a game changer. Radioactivity pointed to the trigger and energy supply. The Allies spent a lot of time interfering with Germany's efforts during to develop one during WW2.

Point is - this is happening.

The main issue with LLM at present is the concept that we are going to build structures that will have an infinite demand for energy. It is one of those things "How much electricity do you need? answer "How much electricity do you have?" So they look toward re-starting 70 year old nuc plant technology, and using a remarkable amount of cooling water.

Anyone with two functioning brain cells should realize pretty quickly that this is not sustainable. The present day data center concept reminds me of the early days of computing, huge energy sucking heat producing tube based computers, some that required nonstop replacing of the tubes. Then along came transistors, then integrated circuits, eventually almost all of us carrying a computer in our pockets that is so much more powerful then the old Colossus and Eniac, that it is mind numbing to consider the trip from utter secrecy to ubiquity.

I'm pretty certain that the same will happen to LLM's either by miniaturization, specialization, or lack of available energy.

But it is not going to go away.

You win the internet this week! Well played indeed.

I was just about to say the same thing. I would not be surprised if new forms of life arise even now in the benthic environment. Probably not successful, but possibly.

The whole thing about not being able to define life, FTA, is partially, the moving goalposts regarding human created life, and the desire by some to heavily categorize things.

That's how virus' are not considered life even though they evolve, reacting to their environment, and reproduce. They rely on other life to metabolize. Perhaps we've adventurously defined life?

So while very intriguing, we have to determine if this first "life" was "life as we presently define it.

If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.

Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.