𝕛𝕨𝕞-𝕕𝕖𝕧

Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy?

It’s less absurd than it sounds and requires understanding how modern data center facilities that are being deployed by big tech actually work and run at a facility-wide and systemic level. They do generate this energy, they just proceed to use it. Notice he says roughly a gigawatt of energy, which is nowhere near the gross need for the facility as per the article.

Most modern data centers built in the past few years, especially those that are “campuses” as described, have on-site power generation solutions. Sometimes this means classic oil/coal/gas generators on the property, sometimes it means more involved and nuanced situations. What Lehane is telling the AP here is that, of the energy consumed by the new data center as a whole, “roughly and depending how you count,” 1 gigawatt comes from such sources. The article clearly states the center is set to deploy at 1.8 gigawatts consumption scaling up to 10 gigawatts over the lifespan of the facility. Presumably these are on the same time scales and everything. Frankly, for an AP article this was written quite poorly and the exact meaning of most this information isn’t very clear. I don’t think that’s Lehane’s fault implicitly. Just seems like bad reporting.

People have this image in their heads of these big data centers opening up and just like, sucking up all the power from the local grid due to their demand and this is what causes things such as blackouts. This is mildly incorrect. The negative effects of these data centers’ power demands is less to do with them “overloading” public grids and more to do with the market economy of energy. You get blackouts because all the energy they can’t generate themselves on-site must be acquired somewhere else. They can walk up to the local power companies and buy energy just like any private citizen can. They often get discounted rates compared to the plebes, too. You end up with blackouts because the energy companies don’t give a shit who they sell their product to, they just care that it sells. When companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, or OpenAI roll up with significantly more capital and resources than anyone else in the local economy, they’re easily able to out-compete even the entirety of the local domestic power demand. That’s what causes blackouts.

No one wants to talk about this because it’s easier to just say braindead shit like “fuck datacenters/AI/big-tech/fuckingwhateveritis” so you can feel like you’re “on the right side” than it is to acknowledge the long line of people in both the public and private sectors who had to rubber-stamp personally fucking the average person for us to even get to this point. Does big tech suck absolutely, fat, stinking donkey balls? For fucking sure. Are they anything more than a symptom of a much more entrenched societal rot? Nope.

This is a strawman argument, though. Sure, that can and does happen, but it isn’t the existence of spaces like Tea that is problematic, it is the holistic relationship between men and women in our society, generally. Further, I’m clearly not saying opposing Tea is inherently misogyny. It is a very particular kind of reaction that I am talking about, and you know this.

Tea itself really isn’t any worse than any other forum. You could have the same thing happen to a man on other platforms, there is nothing unique about Tea in that capacity and it is disingenuous to levy that criticism against the platform in isolation. People dislike it because they have a weird caricature of women in their head and assume every person on this app must have been a gossip or an evil person, yet there is no real basis for that claim other than the fact the audience is mainly women. Hence, the “misogyny,” that you seem to not really have the prior life experience to see. You can look through my profile here. I’ve said plenty in support of men’s rights and men’s issues as well, I’m really not rabidly in coalition for a particular gender’s rights or anything. I’m just calling it as I see it and the reaction to Tea on the web is largely sexist.

No one said false accusations aren’t real or that opposing them makes you a misogynist. You’re being intentionally obtuse and conflating a critique of people’s treatment of women in public discourse with a critique of apps such as these generally to make it seem absurd to point out how sexist some of the reaction to Tea has been. Mostly because I think you saw the word “misogyny” thrown out and for some reason took it as a personal insult or something. I think most people would reflect upon that and I’d hope you would too.

I probably won’t further respond because I’m getting the idea honest discourse and dialectic isn’t your goal here.

if that’s truly how the leak happened then these people, in any reasonable jurisdiction, would be considered criminally negligent, at the least.

yay compsci ethics courses :D

boo courts failing to uphold the law >:(

saw this happening here, saw it happening in reddit threads on the topic, saw it all over the media cycle in the comments.

i agree, people’s visceral backlash against this app is steeped in a deep misogyny. most of these comments have a vapid absence of any sort of even basic recognition towards these women as people. talking about them like they’re abstract figures or test subjects up in here.

watching people take somewhat valid privacy concerns as an excuse to let loose their most toxic feelings towards women used to be the sort of thing only losers or emboldened megalomaniacs did in public, even just a decade ago.

in the past years i’ve just seen all my peers, regardless of political affiliation, manipulated into a cult of outrage that serves as another hamster wheel upon which capital may spin.

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i would recommend against manjaro or endeavorOS and such similar arch based distributions. they’re neat and more stable but have similar issues sometimes, for example the manjaro maintainers are generally known as pretty egregiously irresponsible.

arch is kind of a clusterfuck. the user experience is really poor for a modern linux distribution and the community has an insular attitude of calling everything a skill issue.

i used and maintained a bunch of arch systems for a long time. if you do this you inevitably end up using AUR packages, as some utilities a normal person would use for home and server shit are only available through AUR. updating gets fucky and it’s way more annoying bc you end up needing to constantly read long ass changelogs bc some dude changed the formatting in one UI element and pushed to main at 3AM and it won’t just updated with -Syu or similar args.

i was talking about this earlier on lemmy as an example of terrible UX and all the arch fanboys came to downvote me and write paragraphs in droves talking about how it’s actually just the user’s fault for using the AUR and that i don’t know how pacman works. one guy claimed it’s like Debian PPAs. uh no, the AUR is far less optional lmfao. and i do know how yay and pacman work, i had no trouble, i was just pointing out it was annoying to deal with constantly when using a system like a normal person.

when an OS has no user in mind when designing it… it’s kind of a shit OS and apparently forms a shit culture around it too, in my experiences the past few years on the internet.

Nope, not trolling at all.

From your own provided source on the arxiv, Noels et al. define censorship as:

Censorship in this context can be defined as the deliberate restriction, modification, or suppression of certain outputs generated by the model.

Which is starkly different from the definition you yourself gave. I actually like their definition a whole lot more. Your definition is problematic because it excludes a large set of behaviors we would colloquially be interested in when studying “censorship.”

Again, for the third time, that was not really the point either and I’m not interested in dancing around a technical scope defining censorship in this field, at least in this discourse right here and now. It is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I didn’t say he’s a nobody. What was that about a “respectable degree of chartiable interpretation of others”? Seems like you’re the one putting words in mouths, here.

Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. (emphasis mine)

In the context of this field of work and study, you basically did call him a nobody, and the point being harped on again, again, and again to you is that this is a false assertion. I did interpret you charitably. Don’t blame me because you said something wrong.

EDIT: And frankly, you clearly don’t understand how the work Willison’s career has covered is intimately related to ML and AI research. I don’t mean it as a dig but you wouldn’t be drawing this arbitrary line to try and discredit him if you knew how the work done in Python on Django directly relates to many modern machine learning stacks.

I never implied that he says anything about censorship

You did, at least that’s what I gathered originally, you just edited your original comments quite extensively. Regardless,

Reading comprehension.

The provided example was clearly not intended to be taken as “define censorship,” and, again, it is ironic you accuse me of having poor reading comprehension while being incapable or unwilling to give a respectable degree of charitable interpretation to others. You kind of just take what you think is the easiest to argue against reading of others and argue against that instead of what anyone actually said, is a habit I’m noticing, but I digress.

Finally, not that it’s particularly relevant, but if you want to define censorship in this context that way, you’re more than welcome to, but it is a non-standard definition that I am not really sold on the efficacy of. I certainly won’t be using it going forwards.

Anyway, I don’t think we’re gonna get a lot of ground here. I just felt the need to clarify to anyone reading that Willison isn’t a nobody and give them the objective facts regarding his veracity, because again, as I said, claiming he is just some guy in this context is willfully ignorant at best.

Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions. Perhaps u/lepinkainen@lemmy.world’s warning wasn’t informative enough to be heeded: Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene, particularly aspects of the scene that have evolved into important facets of the modern machine learning community.

The guy is quite experienced with Python and took an early step into the contemporary ML/AI space due to both him having a lot of very relevant skills and a likely personal interest in the field. Python is the lingua franca of my field of study, for better or worse, and someone like Willison was well-placed to break into ML/AI from the outside. That’s a common route in this field, there aren’t exactly an abundance of MBAs with majors in machine learning or applied artificial intelligence research, specifically (yet). Willison is one of the authors of Django, for fucks sake. Idk what he’s doing rn but it would be ignorant to draw the comparison you just did in the context of Willison particularly. [EDIT: Lmfao just went to see “what is Simon doing rn” (don’t really keep up with him in particular), & you’re talking out of your ass. He literally has multiple tools for the machine learning stack that he develops and that are available to see on his github. See one such here. This guy is so far away from someone who just “posts random blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT” that it’s egregious you’d even claim that. It’s so disingenuous as to ere into dishonesty; like, that is a patent lie. Smh.]

As for your analysis of his article, I find it kind of ironic you accuse him of having a “fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work [sic]” when you then proceed to cherry-pick certain lines from his article taken entirely out of context. First, the article is clearly geared towards a more general audience and avoids technical language or explanation. Second, he doesn’t say anything that is fundamentally wrong. Honestly, you seem to have a far more ignorant idea of LLMs and this field generally than Willison. You do say some things that are wrong, such as:

For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.

This isn’t necessarily true. It is true that information not included within the training set, or information that has been statistically biased within the training set, isn’t going to be retrievable or reversible using system prompts. Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth. Either way, my point is that you are using wishy-washy, ambiguous, catch-all terms such as “censorship” that make your writings here not technically correct, either. What is censorship, in an informatics context? What does that mean? How can it be applied to sets of data? That’s not a concretely defined term if you’re wanting to take the discourse to the level that it seems you are, like it or not. Generally you seem to have something of a misunderstanding regarding this topic, but I’m not going to accuse you of that, lest I commit the same fallacy I’m sitting here trying to chastise you for. It’s possible you do know what you’re talking about and just dumbed it down for Lemmy. It’s impossible for me to know as an audience.

That all wouldn’t really matter if you didn’t just jump as Willison’s credibility over your perception of him doing that exact same thing, though.

i mean, you could just as easily say professors and university would stamp those habits out of human doctors, but, as we can see… they don’t.

just because an intelligence was engineered doesn’t mean it’s incapable of divergent behaviors, nor does it mean the ones it displays are of intrinsically lesser quality than those a human in the same scenario might exhibit. i don’t understand this POV you have because it’s the direct opposite of what most people complain about with machine learning tools… first they’re too non-deterministic to such a degree as to be useless, but now they’re so deterministic as to be entirely incapable of diverging their habits?

digressing over how i just kind of disagree with your overall premise (that’s okay that’s allowed on the internet and we can continue not hating each other!), i just kind of find this “contradiction,” if you can even call it that, pretty funny to see pop up out in the wild.

thanks for sharing the anecdote about the cardiac procedure, that’s quite interesting. if it isn’t too personal to ask, would you happen to know the specific procedure implicated here?

i find that rust’s architecture and design decisions give the LLM quite good guardrails and kind of keep it from doing anything too wonky. the issue arises in cases like these where the rust ecosystem is quite young and documentation/instruction can be poor, even for a human developer.

i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.

don’t you dare understand the explicitly obvious reasons this technology can be useful and the essential differences between P and NP problems. why won’t you be angry >:(

you (rhetorical you, not you) can recommend not using the AUR officially all you want. it doesn’t mean anything if a large number of tasks the average user is going to do require AUR packages. i’m kind of drunk rn but i’ll go find specific pages of the wiki that demonstrate what i’m talking about, i stg this isn’t nothing. the core system itself can entirely be managed with pacman, yes, but the average user is going to be doing a lot more than just that. there is a certain discord in the messaging of arch as a whole.

this is exactly my point. arch can either be a nuts and bolts distro or it can be made for normies. it can’t be both.

i agree with this but this isn’t the reality of the arch ecosystem. AUR is explicitly promoted on the wiki for a large amount of tasks the average user is going to do. it feels skeevy to acknowledge the problems with the AUR and then abscond arch’s responsibility for them, because the AUR is not like PPAs or anything. it is significantly more integrated into the ecosystem.

saying it can happen in the AUR feels disingenuous to me when you consider how integrated the AUR is to the arch ecosystem. this is a genuine complaint from a user perspective and is an issue with the design philosophy imo. it is a special case but it’s so frequent as to be annoying, is my point.

not sure why everyone is replying like i’m unaware and totally ignoring the actual grievance i have. im very well aware of pacman and yay’s intended behaviors, i just think they’re shit in some cases. idk if people who say this have never tried to daily drive arch before or something but the AUR is absolutely not optional unless you want to constantly hand roll your own shit. see my edit to the original comment.

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i agree ubuntu is corpo drivel now but flatpaks are actually quite useful for some applications.

the sandboxing is nice to not have to setup manually for every little thing, and i say that as someone who avoids flatpaks generally.

sometimes you just wanna get things up and running, not everything needs to be a unix circlejerk.

sometimes you’re working with particular releases or builds that don’t, but like i said i might be the idiot lol.

i like the concept of arch. i don’t like the way i need to come up with a new solution for how im managing my packages virtually every few days that often requires novel information. shit, half the time you boot up an arch system if you have sufficient # of packages there is 9/10 times a conflict when trying to just update things naively. like i said it’s cool on paper and im sure once you use it as a daily driver for awhile it just becomes routine but it’s more the principle of the user experience and its design philosophy that i think might be poor.

arch is for techies in the middle of the bell curve imo… people on the left and the right, when it comes to something as simple as managing all my packages and versions, want something that just works^TM - unless i specifically want to fuck with the minutiae.

is garuda like endeavorOS or manjaro where it’s technically still an arch-based rolling release distro but the OS maintainers hold packages from upstream mainline arch?

i don’t hate that model, it’s more fun to use as an end user for sure, but i feel like it kind of defeats the point of arch’s entire ethos lmao.

one of my least favorite things about arch and other rolling distros is that yay/pacman will try and recompile shit like electron/chromium from source every few days unless you give it very specific instructions not to - which is annoying as shit bc compiling the entirety of chrome from source takes hours even with decent hardware.

granted, i fucking hate google products too but if you’re doing any web dev it’s necessary sometimes.

idk im definitely willing to admit i might be the idiot here. managing your packages with pacman might just be routine to some people. to me arch is the epitome of classic bad UX in an open source project. it’s like they got too focused on being cmatrix-style terminal nerds and forgot to make their software efficiently useable outside of 5 very specific people’s workflows. it’s not even the terminal usage that is bad about arch. plenty of things are focused on that and… don’t do it shittily? idk…

edit: yes to all the arch fanboy’s points in response to me. i used to be super into arch and am aware of the fact that this isn’t explicit behavior but to act like it doesn’t happen in a typical arch user experience is disingenuous. i also disagree with the take that arch doesn’t endorse this outright with its design philosophy, bc it does. the comparison of the AUR to other, similar things like PPAs doesn’t land for me bc PPAs aren’t integrated into the ecosystem nearly as much as AUR is with arch. you can’t tell people to just grab the binaries or not use AUR whenever it’s convenient to blame the user, when arch explicitly endorses a philosophy amicable to self-compilation and also heavily uses the AUR even in their own arch-wiki tutorials for fairly basic use cases. arch wants to have its cake and eat it too and be a great DIY build it yourself toolkit while also catering to daily driver use and more generalist users. don’t get me wrong, it’s the best attempt at such a thing i’ve seen - but at a certain point you have to ask if the premise makes sense anymore. in the case of arch, it doesn’t and it causes several facets of the ecosystem to flounder from a user perspective. the arch community’s habit of shouting “skill issue” at people when they point out legitimate issues with the design philosophy bugs the fuck out of me. this whole OS is a camel.

the problematic part of this is that you’ve stripped all context to support your, admittedly bigoted, rhetoric and ethos.

black people, generally, have worse education outcomes than whites in american education. you’d still be an incredibly shitty and terrible person if you advocated hiring white people over black people by rote rule. you can find plenty of “studies” that formalize that argument just as you have here, though. essentialist can just say whatever they want, you guys aren’t bounded by rational thought and critical thinking like the rest of us. no, arguing considering context would be too hard. you’d rather just sort people into nice little easy bins, wouldn’t you?

no, i think most rational people understand that in a scenario like this all people have, on average, the same basic cognitive faculties and potential, and would then proceed to advocate for improving the educational conditions for groups that are falling behind not due to their own nature, but due to the system they are in.

but idk, i’m not a bigot so maybe my brain just implicitly rejects the idea “X people are worse/less intelligent/etc than Y people”

fucking think about what you’re saying. there is no “right people” to hate other than the rich and powerful. it isn’t a subversion of the feminist message to admit this. in fact, it makes you a better feminist. real feminist aren’t sexist.

can you imagine if you said this in a racial context and then you made an edit like “edit: can see i offended a lot of darkies with this :)”… are you dense? can you not see how you are engaging in the same kind of thought that oppressed you and likely spurred you towards feminism in the first place? except you don’t understand that what you do is patently unfeminist and makes the world a worse place. i can honestly say i fucking despise bigots, including people just like you.