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Yeah, with sufficient unthoughtfulness, refusing to do research, and with poor enough planning, you can fuck up literally anything? I’m not sure what your point is. I didn’t say it was suitable for everybody, or that it magically cannot fail, or that it will always be worth it in all circumstances (if your soil’s contaminated, yes, you will want to be careful about how you garden and your costs will likely be higher), or that gardening, unlike anything else, is a good fit for everybody’s brain and that every single person can do it effectively.

I just think it’s kinda dumb to go after home gardening as somehow not useful or valuable just because it’s not a complete, viable replacement for industrial agriculture. It’s a completely stupid false dichotomy.

Basically you need to think about how to do it cost-effectively and sanely. Just like anything else you do (you do think about that, right?)

Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.

And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.

Just let people participate in feeding themselves and be happy, fuck.

EDIT – to make a pedant happy

Considering how expensive fresh produce is getting, it doesn’t have to change the direction of inflation to be worth it.

I usually do, when the other person in the conversation doesn’t seem like an insincere ass and I’m not looking up an open and shut factual question I already know the answer to, like “is the majority of AWS’s business from cops and the NSA?”

And I was off by like half a percent because I skimmed, and that half a percent doesn’t actually make your point for you. We’re not arguing because you have no arguments

Yeah, you were trying to argue AWS is basically for the NSA and cops. That hilariously false claim is what I’ve been consistently rebutting this entire time. You’re moving the goalposts and continuously have this entire conversation, which is why this is a dull and bad conversation. You didn’t start out arguing that 1% is “substantial.” You made a rather different argument. I never disputed that a contract amounting to 1% of a company’s annual revenues is significant, I disputed that that 1% means AWS is just a cop shop. Because that’s not how anything works.

You were wrong, and you were making shit up, and you’re moving the goalposts to avoid having to admit being wrong.

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Look up what people used to say about digital art and tell me if history repeats itself or not

If you do the numbers out on that, the volume doubles to 1% of gross revenues over that time period. Not really bolstering the point you were trying to make here, but you did catch me merely skimming the article because of how dull and bad this conversation is. This conversation is pointless because at the end of the day, AI is literally just a potentially very useful tool, which is why everybody’s freaking out about it. Being against AI as such just because bad people are also using it is kind of pointless.

And I don’t know that by comparing it to ENIAC I intended to suggest the exponential gains would be identical, but we are currently in a period of exponential gains in AI and it’s not exactly slowing down. It just seems unthoughtful and not very critical to measure the overall efficiency of a technology by its very earliest iterations, when the field it’s based on is moving as fast as AI is.

I don’t like defending Amazon, but your arguments are shockingly ignorant. Stop making things up on the spot and do a shred of research. The cost of the Wild and Stormy contract is ~half a billion, while AWS’s annual revenues are projected to top $100 billion this year.

So, less than half a percent of AWS’s annual revenues. Stop just making shit up off the cuff.

I don’t like these companies for their cooperation/friendly attitude towards nation-states either, but your comments are insipid. AWS has like 2 million businesses as customers. They have 30% marketshare in the cloud space, of course they provide cloud services to cops and militaries. They’re cheap, and one of the biggest providers, period. I can’t find any numbers showing their state contracts outweigh their business contracts.

And, sure, plenty of those business contracts are for businesses that don’t do anything useful, but what you don’t seem to understand is that telecoms is vital to industry and literally always has been. It’s not like there’s a bunch of virtuous factories over here producing tons of steel and airplanes, and a bunch of computers stealing money over there. Those factories and airlines you laud are owned by businesses, who use computers and services like AWS to organize and streamline their operations. Computers are a key part of why any industry is as productive as it is today.

AI, and I don’t so much mean LLM’s and stable diffusion here, even if they are fun and eye-catching algorithms, will also contribute to streamlining operations of those virtuous steel foundries and airlines you approve so heartily of. They’re not counterposed to each other. Researchers are already making use of ML in the sciences to speed up research. That research will be applied in real-world industry. It’s all connected.

Its not for you to worry about. The decision to rapidly consume cheap energy and potable water is entirely beyond your control. Might as well find a silver lining in the next hurricane.

By the same token, you shouldn’t worry about it either? So insipid.

There’s an entire resurgence of research into alternative computing architectures right now, being led by some of the biggest names in computing, because of the limits we’ve hit with the von Neumann architecture as regards ML. I don’t see any reason to assume all of that research is guaranteed to fail.

Yeah, uh huh, efficiency isn’t really a measure of absolute power use, it’s a measure of how much you get done with the power. Nobody calls you efficient if you do nothing and use no power to do that nothing. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all together could not get anything done as companies if they all had to split an ENIAC (vastly less powerful than an older model iPhone) between them. This is a completely meaningless comparison.

Absolute power consumption does matter, but global power consumption is approximately 160,000 TWh, so the doubling means all the largest cloud providers all together are now using less than 0.05% of all the energy used across the world. And a chunk of that extra 36 TWh is going to their daily operations, not just their AI stuff.

The more context I add in to the picture, the less I’m worried about AI in particular. The overall growth model of our society is the problem, which is going to need to have political/economic solutions. Fixating on a new technology as the culprit is literally just Luddism all over again, and will have exactly as much impact in the long run.

The ENIAC drew 174 kilowatts and weighed 30 tons. ENIAC drew this 174 kilowatts to achieve a few hundred-few thousand operations per second, while an iPhone 4 can handle 2 billion operations a second and draws maybe 1.5w under heavy load.

Like, yeah, obviously, the tech is inefficient right now, it’s just getting off the ground.

15% commenter here. My number came from the source I used, I’m not enough of a Greek history fan to know one way or the other, thanks for clarifying

Sorta. The stade was based on the pous which varied. But not that much, and in ways that are often consistently documented. Around the time Eratosthenes was alive, give or take a couple hundred years, it was documented that 1 Roman mile = 8 stades, which gives us something to go of off. While there are other possible definitions, we do have one that we know is probably closest to whatever Eratosthenes used.

EDIT - the numbers regarding the error range in this source is likely inaccurate, but goes into the units issue

https://maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/eratosthenes-and-the-mystery-of-the-stades-how-long-is-a-stade

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Yeah, it’s not that I like this state of affairs, but right now the vendor lock-in is so one-sided that it’s hard to say there’s a viable alternative to CUDA. I hope that changes one day.

The completely different software stack is a killer. It’s not that you can’t find versions of a model to run, but almost everything that hits the GPU for compute is going to be targeting CUDA, not RocM. From a compatibility standpoint alone this killed AMD for me. I just do not want to spend my time fighting the stack to get these models running.