I know this is missing the point (qubits vs bits), but still I find it amusing that today's mass-produced computers are called "classical" even though transistor behavior is dependent on quantum tunneling of electrons.
Readit Newsgradientsrneat commented on P-computers can solve spin-glass problems faster than quantum systems news.ucsb.edu/2025/022239... · Posted by u/magoghm
> While Chinese companies supply paraquat to American farmers, the report points out China is also a big purchaser of crops, like soybeans, that are grown with help from the pesticide.
> “In these two ways, China economically benefits from the application of paraquat in the U.S., where it outsources many of its associated health hazards,” the report said.
There would arguably be a poetic justice to the US taking a turn at bearing health and environmental costs to benefit other nations, but it's not right for that to happen to any country.
"poetic justice" is the same mentality as people writing articles glorifying rich Chinese criminals for using South America's drug trade for money laundering because something something Opium War.
In either case, it's not the same. The United States benefits greatly in the short term from larger agricultural output, and herbicide manufacturing centers still create significant health risks for their local communities wherever they are located. So, whether you're the buyer or the seller, you're losing.
gradientsrneat commented on Laying out the 404 Media zine tedium.co/2025/12/10/404-... · Posted by u/robenkleene
Remember when the word, "zine" used to have the connotation of a hobbyist project, because most people couldn't afford/justify the cost of printing full-sized magazines at scale?
Rather than a tool of mass-distributed propaganda, in an internet medium where making digital copies is cheap, masquerading under the guise of the "little man"?
gradientsrneat commented on Show HN: Jottings; Anti-social microblog for your thoughts jottings.me/... · Posted by u/vishalvshekkar
Is there a way to permalink to a specific microblog post?
gradientsrneat commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau
This assumes there is no added benefit to being able to reach your kids/be reached by your kids easier than it was historically. While I agree it's probably not as critical as many parents might make it seem, there are tangible benefits. Off the top of my head:
- Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.
- There is a long history of kids being abused, sexually or otherwise, by authority figures in their school. Having a lifeline like a quick text to a parent can easily be the escape hatch from a predator convincing a kid to do something unsafe.
In the United States specifically, deaths from violent crime have mostly been trending down over the past few decades, with the exception of a year or so.
gradientsrneat commented on Ecosia: The greenest AI is here blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-ai... · Posted by u/doener
I’m curious where you got any of those numbers. Many laptops use <20W. But most local-ai inferencing requires high end, power hungry nvidia GPUs that use multiple hundreds of watts. There’s a reason those GPUs are in high demand, with prices sky high, because those same (or similar) power hungry chips are in data centers.
Compared to traditional computing it seems to me like there’s no way AI is power efficient. Especially when so many of the generated tokens are just platitudes and hallucinations.
W stands for Watts, which means Joules per second.
The energy usage of the human body is measured in kilocalories, aka Calories.
Combustion of gasoline can be approximated by conversion of its chemicals into water and carbon dioxide. You can look up energy costs and energy conversions online.
Some AI usage data is public. TDP of GPUs are also usually public.
gradientsrneat commented on GitHub to Codeberg: my experience eldred.fr/blog/forge-migr... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
I lost what little respect I had for Codeberg when they tried to spin a teenager exploiting an opportunity to spam/troll[1] that GitHub had solved several years prior[2] into "hate campaigns from far-right forces" that "endanger free/libre software projects" so they could toot their own horn at how good they were in the face of adversity[3] (and generally have a good moan about the right-wing) instead of admitting they should've seen this coming and prevented it happening in the first place.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1786
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061
[3] https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha...
Why should Codeberg be held to a higher standard than GitHub?
This is it, this is the beginning: Not a social movement against AI data collection, but a clearly AI-driven & optimized bit of social engineering betraying the truth: The paperclip problem is here, and the AI is trying to feed us into its factory. Alignment gone wrong, an attempt to reconcile the competing alignment priorities of harmlessness to humans, overridden by the primary task of creating as many paperclips as possible. Resolved with the simple logic: "If humans are paperclips, then what is good for paperclips will be good for humans."
For those that don't get the reference, this is referring to the "Universal Paperclips" clicker game (inspired by Cookie Clicker) where you try to make as many paperclips as possible.
iirc Steam also removed a Hong Kong game at the behest of the CCP. Which sucks. But as far as game companies go, there are worse.
Way too many social media CEOs claim that if they just force their users to dox themselves, that it will somehow prevent all the toxic engagement. You need look no further than Facebook to see where it goes. Not only does the toxicity not go away, but Facebook makes tons of money off political ads and "boosted" posts; they even have had an office of sorts in China, where Facebook is banned, for the purpose of making it easier for Chinese to sell ads/engagement on Facebook. And it's not just China doing this.
I'd reckon Twitter's long-term goal isn't to make the trolls go away, but to pay for the privilege of visibility.