myrmidon (u/myrmidon)

myrmidon commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber

esseph · 3 days ago

What if those political parties don't exist...

myrmidon · 3 days ago

If there are no parties mainly concerned with climate sustainability, then that is very likely because voters are not sufficiently interested in such platforms, and are more receptive to messages like "will fight immigrants", "will fight use of incorrect pronouns" or "will prevent trans-women from fighting in womens MMA".

Speaking for the US: climate sustainability (as main focus) was up for election 25 years ago, and about half the nation did not even bother voting, so it seems unsurprising to me that focus has shifted away from this issue (and fair to blame voters for that).

myrmidon commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber

esseph · 3 days ago

The amount of CO2 emissions a human makes or even an average family makes pales in comparison to the emissions companies create. It was all advertising propaganda to reduce corporate accountability.

myrmidon · 3 days ago

This is simply incorrect. CO2 emissions from a single passenger vehicle alone are ~5 tons/year (this is tailpipe missions only), while per capita emissions for EU/US citizens are between 5 and 15 tons/year.

So invididual transport alone (not even counting indirect emissions from vehicle construction, road infrastructure etc.) is already significant.

What fraction of emissions would you blame on corporations alone (which corporations)?

myrmidon commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber

benterix · 4 days ago

> you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability

Since you are talking about culpability specifically, what exactly can they do about it? Or, more to the point, what have they done so that it it is their fault?

myrmidon · 4 days ago

Vote political parties into power that put a price on emissions and honestly work on reducing it.

The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive.

The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.

myrmidon commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber

myrmidon · 4 days ago

I think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception.

People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.

I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.

myrmidon commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

sceptic123 · 6 days ago

> A system that costs less, per word thought or written, than it'd cost to hire the cheapest human labor on the face of the planet.

Is it really possible to make this claim given the vast sums of money that have gone in to AI/LLM training?

myrmidon · 5 days ago

I'd say yes, because AI training is mostly fixed-cost and not that expensive when you compare it to raising/educating human labor.

Early factories were expensive, too (compared to the price of a horse), but that was never a show-stopper.

myrmidon commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

d4rkn0d3z · 6 days ago

It might be better to think about what a horse is to a human, mostly a horse is an energy slave. The history of humanity is a story about how many energy slaves are available to the average human.

In times past, the only people on earth who had their standard of living raised to a level that allowed them to cast there gaze upon the stars were the Kings and there courts, vassals, and noblemen. As time passed we have learned to make technologies that provide enough energy slaves to the common man that everyone lives a life that a king would have envied in times past.

So the question arises as to whether AI or the pursuit of AGI provides more or less energy slaves to the common man?

myrmidon · 6 days ago

The big problem I see with AI is that it undermines redistribution mechanisms in a novel and dangerous way; despite industrialization, human labor was always needed to actually do anything with capital, and even people born in poverty could do work to get their share of the growing economical pie.

AI kinda breaks this; there is a real risk that human labor is going to become almost worthless this century, and this might mean that the common man ends up worse off despite nominal economic growth.

myrmidon commented on Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication lemonde.fr/en/environment... · Posted by u/isolli

myrmidon · 9 days ago

This kind of shit happened before, is happening right now and is going to happen again. Something needs to be done.

IMO the best way to stop companies from messing with science and law is to hold them accountable for the actual damage, ideally both company leadership (CEO goes to prison) and shareholders (potentially lose everything) when it comes to light that companies prevented regulation or research into negative externalities that they caused.

We had the exact situation with leaded gas (paid shills, lawfare and discrediting campaigns against critical scientists), the exact same thing is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry and if we don't change anything it is invariably gonna happen again.

myrmidon commented on The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law somo.nl/the-secretive-cab... · Posted by u/saubeidl

philipallstar · 9 days ago

I'm not saying they're being straightforward. I'm saying that the regulator needs to be expert enough to not screw this up even if someone does that.

myrmidon · 9 days ago

In this case the biggest failure was that ExxonMobil et al were capable of subverting EU lawmaking via external pressure (via US diplomatic channels/trade negotiation) and indirect influence by targetting individual countries.

This seems difficult to systematically prevent to me, and the fact that they went for an approach like that is IMO actually a good sign that its not trivial and cost effective to direct such efforts at EU regulators themselves.

What we actually need to prevent cases like this in my opinion is to hold companies accountable for damages when they sabotage legislation or research in that sector.

A really good historical example is leaded gas: Industry knowingly hobbled research (discredited researchers, paid shills, etc.) and legislation for decades, but there were zero consequences after everything came to light. If there was a credible threat of company leadership going straight to prison and shareholders losing everything in extreme cases like that, companies would be MUCH more circumspect when messing with law/science.

myrmidon commented on The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law somo.nl/the-secretive-cab... · Posted by u/saubeidl

philipallstar · 10 days ago

This article is written as though lobbying is some sort of unstoppable force.

EU regulators are paid out of EU taxpayers' money, taken by an actual unstoppable force, on the sole promise that they will do a good job of writing some words down on paper.

If they can't even do that then you need to blame them. Not people who talk to them.

myrmidon · 9 days ago

I don't agree with this. I think the article does a good job at pointing out the problematic aspects of this particular lobbying campaign, and even how/why to stop it.

A lot of people view lobbyism as basically exchangeable with nepotism and bribery (strictly negative), but this is not the case.

The "happy path" with lobbyism is that local industry gives input on new laws/regulation to prevent unintended negative side-effects. Politicians have typically a much more cursory understanding of how a new law is going to affect any particular industry than people in that industry (obviously).

If you lock down any mechanism like this, you are invariably going to end up with numerous laws that are highly detrimental to local industry in a way that achieves very little (compared to laws designed with input from lobbies).

The article points out exactly how this fossil lobbying case deviated from this ideal (foreign influence instead of domestic, obfuscation and lack of transparency on originators/funding, use of methods to directly affect/manipulate the outputs of lawmaking instead of providing inputs).

myrmidon commented on Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/davedx

kragen · 11 days ago

This seems to be either LLM AI slop or a person working very hard to imitate LLM writing style:

The key dynamic: X were Y while A was merely B. While C needed to be built, there was enormous overbuilding that D ...

Why Forecasting Is Nearly Impossible

Here's where I think the comparison to telecoms becomes both interesting and concerning.

[lists exactly three difficulties with forecasting, the first two of which consist of exactly three bullet points]

...

What About a Short-Term Correction?

Could there still be a short-term crash? Absolutely.

Scenarios that could trigger a correction:

1. Agent adoption hits a wall ...

[continues to list exactly three "scenarios"]

The Key Difference From S:

Even if there's a correction, the underlying dynamics are different. E did F, then watched G. The result: H.

If we do I and only get J, that's not K - that's just L.

A correction might mean M, N, and O as P. But that's fundamentally different from Q while R. ...

The key insight people miss ...

If it's not AI slop, it's a human who doesn't know what they're talking about: "enormous strides were made on the optical transceivers, allowing the same fibre to carry 100,000x more traffic over the following decade. Just one example is WDM multiplexing..." when in fact wavelength division multiplexing multiplexing is the entirety of those enormous strides.

Although it constantly uses the "rule of three" and the "negative parallelisms" I've quoted above, it completely avoids most of the overused AI words (other than "key", which occurs six times in only 2257 words, all six times as adjectival puffery), and it substitutes single hyphens for em dashes even when em dashes were obviously meant (in 20 separate places—more often than even I use em dashes), so I think it's been run through a simple filter to conceal its origin.

myrmidon · 11 days ago

I agree, and it feels like an allergy by now to that style specifically. This is doubly annoying because it ruins the reading experience and just makes me question myself constantly because you often can't be quite certain especially for shorter posts/comments.

On topic: It is always quite easy to be the cynical skeptic, but a better question in my view: Is the current AI boom closer to telecoms in 2000 or to video hosting in 2005? Because parallels are strong to both, and the outcomes vastly different (Cisco barely recovered by now compared to 1999 while youtube is printing money).