> Making sure your electricity comes from wind, solar or nuclear power is a logical first step. Google itself, for example, says it has been running entirely on green electricity since 2015.
Story misses a crucial point:
👉 The goal isn't just to add green power. The goal is to emit less CO2!
New green capacity needs to replace old dirty stuff. Not be gobbled up by new data centers for AI.
Also, when Google says it's been running "entirely on green power", do they actually mean that all the power they are using has been physically generated from renewables?
Or did they just buy some carbon offsets and called it a day? 👀
Again, what matters is how much CO2 gets actually pumped into the air.
Not what a shady startup somewhere pinky-promised that maybe one day they could remove, or their forest – currently in the form of seedlings – will sequester: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/50689/
@rysiek When I worked at Google in 2018 this question was explicitly asked and answered (at least they had the decency to answer back then) at a meeting I attended: The answer is offset, not literally powered by carbon neutral energy.
Whenever a manager at a company (especially a large one) says:
> I'm sorry, we cannot afford a raise for you at this time
…ask yourself if what they really mean is:
> I'm sorry, we cannot afford a raise for you and a huge payout (dividends, bonuses, etc) for the management and stockholders simultaneously, and our priorities are obvious.
You'd be surprised how often that's the case.
Oh, and get into the habit of reading any available financial disclosures before having that talk! Just sayin…
This smells of the naïve "we can all become billionaires and exploit everyone else" mindset that is holding back any serious labor-supporting regulations.
@rysiek Search engines: While everyone is singing the praises of Kagi, I've found that for the sorts of things I'm interested in, marginalia.nu is often very useful. And it's run by one guy in Sweden.
AI hype: I think the cycle's length and intensity is directly proportional to how much these people want to believe.
@vt52 I would disagree on the transparency there. One of the points of the ethical assessment is:
> Is the training data available and free to use?
Consider how StackOverflow is basically arguing that the stuff people wrote on the site is "free to use" (as it is on a CC By-SA license), but the community outcry seems to suggest that they are not exactly on board with that interpretation.
LocalAI gets a Green rating, for example. But I cannot find info on the training data… 👀
Okay, so, podcasts are great but sometimes I prefer to read instead of listen. 🤔
So what if – hear me out – there was a thing like podcasts, but for text! 🤯
It would still be distributed via RSS, you could still follow them and automagically pull them to your device. But instead of audio, there would be text. ✏️
👉 We could call them: textcasts!
And get this: I already have one! It was super easy to set up, actually. You can find it here: https://rys.io/en/feed.rss
@rysiek what speech-to-text tool do you use for textcasting your podcast?
And now I need to buy a new device that supports audiocasting your textcasts...
@rysiek@baldur The concepts go way back to at least 1776 in The Wealth of Nations:
> A key requirement for effective labour arbitrage is that the employees can be treated as interchangeable, well, components. Jobs that require expertise lend themselves less to arbitrage than jobs that don’t.
"Secondly, the wages of labour vary with the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense, of learning the business.
[...]
When any expensive machine is erected, the extraordinary work to be performed by it before it is worn out, it must be expected, will replace the capital laid out upon it, with at least the ordinary profits. A man educated at the expense of much labour and time to any of those employments which require extraordinary dexterity and skill, may be compared to one of those expensive machines. The work which he learns to perform, it must be expected, over and above the usual wages of common labour, will replace to him the whole expense of his education, with at least the ordinary profits of an equally valuable capital. It must do this too in a reasonable time, regard being had to the very uncertain duration of human life, in the same manner as to the more certain duration of the machine.
The difference between the wages of skilled labour and those of common labour, is founded upon this principle." (Book I, Chapter X)
Labour arbitrage: "What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour. [...] There are certain circumstances, however, which sometimes give the labourers an advantage, and enable them to raise their wages considerably above this rate, evidently the lowest which is consistent with common humanity.
When in any country the demand for those who live by wages, labourers, journeymen, servants of every kind, is continually increasing; when every year furnishes employment for a greater number than had been employed the year before, the workmen have no occasion to combine in order to raise their wages. The scarcity of hands occasions a competition among masters, who bid against one another in order to get workmen, and thus voluntarily break through the natural combination of masters not to raise wages."
@rysiek this is one that terrifies me for almost a decade now. So far haven't seen it, but this is why we are moving to compiled node apps in containers with SBOMs and absolutely no external CDNs
@tanepiper honestly I am surprised that I was so far not able to find a specific example of this happening.
I do vaguely remember some cryptocurrency websites being targeted that way, but I think the vector was not CDNs but malicious npm dependencies on build time. 🤔
Torment Nexus is inevitable; if we didn't make it, someone else would.
It's good it was us, because we can deploy it least unethically.
It is of course unfortunate that it kills a person a day, but we estimate that within a million years it will have caused slight enjoyment for over9000³²² people.
The amount of pleasure is, clearly, incomparably higher in the long run than the amount of current suffering caused by it.
So we had a moral duty to create and profit from this here Torment Nexus!