PartiallyApplied

Yes.

Like trains and bike lanes, people only love the environment enough to oppose investment in those specific things, their own environmental impacts from voting for roads to nowhere are irrelevant to them.

Therefore it’s only logical that people hate data centers and AI because they primarily concentrate wealth at the top. The valuations around AI are justified by the devaluation of college. To preface, I understand that wages and valuations are different metrics, but those with wealth have their net worth increase by 12%-ish per year. Maybe more, maybe less, but that’s about the edge of the pareto frontier that the market demands as a return. Lately it’s been way higher.

So we see frankly easy paths to a better living than 99% of the planet via careers CS, and very livable careers like environmental sciences becoming devalued. The goal of the AI companies is not to obsolete software engineers, it’s to satiate the demand for them and augment the leftovers with enough instant-knowledge and quasi-reasoning that they can replace 95% of other white-collar careers. Now the AI companies have a business market corner, to participate in the economy at all, you must first be trained through AI.

This hard pivot and devaluing of both the compensation and enjoyment of work has led people to oppose the build out of AI.

I’m generally a big optimist economically. I think simultaneously the environmental effects are overblown and not as wasteful as other water usage. Lawns and golf courses, for instance are wastes and paper mills are far more polluting for their economic output. But yeah, I’m kind of “with” the faux-environmentalists on stopping the build out.

The environmentalists have unfortunately been very unsuccessful historically, but the data center bans are here and growing without opposition. This is clearly about more than environmentalism.

If we’re truly approaching a post scarcity world, let’s see it! Throw the average person a bone! Let’s see a dignified life be made MORE achievable. Let’s see it! I dare them. They won’t though. So let the bans from the people roll in, and when the country falls behind on the AI race, investors will cry for deregulation, but everyone will know this was their fault all along.

As a statistician who has implemented models nowhere near the scale, and as someone who has experience in distributed computing, a lot of the actual work comes from global optimization, which means that all the state has to be communicated somehow. Now this state can be distributed, but it needs to exist, so now you need to have the same resources required to train the model, plus the resources required to shuttle the state around in a distributed manner. It’s cheaper and faster and more ecologically friendly to build better hardware.

Please.

The person in the photo is weak not because he cries on TV, but because he entirely argues in bad faith, has little idea what he actually believes, and is fully engaged in a culture war, with little focus except fearmongering and resisting anything that might make the world somewhat lively in a crazed aspiration to “rebuild” western civilization.

This meme is sexist itself; I don’t care that the person in the photo is a hypocrite. It is petty to the point it essentially platforms the person depicted.

Please be part of a cultural movement. The news used to bring on people from outrageous movements to mock them and instead it simply promoted those groups to a wider audience. The news has somewhat learned and you can see how delicately the NYT tries to dismantle Yarvinism.

Please please don’t platform hateful people. I’m here to escape them.

They both are beautiful and impressive artworks.

Personally, your latest render evokes a sense of warm cleanness. I take it as a sort of illumination of a dark but hopeful place.

Your earlier render feels more outdoorsy (but not necessarily more organic, if that makes any sense). It conveys to me more a spirit of perseverance in contrast to the first one.

That is to say, while everyone may have their own opinions, both pieces of art to me, are incredibly complex works, and you’re clearly insanely talented, so you make it hard to have a preference!

Your latest work does seem to have an incredible amount of meticulous work and effort put into the lighting, and this one seems to focus more on the background, but either way, they are stunning!!

This github page isn’t visible on my mobile device because the ads block the view.

The concept sounds truly interesting but distribution is everything. The AdSense you have is probably not very profitable and is actively hurting your recognition. As politely but bluntly as possible: If you want appreciation and adoption, remove the advertisements. You’re selling us on your idea, not whatever bottom barrel consumerism Google wants me to buy

Behold: PRQL. I only know it exists not if the errors are good, my SQL needs are simple, but perhaps for some complex data wrangling it could be nicer idk

Perhaps the textbook example is the Simpson’s Paradox.

This article goes through a couple cases where naively and statically conclusions are supported, but when you correctly separate the data, those conclusions reverse themselves.

Another relevant issue is Aggregation Bias. This article has an example where conclusions about a population hold inversely with individuals of that population.

And the last one I can think of is MAUP, which deals with the fact that statistics are very sensitive in whatever process is used to divvy up a space. This is commonly referenced in spatial statistics but has more broad implications I believe.

This is not to say that you can never generalize, and indeed, often a big goal of statistics is to answer questions about populations using only information from a subset of individuals in that population.

All Models Are Wrong, Some are Useful

• George Box

The argument I was making is that the NYT will authoritatively make conclusions without taking into account the individual, looking only at the population level, and not only is that oftentimes dubious, sometimes it’s actively detrimental. They don’t seem to me to prove their due diligence in mitigating the risk that comes with such dubious assumptions, hence the cynic in me left that Hozier quote.

“Wet sidewalks cause rain”

Pretty much. I never really thought about the causal link being entirely reversed, moreso that the chain of reasoning being broken or mediated by some factor they missed, which yes definitely happens, but now I can definitely think of instances where it’s totally flipped.

Very interesting read, thanks for sharing!

I feel this hard with the New York Times.

99% of the time, I feel like it covers subjects adequately. It might be a bit further right than me, but for a general US source, I feel it’s rather representative.

Then they write a story about something happening to low income US people, and it’s just social and logical salad. They report, it appears as though they analytically look at data, instead of talking to people. Statisticians will tell you, and this is subtle: conclusions made at one level of detail cannot be generalized to another level of detail. Looking at data without talking with people is fallacious for social issues. The NYT needs to understand this, but meanwhile they are horrifically insensitive bordering on destructive at times.

“The jackboot only jumps down on people standing up”

• Hozier, “Jackboot Jump”

Then I read the next story and I take it as credible without much critical thought or evidence. Bias is strange.

I think many people don’t like it conceptually because the advertising for Brave is:

Built in Privacy + Crypto + Ad Blocking

Firefox + uBlock Origin suffices well enough for most people. It’s stable, suits the purpose, and separates them from a company entangled with crypto.

Everyone is just trying to do their best to balance convenience with the social impacts of their actions. People make change because they care, either altruistically or personally, but it always comes with some sort of personal cost. Putting your neck out there and trying to make a change is more important than any specific browser choice