Okay wow. I needed this comment. Thanks.

I think you'd be dismayed at how easy it is to enforce these things when you have OpenAI money.

Growing up I also felt that the most awful bullies were the smart ones. The one who understood exactly what they were doing. The dumb ones who just wanted to tear things down or lash out were way less effective at causing real pain and emotional damage.

I think that patents over IP relating to software or math (and several other fields) are evil, evil, evil. If we're using them to do anything we're doing things wrong.

LLM's and just AI-systems in general have been used by intelligence agencies well before ChatGPT came along. At scale, and in coordinated, find-grained, and concerted fashion across society in ways that would shock almost anyone. Should we be concerned? I mean, relative to all the other shit going on in our lives? I guess?? It's the sort of stuff that makes us ineffectual at putting up a coordinated defense against fucked up government policies, so sure, but OTOH there's just so much shit going on right now that in the same breath, well, meh.

How fucking propaganda batman. If you're clueless enough to equate the outsourcing of making physical money with the onerous, deleterious and all-around-fucked-up impact that not being able to set your own country's economic policies on the fundamental level that being on the CFA is then you're absolutely not one who should be uttering a word here.

For those who don't know: being able to set strength or weakness of your own currency is incredibly important in being able to make your own goods cheaper for overseas markets, making them more attractive to buy, stimulating your own economy. This comes with trade-offs, but the need for poorer nations to do this is very, very real. By being stuck using the CFA as their currencies, dooms these smaller, fledgling economies to never be able to compete on the world stage. Hundreds of years from now, unless they change this, they'll still be backwater nations.

And has absolutely nothing to do with how your physical money gets created. Lots of even first world nations outsource their physical coin stamping and money printing to other countries, it's completely out of scope of monetary policy.

France has every incentive to keep them weak and dependent on France. France uses all its available power to keep its neocolonialism going, and it's been stupendously successful. Propaganda works though, just watch the comment I'm replying to to see it in action.

If you want to get a better understanding of just how massively and systematically evil France is when it comes to neocolonialism and their exploitation of their ex colonies, this video - France secretly owns 14 countries - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg

To the coward who posted a bullshit link that supposedly refutes what I said but then blocked me so I couldn't respond, you're so transparent it's utterly ridiculous. Oh, and I posted a response to their rubbish "takedown" (that is just long and wrong) of the video . The underlying thesis of the video is absolutely accurate: neocolonialism is 100% a thing and completely invisible to 99% of everyone in first world nations. Doesn't mean it's not a bone in the throat of every third world nation, and utterly indefensible.

>Plastics are irreplaceable in plumbing, medicine, weather proofing in construction, many durable consumer goods, automobile crumple zones, storage for dangerous industrial chemicals, and on and on. We need to dispose of plastics better, not try to blanket ban them.

Just because we don't have a valid replacement for plastic in these use-uses doesn't mean that one doesn't exist: we should be striving and looking for them. And if we need to adjust our behaviors as part of that process, so be it. But in general, we don't even try; Big Oil relies on our addiction to plastic in a big way, and we should absolutely keep getting rid of it in our gunsights.

There are plenty of other countries in similar situations, most of them continue to languish as third world hellscapes indefinitely. Neo-colonialism is a sophisticated game, it doesn't always require visible military intervention, rather far more carefully nurtured and calibrated corruption and puppeteering (although the odd assassination obviously has its place in their playbook). I would assume that the Feedom you're referring to is either going well and good within Morocco right now, or the seeds for it have been planted. People lose sight of just how sophisticated a game first world nations run.

Additionally, we can take steps to find places to put the turbines that minimize the impact on the local fauna, and in some instances, on a case by case basis, establish new habitats for them.

Does the government in China typically have a stronger ability to step in/exert pressure on/make demands on private enterprises within that country than their Western counterparts? Sure. But, private still means private there - they have been experimenting with letting companies be private in a wide variety of very important areas as they've found that it can lead to superior results. Make of that what you will, but China is often remarkably results driven.

Yeah Amazon's ML offerings performed very poorly the last time I tried them out. Kendra returned miserable results, and AWS Comprehend had a crappy (very limited) API, multiple serious bugs (like whole-sale truncating input text segments in the response, not handling quotes consistently, etc.) that they took months to fix when we reported them, and never inspired huge amounts of confidence.

In all honesty, I'm not too surprised; my understanding is that AWS has a habit of grabbing open-source projects that kinda/sorta do what they need and build off of that internally, so you're not typically going to be exposed to unparalleled brilliance with their offerings. Mostly it will "kind of" work. But not much more than that.

(I wouldn't say I hate AWS because they do a reasonable job on several points, but they're no silver bullet across the board.)

Do you have a link available? Also, how far out qualifies as "blue ocean"? It would almost certainly be contingent upon currents too, as otherwise it would build up? I would also be curious as to how rigorous the science is, as opposed to "we pushed it out of sight and we're bad enough at detecting life there that no one is able to call us out at this stage for killing things there".

Which isn't to say that I'm not encouraged to hear that - and maybe there's an argument to be made that life close to shore is more important than life further out?? - but it needs to be sustainable.

I'm all for other solutions. But AFAICS no one doing desalination is getting down to pure salt as it's not cost effective. Rather they stop at "toxic brine". Otherwise I don't see why they couldn't just create and pack all the bricks of salt in a storage setup and work from there.

Yeah, we know that's the cheapest option and so that's why everyone does that rn.... Except it kills marine life and creates dead zones where that's done because it's too salty for anything alive.

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/coal/the-facts-about-air-quality-and-coal-fired-power-plants/ says:

"One factor in improving air quality has been the pollution-control technologies used by coal-fired power plants. Today’s coal-fired electricity generating plants produce more power, with less emission of criteria pollutants, than ever before. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), a new pulverized coal plant (operating at lower, “subcritical” temperatures and pressures) reduces the emission of NOx by 86 percent, SO2 by 98 percent, and particulate matter (PM) by 99.8 percent, as compared with a similar plant having no pollution controls [xv]."

So... we're still getting 14% of the NOx, 2% of the SO2, and 0.2 percent of the particulates. Those are obviously much better, but not zero, especially when one considers just the volumes involved: even a small percentage of a huge amount can still end up a very bad quantity.