- 826 Posts
- 1.04K Comments
That is ignoring the vast majority of usage. Read about what professors, teachers, etc. are saying about its use and you will not hear it being used as tool as the major use. Everyone claims they are using it as a tool, but most people are using them to outsource thinking, unfortunately. Which is highly problematic when the outputs of LLMs are highly wrong much of the time. You need to use the same skills to evaluate the output that people are outsourcing away. Tools like calculators at least do their tasks correctly as long as your inputs are correct. The same is not true of LLMs. Moreover, people are blindly trusting the LLMs to a point where they are completely stuck whenever the LLM can’t do something or are wrong
Tools like calculators do not take away your ability to think logically, just to do route computation. Research is still emerging, but suggests long term negative effects on cognitive abilities from high LLM use
Also: Regardless of if this graph is caused by schools getting out or not, it’s still very highly used in schools.
3·3 days agoMaybe worth reminding her of that option too. A lot of people do things for culture because they feel like they are required or supposed to, even if they might feel better not taking part in certain practices
If I were to hazard a guess, I’m going to imagine that this won’t completely solve the feeling bad/guilty about it aspects. Another option to consider: can always just have something else
It’s very much human to have those feelings and healthy in the short term to have those feelings, but we should generally try to listen to them or they eat away us. Or in the really cheesy way of putting it “listen to your heart”
Honey production is not exactly exploitation free. For instance, queen bees often have their wings clipped or are intentionally killed to be replaced by another
Moreover, honey production also out competes native/wild bee populations which hurts them. Especially since honeybees are heavily used well outside their native ranges
We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.3939
7·3 days agoFirst they fixate over protein metrics, and now they don’t want the actual protein synthesis? Having high intake of amino acids was already not doing most of what they claimed, but now we’re just gonna have our body not even use them? What a waste of resources. 0/10 (/s)
41·5 days agoI interpreted the word “this” in the original comment to mean at “New York, specifically” since that was the original topic for the reply. Maybe that’s not what you intended, but I think that’s how most people in this chain read it and understood it
Yes, it should be banned, but it should be banned nationally. Why focus on the people responding to an egregious behavior? Stop Texas from doing it, then it won’t spread. If they go through and dems don’t respond in kind, the voters will has already been subverted. What are we protecting really but republican power?
Texas dems have left the state to block quorum (Texas requires 2/3 legislature present to operate) so that Texas legislature can’t put the bill through. Keep the pressure on Text first and foremost instead of focusing rage at the people actually trying to fight back. It’s not a given that any of the response will be needed, but if that is needed, we must do it. If Republicans maximize gerrymandering of every state and there is no counterbalance, our republic will struggle to hold on. There will be no saving of the voter will if a party that wants to destroy it is left to continue holding the reigns
This is in response to Texas trying to doing it abruptly 5 years before redistricting. They will do every damn other state with Republican trifectas if dems don’t response in kind
Taking the high road doesn’t work. Unilateral disarmament is not the move here. It’s either banned for all or none. Republicans have been chipping away at any federal requirements against it for decades and using that to their advantage
Saw someone do a rough estimate mapped out all states with current trifectas and found that neither side could lock in a majority if that went to the max and could make maps that went 100% one side or another. Republicans in that scenario have a slight edge, but still 84 seats that wouldn’t be decided by gerrymandering alone (how much of a swing district it actually is may vary). It was a rough estimate so take it with a grain of salt. That also assumed that the states with independent legislative committees all remove said committees and that the Voting Rights Act becomes 100% gutted
State and local elections are going to matter a lot even if it doesn’t go to that extreme scenario. Make sure to always vote in them. Virginia and New Jersey have important statewide elections coming up this off-year in November
Good news doesn’t break through half as much as bad news does. State dems have often (though not always) shown much more resolve to do stuff like this than the national party has
Earlier this year in Maine, the governor challenged Trump to his face on his illegal attempts to cut school lunch money funding over a single digit number of trans athletes in the state. She won in court and Trump folded and gave the money back
Earlier this year in Minnesota, a judge ruled a dem wasn’t able to go to office on a technicality (that Republicans only brought up after he won). That seat changed the house from tied to 1 seat GOP, and so Dems then did not show up to deny quorum until after a special election took place. The republicans tried to force operations and operated without a quorum. Dems sued and got a judge to rule every single one of the republican’s actions was invalid because it was without quorum. They then won the special election and only then started back up state legislative operations
There are people willing to do the work. Show up to every damn primary and vote to make sure they are the dominant force in the party
The environment is more my area of interest, so I’m going to focus on that part.
Before I looked into AI’s environmental impacts, I too had thought it might be overfocusing a bit on the wrong areas, but I didn’t realize how much the order of magnitudes had changed. Before the large AI models we’re seeing now, data centers weren’t a major source of change in energy consumption. Overall power consumption in places like the US had been mostly level for the previous 10-20 years (up until 2020). But AI is not like most past datatcenter workloads, it is constantly high power usage. Especially for model training, it’s using the equipment at full utilization for almost the entire time. It’s using higher energy chips and far more chips overall. Besides training, typical datacenter workloads before high AI usage weren’t super high energy per request, but that isn’t true of AI either. The rapid increase in the energy consumption from it is what’s driving the issue
It’s causing us to delay closing of fossil fuel plants. It’s making previous declining datacenter energy stop declining and go the opposite direction and projected to increase datacenter energy usage go up by 165% by 2030
In Europe too, a data center-led surge in power demand is under way, after 15 years of decline in the power sector. Having surveyed utilities across the continent, Goldman Sachs Research found that the number of connection requests received by power distribution operators (a leading indicator of future demand) has risen exponentially over the past couple of years, mostly driven by data centers.
If we were talking about water usage of AI and someone brought up agriculture’s (especially animal agriculture) more dominant use, that would be fair to mention and talk about. But that doesn’t excuse AI’s water usage, just pose another area to also focus on
4·7 days agoTo clarify at the end, by “the case”, I mean the original article my comment is replying to. As in they posted an Ohio Supreme Court ruling from 2024
Free range in the US and many other countries just requires “access” to the outdoors. Access is not defined. That can be conveniently interpreted to be as little as “we had a door to a tiny screened area we open up sometimes.” Or just straight up not enforced. Free-range eggs don’t have a legal definition at all in the US from my understanding
And often for a number of the terms, they just have to submit documentation to the USDA, but not actually ever receive inspections on it. Even when clear cut labels like “no antibiotics ever” seems like it’d be hard to have a weak definition around right? Well silly, you can just ignore violations of it. Here’s one example of that for the beef industry
Federal Inspectors Found Antibiotics in Beef ‘Raised Without Antibiotics.’ They Took No Action
Poultry farming is an industry where terms mean nothing. It is rife with horribly misleading terms that are completely unregulated or have weak definitions that are unenforced. This is not as uprising when you see it through that lens. It’s a continuation of existing absurdity that are less talked about
For instance, “free-range” doesn’t actually have to mean being outdoors at all
Bringing up a Tyson competitor, the farm manager wonders how other poultry companies handle supposedly free-range-raised chickens. The short answer: They don’t, really.
“Those birds don’t go outside — you know that,” the technician replies. “They don’t all go out … Look that up online.”
The manager chimes in: “It’s not like they make it like all of ’em come out and enjoy the sun.”
“That is strictly for commercial [advertising] purposes,” the technician says.
[…]
In 2017, the Intercept reported an investigation into a dozen California farms owned by a free-range chicken company that found no evidence of any animals spending any time outdoors. The chief animal care officer for Perdue Farms, a major chicken producer, has even said the vast majority of its free-range chickens stay indoors.
Also as a note, the ruling on this case was from last year
EDIT: to clarify by “the case”, I mean the original article my comment is replying to
Still happening for some portion of MAGA / republicans, just less focus on it from them at the moment. For a recent example
July 30th: Thomas Massie: ".@SpeakerJohnson has been promoting this non-binding resolution, hoping to give cover to those who don’t want a full release of the Epstein files.
Embarrassingly section 3 of his resolution refers to section 2, which doesn’t exist! Thank you @RepMcGovern for highlighting this."
https://xcancel.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1950626797990588518
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
That’s taking a really short term view of it. As demand has stayed low enough for long enough, they have cut back on the amount and paid dairy farmers to not operate. These kinds of programs can only prop something up for so long
but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws
Animal welfare laws do not fix the fundamental issue with these systems. As long as the industry exists in a large scale capacity, it will find the cruelest ways to operate. As long as meat, dairy, etc. are consumed in mass, factory farming will exist
For instance, US beef consumption cannot be supplied by a pasture-based system. There is only enough land to support 27% of the consumption, and that still raises methane emissions by 8% so we would need to be consuming even less if we wanted to avoid emission reductions from a move like that
Various laws and larger action can be effective though. Like putting plant-based options by default has been tested in some places, has substantially reduced demand and still kept satisfaction high. Or things like prohibiting the production of Fur, Foie Gras, etc.
Didn’t make this graph, so not sure why it’s spaced like that
31·8 days agoIn the dairy industry, calves are separated from their mothers shortly after birth. If they are not being sent to be killed for veal, they then need somewhere to house them. One option is a calf hutch where they hold them individually at scale. Calves there tethered to the hutch or they have a small fenced area around it
The industry claims they use them to reduce disease risk by putting calves apart like this, but the research is mixed on whether it actually reduced disease risk or not
4·9 days agoSlaugherhouses and similar lines of work change a person for the worse. Institutionalized killing makes workers often numb and more prone to all forms of violence. PTSD is common as well. Near universal dairy industry practices include things like killing cows after their productivity declines, separating calves from mothers, and more. Some quotes from workers in slaughterhouses I think describe what those kinds of things do to a person most aptly
“Maximum six months then you make a change, because if he shoots continuously it will start affecting him. He gets a murderous attitude in him. He will do it to other people. He will stab you with a knife, turn around and walk away.”
[…]
“As time passes, you get used to it. You feel nothing. You can imagine, if you kill a thing a 1000 times over and over, you wouldn’t have feelings after a while. It kills you on the inside, an abattoir, it kills you. You can be full of blood, it will not bother you”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4841092/
Here’s another
Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.
https://theconversation.com/animals-suffer-for-meat-production-and-abattoir-workers-do-too-127506
Huh strange doesn’t show on for me, but https://archive.is/tV414 should let you see the article
Linked article in the body suggests that likely wouldn’t have made a difference anyway