In Venezuela the opposition surreptitiously got hold of all the tally sheets direct from polling places and uploaded them to a secure central store, so when the administration claimed victory they could produce the evidence of that claim’s falsehood. Perhaps this is a mechanism that we should consider this November?
https://eraldkolasi.substack.com/p/the-global-energy-and-emissions-footprint
Trying to find realistic estimation of energy and water usage for AI. I’ve read water estimates from “less than most agriculture” to “more than a city”, and similarly wide estimates of electricity consumption and waste heat/emissions. This paper is one data point that purports to be more accurate, although as with most others the text is cloaked in hyperbole.
Not sure what’s real here, but want to set a marker on the more extreme position.
Note that some analysts also posit that, since the chips involved have a useful life of months before being hopelessly obsolete and requiring replacement, it’s categorically impossible for the industry to make money on scaling up (https://share.google/TCs1bLRPT2T6G6rPw)
https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperature-zero-for-culture-why
Why everything is becoming bland. I get this when playing music on Tidal; each new selection it makes eventually ends up in Pachelbels Canon or some other old chestnut, regardless of where I start: Brahms string quartets, 20th century experimental vocal music, …. She looks at three different systems: shopping streets in London, lyrics in music, movies people watch, and draws the threads together as a failure of exploration of a space vs exploitation of the space, resulting in convergence of local minima rather than an explosion of personalization options. The solution, she posits, is finding a threshold of variance that allows such systems to climb away from local minima, a value she finds is around 5%. As she says, this won’t work in a market, because it effectively requires a business to propose one twentieth of its offerings not knowing whether or not they’ll be leaving money on the table, a hard sell for a successful business. So she returns to regulatory intervention in the markets.
When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.
This guy sprays out memorable text like a garden hose.
Doctorow has a spiel (https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/23/drop-a-dime/) in the middle of a discussion where he talks about carbon credits, and points to a website that compares them to theoretical murder credits:
The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff
The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.
Except, for many, crime and punishment == appropriate pricing of actions. So unless the cost is high enough, the action is do-able (gangland murders, for example, or corporate pollution). “Crime” => morally sanctioned by the society you’re in, and unless the ethical and moral aspect is part of the analysis crime devolves into market incentives, no?
I remembered what vibe coding reminds me of: Excel macros. Back in the day, there was this whole class of non-programmers who were suddenly empowered to build tools unique to them or their organizations, by leveraging macros in Excel and (to a lesser extent) other Office products. There was, for example, a little old accountant at the Henry Luce Foundation who had built himself a whole stack based on Excel that nobody else would ever use but which was of immense benefit to his work.
Microsoft in turn leveraged this emerging user base with Visual Basic for Applications, upon which towering edifices of enterprise code were constructed, most of which tottered and fell after a few years when they became unmanageable. But that was because they had left behind the thing that made them great, the non-programmer who suddenly found himself empowered to build his own tools.
Talking with Phil:
– three musical time primitives: before, during, after. These might collapse into after and during. These are “interpreted” into linear time. Maybe there are other relationship primitives? (Faster, slower? Brighter, dimmer?)
– there’s a mode of interaction that’s something between out of time composition and linear in time performance, sort of a back and forth dialog with a piece in real time. What’s that called?