skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
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Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities
skybrian Link ParentMaybe it would happen because it's learning from people or animals somehow? LLM's learn a lot of different ways of writing from what people have written.Maybe it would happen because it's learning from people or animals somehow? LLM's learn a lot of different ways of writing from what people have written.
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Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
skybrian Link ParentYes, houses are for living in, and renting housing to people is providing people with a place to live. They're not sitting vacant, and that's important. And then you spin it as "harvesting money...Yes, houses are for living in, and renting housing to people is providing people with a place to live. They're not sitting vacant, and that's important.
And then you spin it as "harvesting money from the poor." You oughta be ashamed to repeat such nonsense.
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Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
skybrian Link ParentThough it's a bit fragmented, SF has quite a bit of public transit, and I think there's still room for more density along major transit lines? For example, along Geary.Though it's a bit fragmented, SF has quite a bit of public transit, and I think there's still room for more density along major transit lines? For example, along Geary.
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Comment on How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use? in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
We can look at this question on two levels. The first is the total amount of electricity AI uses. The second is about individual impact, or how much electricity each query consumes.
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Non-AI data centers consumed two-thirds of the total, and AI-focused ones, the remaining third. Based on this data from the International Energy Agency, I estimate that AI consumed around 0.5% of the world’s electricity in 2025.4
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Given how quickly demand for AI has been increasing, it might be surprising that AI-focused data centers consume less, on aggregate, than non-AI ones. Projections expect this gap to close quickly. In the chart, I’ve also included the IEA’s base-case projection of data center demand in 2030.
These projections are highly uncertain, and some have argued that the IEA is among the most conservative in its assessment of AI demand growth. Even so, most of the growth in data center demand will come from AI-focused facilities. In this scenario, data centers grow to 3% of global electricity in 2030, and AI centers then use about the same amount as non-AI ones.
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1.5% of the world’s electricity might not seem like much. But in some places, that share is far higher. This is really the key challenge with growing data center demand: it’s geographically concentrated, meaning the world’s demand is served by a small number of electricity grids.
In the chart, you can see the share of electricity used for data centers in different regions. 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.
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But in fact, this demand is even more locally concentrated. Beneath Europe’s 1.6% figure, we have Ireland, where data centers account for more than 20% of electricity consumption. Beneath the 5% US figure, there are states where data centers make up more than 10% of demand.6 In states such as Virginia, it’s more than one-quarter.
This, combined with the rapid pace of AI growth, could put pressure on local grids, even if total electricity demand is not overwhelming for the world as a whole.
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For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query.
There are fewer estimates for other types of requests. In its 2026 report, the IEA provides estimates of GPU electricity consumption for agentic tasks with reasoning.7 A standard request to an AI agent — such as Claude — is estimated to consume around 1.1 Wh. An agentic request with reasoning, around 50 Wh. This is similar to the estimates for maximum-length text queries.
However, all of these are still relatively small compared to the average person’s daily electricity consumption, especially in high-income countries.
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While we don’t know how much AI energy demand will grow in the future, the key points we learn from the data today are likely to hold true. For an individual worried about their own use of AI, the energy use of individual chatbot queries is small. For the world as a whole, data centers make up a relatively small share of total electricity consumption, and that won’t change in the coming years. The issue is that supply is so geographically concentrated: whether grids can meet this surge in demand while keeping emissions and local prices under control is the real test.
A final point that’s worth keeping in mind is that the figures we’ve looked at measure electricity consumption, not carbon emissions. For those worried about the climate impacts of data centers and AI, how that electricity is generated arguably matters more than how much it uses. A query served by a data center on a coal-dominated grid will have a much larger impact than one running on a renewables- or nuclear-heavy one. How the growth of AI affects emissions depends not just on its energy efficiency and demand, but also on how clean the grids are that supply it.
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How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?
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Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
skybrian Link ParentThe results would likely vary based on the competence of particular local governments. What if local governments gave it a go and then we’ll see if they can do better?The results would likely vary based on the competence of particular local governments. What if local governments gave it a go and then we’ll see if they can do better?
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Comment on Brazilian cities are building vast surveillance networks in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/TlwQz From the article: [...]From the article:
São Paulo is one of many Brazilian cities spending big on crime-fighting technology. As in other countries, police are investing in body-worn cameras and networks of microphones that detect the sound of gunshots. What sets Brazil apart from many democracies is its enthusiasm for face-spotting tech. Researchers for O Panóptico, a watchdog, count 560 active facial-recognition projects in more than 20 Brazilian states. These include police-run initiatives but also experiments in schools, for example, where cameras are increasingly being used to take attendance. They gaze upon some 99m people, more than 47% of Brazil’s population.
The main impetus for the likes of Smart Sampa is Brazilians’ persistent fear of crime. Policing is largely the responsibility of states and municipalities. Their governors and mayors are embracing high-tech kit as a way of showing they are cracking down on insecurity. The spread accelerated during the pandemic, when cities bought cameras to enforce lockdowns and track public-health measures. Many were later repurposed for public security.
It helps that high-resolution, internet-connected cameras are becoming cheaper—and that software capable of wringing insight from their footage is growing more effective. As well as governments, companies and individuals now deploy smart surveillance systems, says Erick Coser of Gabriel, a security-technology firm. Smart Sampa relies heavily on cameras put up by landlords, such as the firms that operate in São Paulo’s shopping centres or manage apartment and office buildings, who link their sensors into the system. Ricardo Nunes, the city’s mayor, says that already more than half the cameras in the network are privately owned.
The authorities paint these developments as a success. São Paulo’s government says more than 3,000 fugitives have been arrested after being spotted by its system, and that the cameras have let them catch nearly 6,000 people in the act of committing crimes. The use of facial recognition has won broad support across Brazil’s political spectrum, says Rafael Ch of Signum Global Advisors, a consultancy.
Yet privacy advocates and some security experts are alarmed. They question the effectiveness of the surveillance systems, and their fairness. São Paulo has been hauling people in on warrants later found to have expired or been withdrawn. A persistent worry is that face-spotting systems are not uniformly accurate when identifying people of different ethnicities. According to Agência Brasil, a state news agency, roughly 80% of wrongful arrests linked to facial-recognition systems in Rio de Janeiro involve black Brazilians. Though the country’s privacy and data-protection laws are some of the strongest in Latin America, public security gets big carve-outs. In other places that have invested heavily in surveillance technology, such as Britain, there are stricter legal safeguards.
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Official claims about effectiveness also tend to ignore the fact that Brazil’s streets were growing safer before new crime-fighting technologies became widespread. Murders, robberies and thefts have fallen markedly since 2018. In São Paulo, robberies reached a 25-year low in 2025; its murder rate is now among the lowest of any large city in Latin America. One reason is that crime is changing: large organised crime groups are becoming less like street gangs and more like lawless conglomerates. They infiltrate legal markets, seize control of their supply chains and launder money through legitimate businesses. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, a think-tank, gangs generated 147bn reais ($29bn) from fuel, gold, cigarettes and drinks in 2022, compared with only 15bn reais from trafficking cocaine. None of this is easy to capture with cameras, no matter how smart they may be.
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Brazilian cities are building vast surveillance networks
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Comment on Big Tech is now targeting Native American land for data centers in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
The issues have cropped up on Indian lands nationwide. In the Pacific Northwest, the Yakama Nation went to federal court in May to block a clean energy project on a sacred site that would power a data center campus. Honor the Earth, a national Indigenous group, has kicked off a Stop Data Colonialism campaign featuring an interactive map tracking proposed data centers.
But Oklahoma, which has 38 federally recognized tribes, “is really ground zero,” Ms. Morris said.
Among the reasons tech companies find tribal lands so appealing is speed, according to the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. While energy projects on nontribal lands can face permitting delays of three to 10 years, projects on tribal land often proceed more quickly because tribes wield sovereign authority to handle their own regulations and permitting.
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Now all eyes are on the influential Cherokees, the country’s most populous tribe, with 480,000 enrolled members, whose 7,000-square-mile reservation is almost the size of New Jersey.
Two prominent Cherokees — Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, both Republicans — are vocal data center proponents. Mr. Mullin, when he was still Oklahoma’s junior senator, called data centers a “game changer,” highlighting a Google hub in Pryor, Okla., that generates millions in tax revenue.
So far, Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, has been cautious, establishing a task force to study the environmental and economic impacts.
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The Colusa Indian Community of Northern California, which has operated its own power plant and electricity grid for two decades, hopes to bridge the gap between skeptical Native Americans and outside tech giants.
“There’s a mistrust of corporate America in general, and we share that mistrust,” said Ken Ahmann, chief operating officer of Colusa Indian Energy, which just opened a Tulsa-area office. “Our charter in this space is to help act as a firewall and a negotiating partner on behalf of the tribes.”
The Colusa are now in talks with the Caddo, among other tribes, to build a power plant for a data center in Oklahoma by the end of the year.
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Big Tech is now targeting Native American land for data centers
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Comment on America’s enterprising spirit is booming after decades-long slump in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Jump-started by the pandemic, when a confluence of factors including mass layoffs and remote work led to a flood of business creation, and supercharged by the rise of artificial intelligence, start-up activity is booming after a decades-long slump.
Americans filed 5.7 million applications last year to start new businesses, according to the Census Bureau, the most in the two decades the government has kept track. New business applications through the first half of this year continued to climb.
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The strong run of business creation is one of the most surprising and welcome economic developments of the post-pandemic era. New businesses help drive innovation and productivity growth. Although many fail or remain small, some could develop into giants that spur job growth for years to come.
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Data on the number of business formed each year lags, so it will take time to determine whether the increase in new business applications translates to a rise in real-world businesses and hiring. In 2023, the most recent year for which the data is available, half a million businesses formed, according to the Census Bureau. That was down slightly from the previous year but broadly consistent with an upward trend.
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More recently, there are signals that A.I. is adding fuel.
A recent paper from economists at the University of British Columbia and the Stockholm School of Economics found that generative A.I. was “spurring entrepreneurial activity” in the United States, both by giving rise to new ventures built around the technology and by making it cheaper to start enterprises.
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According to a recent report from Gusto, a small-business payroll and benefits service, nearly 60 percent of founders on its platform who started businesses last year said they used A.I., and half said the technology made it cheaper and faster.
The technology appears to be greasing the path for entrepreneurs, removing some barriers and allowing them to get their enterprises off the ground more quickly. Chatbots are effectively serving as virtual collaborators that can answer questions, carry out tasks and write code.
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Census data shows that the rise in business applications has been driven by start-ups that are not likely to hire workers rather than by those that are. That, some economists believe, is more evidence that A.I. is eviscerating obstacles to entrepreneurship.
Ernie Tedeschi, the chief economist at Stripe, a financial tech firm, said the government’s data, as well as an analysis of Stripe users, indicated a jump in solo entrepreneurs who might be using A.I. for tasks that once required human employees.
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Other factors could be stoking the rise in start-up activity.
The low-hire, low-fire labor market that has persisted for much of the past two years could be causing some unemployed workers to turn to other sources of income. The high-flying stock market and lofty home prices could be encouraging business investments. E-commerce platforms such as TikTok Shop could be producing a new category of third-party sellers. Swelling business creation could be a reflection of optimism in the country’s trajectory. It is also possible that A.I. is making it easier to fill out applications.
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America’s enterprising spirit is booming after decades-long slump
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Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
skybrian Link ParentI think we can assume that older, less desirable apartments will rent for cheaper and some people will choose to live there to save on rent. It's no different than the logic for who is likely to...I think we can assume that older, less desirable apartments will rent for cheaper and some people will choose to live there to save on rent. It's no different than the logic for who is likely to own an old car.
In locations with high demand, landlords will have incentives to fix up places like that until they don't exist anymore. But I don't see why we should encourage that, and I can see the logic for requiring some low-cost units in new, larger developments.
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Comment on European Parliament approves new rules for gene-edited plants in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
The rules governing new gene editing techniques for plants – called "new genomic techniques" (NGTs) – are being changed at EU level. Gene-edited plants will be divided into two categories, depending on the type and number of edits involved. Those with few genetic changes that could have occurred through conventional breeding techniques will be considered conventional plants, while the rest will have to follow the same strict rules as GMOs.
The new law was adopted by the European Parliament on 17 June 2026 and will apply from mid-2028.
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New developments in biotechnology have led to a variety of new gene editing techniques, encompassed in the term "new genomic techniques" (NGTs).
The big difference between GMOs and NGTs is that GMOs are mostly made by inserting a gene from a different species into a plant, while NGTs allow targeted changes to a plant’s own DNA.
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The new EU rules mark a shift towards regulating based on what the final plant looks like genetically, not how it was made.
NGT-altered plants are split between two categories, with different legal obligations attached.
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NGT-1 — This category is for plants with edits that could have occurred through conventional breeding. These will be treated like conventional plants, exhibiting a limited number and type of changes. Plants engineered for herbicide-tolerance or to produce insecticidal substances cannot be treated as NGT-1 plants.
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NGT-2 — This category is for plants that have undergone more extensive or complex genetic modifications. These are covered by the existing strict GMO rules and will be subject to risk assessment, authorisation, labelling, traceability, and member-state opt-outs for cultivation.
Neither NGT-1 nor NGT-2 plants will be allowed in organic production.
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European Parliament approves new rules for gene-edited plants
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Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities
skybrian LinkFrom the book manuscript: ...From the book manuscript:
Moreover and more importantly, we won’t know before we’ve already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI systems. Engineering sprints ahead while consciousness science lags. Consciousness scientists – and philosophers, and policy-makers, and the public – are watching AI development disappear over the hill. Soon we will hear a voice shout back to us, “Now I am just as conscious, just as full of experience and feeling, as any human”, and we won’t know whether to believe it. We will need to decide, as individuals and as a society, whether to treat AI systems as conscious, nonconscious, semi-conscious, or incomprehensibly alien, before we have adequate grounds to justify that decision.
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In this book, I aim to convince you that the experts do not know, and you do not know,
and society collectively does not and will not know, and all is fog. -
A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness
7 votes -
Comment on Why socialists should embrace luxury apartments in ~society
skybrian Link ParentIn NYC, it seems like there's room for growth in outer boroughs like Queens? In San Francisco, there's aren't a lot of tall buildings in some parts of the city and perhaps the Marina Safeway...In NYC, it seems like there's room for growth in outer boroughs like Queens?
In San Francisco, there's aren't a lot of tall buildings in some parts of the city and perhaps the Marina Safeway project will start a trend?
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Comment on Laser-boosted microscopes could reveal new drug targets, sharpen views inside cells in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley report developing a contrast-boosting cryo-EM system that incorporates powerful beams of laser light to make tiny proteins stand out from the surrounding haze. “At the moment, we can see just a snifter of what we’re interested in,” says Michael Grange, a structural biologist at the Rosalind Franklin Institute who was not involved in the study, published online today in Science. With the laser, he says, “we can see more clearly.”
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Despite a decade of spectacular advances in detectors, software and microscope design, cryo-EM still struggles with one fundamental problem: Below a certain size, proteins become nearly invisible to the microscope. Rather than strongly scattering electrons, creating dark and light patterns that directly reveal the proteins’ structures, they mostly shift the timing—or phase—of passing electron waves, encoding information that detectors struggle to capture.
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In the new study, the UC Berkeley team used the laser-enhanced system to sharpen reconstructions of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in blood. Hemoglobin sits near the lower size limit of what conventional cryo-EM can reliably resolve, making it a useful benchmark. Comparing experiments performed with and without the laser, they showed the added contrast transformed a blurry 4.46-angstrom hemoglobin structure into a crisp 3.09-angstrom reconstruction, with sharper detail and spatial resolution throughout.
Not content to stop there, Carragher and her Biohub colleagues, with guidance from Müller, built a more powerful variant, adding a second, orthogonal laser to create a dual, criss-crossing phase plate. Described this week in a companion preprint posted to bioRxiv, the design spreads the lasers’ load more evenly, reducing aberrations and minimizing heating that could destabilize the mirrors.
Last month, Carragher says her team combined images from dozens of exposures at different angles to create as-yet-unpublished 3D images of the mélange of structures within frozen yeast cells. “We know so little really about the molecular structure inside of cells,” says preprint co-author David Agard, a structural biologist at Biohub and UC San Francisco. “The phase plate, we’re really hoping, gets us over the hump.”
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The challenge is that laser phase plates are not yet commercially available. Thermo Fisher Scientific, which holds the license for the technology, has not yet said when it will sell phase plates or how much they will cost.
After spending 15 years working on the engineering and optics of laser phase plates, Müller hopes the company will hurry. “There would be nothing better,” he says, “than if one day somebody discovers a cure for something, and the laser phase plate has helped with that.”
It's taking something ordinary and spinning it as inherently sinister. We all do things for money and I wouldn't expect anyone to work unpaid. Whether it's good deal or a bad one depends on circumstances.