skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on US data center land use issues are fake in ~enviro
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Comment on US data center land use issues are fake in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
Like biographies use their subject as a prism for the world around them, I use data centers as a prism for much larger but invisible environmental problems, hidden by our tendencies toward populism and localism that data centers offend. This post focuses on the ridiculous ways we use land in America, which (like most of our water issues) is downstream of farmers being shielded from popular criticism by political alliances and folk intuitions about the honest toil of growing food. By the end, I hope you’ll be much more skeptical of headlines like this:
and of the idea that data centers purchasing farmland is a unique evil.
I’m not claiming data centers should be built anywhere and everywhere. There are lots of places where they’ve been built too close to people’s homes. This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).
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US data center land use issues are fake
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYeah, this is bad because it's bloat and perhaps a security issue if the JavaScript code that calls the new API is written badly. But you could do the same thing by calling an LLM remotely....Yeah, this is bad because it's bloat and perhaps a security issue if the JavaScript code that calls the new API is written badly. But you could do the same thing by calling an LLM remotely. Calling it malware is a distraction.
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Comment on Google DeepMind workers in UK vote to unionize in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
In a letter slated to go to management on Tuesday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, workers at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research laboratory, requested recognition of the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives of the lab’s UK-based staff.
DeepMind’s UK workers voted to unionize in April. One of the workers said they were particularly driven by reports that Google was close to reaching a deal with the defense department and pointed to the US’s “capricious Iran war” and the Trump administration’s feud with Anthropic as indications that the department is “not a responsible partner”. The deal was ultimately announced on Friday.
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Another worker, who also requested anonymity, said that many at the company had struggled with what they had come to view as their complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza. The company provided the Israeli military with increased access to its AI tools from the early days of the war in Gaza, the Washington Post reported last year, and in 2021, it signed, along with Amazon, a $1.2bn cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government.
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Google DeepMind workers in UK vote to unionize
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Comment on The VCs of BC (2015) in ~humanities.history
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
One morning, just before dawn, an old man named Assur-idi loaded up two black donkeys. Their burden was 147 pounds of tin, along with 30 textiles, known as kutanum, that were of such rare value that a single garment cost as much as a slave. Assur-idi had spent his life’s savings on the items, because he knew that if he could convey them over the Taurus Mountains to Kanesh, 600 miles away, he could sell them for twice what he paid.
At the city gate, Assur-idi ran into a younger acquaintance, Sharrum-Adad, who said he was heading on the same journey. He offered to take the older man’s donkeys with him and ship the profits back. The two struck a hurried agreement and wrote it up, though they forgot to record some details. Later, Sharrum-Adad claimed he never knew how many textiles he had been given. Assur-idi spent the subsequent weeks sending increasingly panicked letters to his sons in Kanesh, demanding they track down Sharrum-Adad and claim his profits.
These letters survive as part of a stunning, nearly miraculous window into ancient economics. In general, we know few details about economic life before roughly 1000 A.D. But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 B.C. — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. Tens of thousands of these records remain. One economist recently told me that he would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4,000-year-old community.
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In a beautifully detailed new book — ‘‘Ancient Kanesh,’’ written by a scholar of the archive, Mogens Trolle Larsen, to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year — we meet dozens of the traders of Kanesh and their relatives back home in Assur. Larsen has been able to construct family trees, detailing how siblings and cousins, parents and spouses, traded with one another and often worked against one another. We meet struggling businessmen, like Assur-idi, and brilliant entrepreneurs, like Shalim-Assur, who built a wealthy dynasty that lasted generations. In 2003, while covering the war in Iraq, I traveled to many ancient archaeological sites; the huge burial mounds, the carvings celebrating kings as relatives to the gods, all gave the impression of a despotic land in which a tiny handful of aristocrats and priests enjoyed dictatorial control. But the Kanesh documents show that at least some citizens had enormous power over their own livelihoods, achieving wealth and power through their own entrepreneurial endeavors.
The details of daily life are amazing, but another scholar, Gojko Barjamovic, of Harvard, realized that the archive also offered insight into something potentially more compelling. Many of the texts enumerate specific business details: the price of goods purchased and sold, the interest rate on debt, the costs of transporting goods and the various taxes in the many city-states that the donkey caravans passed on the long journey from Assur to Kanesh. Like most people who have studied Kanesh, Barjamovic is an Assyriologist, an expert in ancient languages and culture. Earlier this year, he joined some economists, as well as some other Assyriologists and archaeologists, on a team that analyzed Kanesh’s financial statistics. The picture that emerged of economic life is staggeringly advanced. The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation.
It’s impossible not to see parallels with our own recent past. Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods — silver, tin, textiles — transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable (though there never seems to be agreement on who the wrongdoers are, exactly). The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than a decade. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again.
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The VCs of BC (2015)
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentPresumably the update also includes code to do inference, so you could think of the combination as comparable to shipping a general-purpose interpreter, along with the data it needs to run.Presumably the update also includes code to do inference, so you could think of the combination as comparable to shipping a general-purpose interpreter, along with the data it needs to run.
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentOnly if you call anything you don’t like “malware.”- Exemplary
Only if you call anything you don’t like “malware.”
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Comment on "The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link) in ~humanities
skybrian (edited )Link ParentIt’s true that generals who had success in the provinces often tried to become emperor, and they often succeeded. Kind of an odd dynamic. Also, many local rulers would call themselves “Roman” even...It’s true that generals who had success in the provinces often tried to become emperor, and they often succeeded. Kind of an odd dynamic.
Also, many local rulers would call themselves “Roman” even long after the western empire collapsed. It was a popular label. Maybe compare with all the countries that put “democratic” in their name nowadays?
I do see the concept of Roman citizenship as a set of legal rights that eventually were extended to all free people in the empire as pretty important in history.
But there were plenty of revolts and uprisings. I asked ChatGPT to make a list of the major ones. Looks like there were two slave uprisings in Sicily?
It seems like “large-scale” is doing a lot of work there. Revolts not becoming widespread might have more to do with a lack of cohesiveness between different peoples as well as poor communication over long distances. When the Jews revolted, why should anyone else join in?
The lack of abolition movements probably has more to do with the concept not being invented yet? After all, slavery was often the result of conquest. Slaves were an important form of loot. What good would a law after being conquered by foreigners?
All this has little to do with conditions for the average peasant.
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentWhy would it be like a backdoor? An LLM isn’t malware. My understanding is that it’s part of a proposed browser API. Maybe some don’t like the update, but the user never had any control over...Why would it be like a backdoor? An LLM isn’t malware. My understanding is that it’s part of a proposed browser API.
Maybe some don’t like the update, but the user never had any control over browser API changes.
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Comment on "The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link) in ~humanities
skybrian Link ParentThere's little in writing about how peasants lived because the people doing the writing didn't care much about them. But reasoning from what we know, it was really terrible. [...] From acoup.blog.There's little in writing about how peasants lived because the people doing the writing didn't care much about them. But reasoning from what we know, it was really terrible.
What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died.
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First a high proportion of these societies at any given time were children, even by their standards of childhood (often ending between 15 and 17, not at 18). Generally about half of the population at any given time under this mortality regime is going to be age 15 and below, whereas for a modern population close to replacement that figure is going to be 20-25%. Children were thus socially omnipresent in a way that they simply aren’t in any modern industrial society (but are in some developing countries).
Equally, for societies with very low productivity the demand to feed that population means that pre-modern cultures do not have a ‘childhood’ as we understand it, as an extended vacation from work and adult life. Children were instead working in whatever capacity they were physically able as soon as they were physically able because these societies simply lacked the resources to support half of the population on a non-working basis (which is also going to be true when it comes to labor and gender, but we’ll get to that later in the series). This, of course, was especially true for our peasants, at the bottom of the society, whose work was necessary for its basic subsistence, but one gets the sense that childhoods were short and transition into work was common even among the higher rungs of society – for instance the age for an elite boy to become a page attending a knight was seven.
From acoup.blog.
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Comment on For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work. in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don't think it's much like working in a warehouse. It might be like a support job (responding to trouble tickets) except that you never get abuse from a coding agent, you can rely on some...I don't think it's much like working in a warehouse. It might be like a support job (responding to trouble tickets) except that you never get abuse from a coding agent, you can rely on some baseline intelligence even if it does screw up sometimes, and you're the one giving orders. (Or suggestions, which is how I usually phrase it.)
The multitasking is because LLM's are often too slow to wait around for; if they were faster then there wouldn't be much point switching tasks.
Since I'm just coding for fun, I multitask with something else (like checking Tildes or doing something else entirely) rather than trying to multitask programming.
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Comment on Valencia and a Sledgehammer (MinnMax spotlight on a new game from Deconstructeam) in ~games
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Comment on "The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link) in ~humanities
skybrian Link Parent“Not particularly bad for the time period” isn’t the same as “not terrible.” It’s a very low bar. As you say, brutal, by our standards.“Not particularly bad for the time period” isn’t the same as “not terrible.” It’s a very low bar. As you say, brutal, by our standards.
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Comment on "The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link) in ~humanities
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI’ve only skimmed the article, but they don’t say “unique,” they say “new,” and it seems likely that the combination of monotheism and universalism (not based in one city or region and anyone can...I’ve only skimmed the article, but they don’t say “unique,” they say “new,” and it seems likely that the combination of monotheism and universalism (not based in one city or region and anyone can join) was understood to be pretty different to the people who lived in the Roman empire at that time.
We don’t know for sure why Christianity became so popular with the ancient Greeks and Romans, but that doesn’t mean we have to throw up our hands and say it was random. The ideological content likely played some role. This popularity can’t be explained by it becoming the state religion because it became popular first and then became the state religion a few centuries later, in 313. Constantine was going along with a trend that was well under way.
After Christianity becomes the state religion of the Roman empire, things do change quite a bit. In particular, religious disputes became much more prominent. The Christians cared what people believed, not just that they did the rituals correctly. Now they had the power and the emperor making laws about religion was considered as legitimate as other laws. Modern religious tolerance hadn’t been invented yet.
Other aspects of Christianity resulted in a state religion that was different, such raising the status of the poor and an emphasis on charity towards the poor, which resulted things like building hospitals. I don’t imagine those hospitals were any good by modern standards, but I don’t think the Romans built them before that?
I think it’s fair to say that other popular world religions and ideologies also had reasons why they became popular, but they were sometimes different reasons. Being adopted by the powerful definitely gives an ideology an edge, though.
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Comment on Everyone's got a proof when they explode in ~humanities
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
The problem with logic is that if you do it wrong even once it blows up. The principle of explosion states that, if your logical system has a single contradiction in it, you can prove anything in that system. When you have a statement P that is both true and false, combine it with whatever you want: “P OR Geodude from Pokemon is real and my best friend.” Well, P is true, so the whole statement is true, since a true statement OR anything is still true. But P is false, so the only way that whole statement is true is if Geodude from Pokemon really is real and your best friend. You use the contradiction as a sneaky little u-turn to drive wherever you want to go.
Yet despite the hair-raising risk of explosion mathematicians will still edge themselves into almost exploding, all the time, for fun. This is called a proof by contradiction. You start by making up exactly one thing and asserting it is true without evidence. Then you do math using your new toy. If you reach a contradictory conclusion — that is, if you find a single bomb, which has enough destructive power to blow up all of math — then you say “Okay this is a bomb, but math has not been exploded, which means math has zero bombs. So the thing I made up must not be true, because it led to a bomb.” And then you come away with a bit of useful knowledge: the thing you made up is not true. The benefit was in the turning away, not from blowing yourself up for no reason.
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If you are going to assume something without evidence, it is really, really important to a.) remember the thing that you assumed and b.) recognize the first contradiction you see as a signal that your assumption is wrong, not an excuse to walk up “P is true” and then walk down “P is false” and keep proving stuff. Because if you take that path just once, that’s it. Everything you find afterwards is meaningless, but will seem locally true, and the further you go the more it seems like you’re on to something because you keep proving stuff. This is the wretched loop behind most screeds about new physics, new philosophy, etc.
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The whole point of the proof by contradiction is to be hyper-vigilant for when you’ve hit the bomb so you can stop trying to prove anything and declare a victory of discretion. The whole point of a thought experiment is to try to prove things that follow from your experiment; that is, to assume you haven’t hit a bomb. And if you hit the bomb and don’t notice, you probably can come up with a great proof of the outcome you’re arguing for, because you can come up with a great proof for anything.
This is why, while I love thinking and I love experiments, I am generally not a fan of thought experiments. [...]
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Everyone's got a proof when they explode
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Comment on US landlords want to be paid for pandemic losses and hope to reach a deal with the Donald Trump administration in ~finance
skybrian Link Parent"On average" doesn't really seem relevant here? Some landlords might not have had any losses, but other landlords did. It's not like the landlords that had high rents and paying tenants would have..."On average" doesn't really seem relevant here? Some landlords might not have had any losses, but other landlords did. It's not like the landlords that had high rents and paying tenants would have helped other landlords that were losing money.
Although, it might have turned out that way for large landlords that were diversified.
If you want to read a progressive attack on most farmers (for bad politics), there is Sarah Taber's latest.