We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

lol

What? Taiwan doesn’t want to give up its only strategic advantage? I’m shocked.

/uj

I’m curious how long it would take to build the supply chains and fabs to make the 50% things a reality.

Denmark is densely populated. Most rounds fired at a drone won’t hit, and will come down somewhere. Rounds designed to explode in the air occasionally don’t.

The plant will generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year—enough to help run a nearby desalination facility and supply around 220 homes. That equals the output of two soccer fields of solar panels, but osmotic power keeps running day and night, in any weather.

In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.

It would be fantastic if our other GHG-producing activities were held to the same level of criticism as AI.

You’re gonna get downvotes defending AI on Lemmy - our Overton window is ^*tiny*.

A ChatGPT prompt uses 3 Wh. This is enough energy to:

Leave a single incandescent light bulb on for 3 minutes.

Leave a wireless router on for 30 minutes.

Play a gaming console for 1 minute.

Run a vacuum cleaner for 10 seconds.

Run a microwave for 10 seconds

Run a toaster for 8 seconds

Brew coffee for 10 seconds

Use a laptop for 3 minutes. ChatGPT could write this post using less energy than your laptop uses over the time you read it.

Nice!

I enjoyed reading your blog. It’s been a while since I looked at an honest to goodness enthusiast blog. Thanks for writing it!

Pretty wild that the author didn’t set up app notifications. Getting specific notifications from specific people on my wrist is a big part of the reason I use a smartwatch. But to each their own.

It’d be pretty cool to get a significant use case of my pricey pricey Garmin for ~CAD$40.

Recognizing from history the possibilities of where this all might lead, the prospect of any serious economic downturn being met with a widespread push of mass automation—paired with a regime overwhelmingly friendly to the tech and business class, and executing a campaign of oppression and prosecution of precarious manual and skilled laborers—well, it should make us all sit up and pay attention.

We don’t notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I’ve never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.

AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren’t technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.

In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.

Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).

There’s probably a lesson there.

It just seems like dude is suffering from Not invented here and wants to reinvent the wheel. The only reason anyone noticed is because a tech b-lister is involved.

Let’s fucking go

The Facebook Files made – and provided evidence for – multiple allegations, including that Facebook was well aware of how toxic Instagram was for many teen girls; that Facebook has a “secret elite” list of people for whom Facebook’s rules don’t apply; that Facebook knew its revised algorithm was fueling rage; and that Facebook didn’t do enough to stop anti-vax propaganda during Covid-19. Most damningly of all, The Facebook Files reported that all of these things were well known to senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s clear which side Sorkin is taking. “I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said last year. “Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement … There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”

Corps are gonna corp.

That’s a really weird way of looking at it.

That’s how I roll.

Without the database, there’s no central ledger to consult as to whether or not you’re legally a person.

We’re already seeing them do that without a database. 🤷‍♂️

Other countries are able to maintain internal databases without using them to screw over their own citizens (except when they do). The problem isn’t the database.

See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide.

The database is the least important part of the system: the organizational structure, rules, and procedures are way more important, because they actively help or harm people.

no no, it’s an input to a Palantir database

While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.

reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere

Agreed - I like the look of these things in an abstract sense, but it makes the text really hard to read. I assume hope there’s a way to disable it in accessibility settings.

A sixth man, Maltese businessman Yorgen Fenech — who was among those with close ties to the Muscat government — currently awaits trial on charges that he masterminded the Caruana Galizia hit.

Getting closer…