CHICAGO—In what is being called the first conceptual terrorist attack on American soil, the landmark Sears Tower was encased in 18 million tons of strawberry gelatin early Monday morning, leaving thousands shocked, angry, and seriously confused.
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Varieties of Abundance
This piece makes an interesting argument that Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance only describes ‘a very particular place on the Abundance spectrum’. It provides a taxonomy of semi-existing viewpoints along that spectrum (from ‘Red Plenty’ to ‘Dark Abundance’), with plenty of links to more information about each.
Cluster Moon
The Narrowing Circle · Gwern.net
The “expanding circle” historical thesis ignores all instances in which modern ethics narrowed the set of beings to be morally regarded, often backing its exclusion by asserting their non-existence, and thus assumes its conclusion: where the circle is expanded, it’s highlighted as moral ‘progress’, and where it is narrowed, what is outside is simply defined away. When one compares modern with ancient society, the religious differences are striking: almost every single supernatural entity (place, personage, or force) has been excluded from the circle of moral concern, where they used to be huge parts of the circle and one could almost say the entire circle. Further examples include estates, houses, fetuses, prisoners, and graves.
In Defense of the Ad Economy
I want to say this is stupid and wrong, but unfortunately I’m not sure it is. And in fairness it works out great for me; since I routinely use adblockers I’m being subsidized by the people who do look at ads.
Ads are annoying, except as compared to the alternative. And this is true at many levels. Not only do ads elegantly solve some pricing problems, they actually create a continuous economic incentive to hunt down spammers and even to care about the quality rather than quantity of time spent.
Becoming a goat to avoid existential dread
A gentler Sapir-Whorf
Although the languages with top scores for “snow” are all spoken in snowy regions, the top-ranked languages for “rain” were not always from the rainiest parts of the world.
For instance, South Africa has a medium level of rainfall, but languages from this region, such as Nyanja, East Taa and Shona, have many rain-related words. This is probably because, unlike snow, rain is important for human survival – which means people still talk about it in its absence.
For speakers of East Taa, rain is both relatively rare and desirable. This is reflected in terms such as lábe ||núu-bâ, an “honorific form of address to thunder to bring rain” and |qába, which refers to the “ritual sprinkling of water or urine to bring rain”.
Our tool can also be used to explore various concepts related to perception (“smell”), emotion (“love”) and cultural beliefs (“ghost”).
The top-scoring languages for “smell” include a cluster of Oceanic languages such as Marshallese, which has terms such as jatbo meaning “smell of damp clothing”, meļļā meaning “smell of blood”, and aelel meaning “smell of fish, lingering on hands, body, or utensils”.
On the Environmental Costs of Using ChatGPT
This seems to me like a very solid analysis of this issue. I might quibble with a minor point or two, but nothing that at all invalidates his argument. It’s nice to hear it coming from someone who obviously cares very much about the environment. For me it’s good to hear it coming from someone involved with effective altruism, because whatever your feelings about EA, they tend to be pretty careful about their data and their calculations.
Tl;dr: see the two graphs I included.
This post is about why it’s not bad for the environment if you or any number of people use ChatGPT, Claude, or other large language models (LLMs). You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.
This post is not about the broader climate impacts of AI beyond chatbots, or about whether LLMs are unethical for other reasons (copyright, hallucinations, risks from advanced AI, etc.). AI image generators use about the same energy as AI chatbots, so everything I say here about ChatGPT also applies to AI images.
My goal is to fairly and charitably address each common environmental criticism of ChatGPT that’s normally brought up. If you think I’m getting anything wrong I’d really appreciate you saying so, either in the comments or somewhere else I can read it!
Steps forward in understanding and speaking Dolphin
Screenshot
Today, on National Dolphin Day, Google, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), is announcing progress on DolphinGemma: a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences. This approach in the quest for interspecies communication pushes the boundaries of AI and our potential connection with the marine world.
DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
Hyperhyperhyperparasitoids
The longest chain of parasitism that I’ve been able to find:
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/28549
Interestingly, in order to support many levels of parasitoids, each level has to be extremely efficient, managing to use nearly all of the body mass of its one host.