I don’t love an abstract legal identity. I’m capable of being happy with institutions, the culture composed if the people living there, and adoring the natural splendor.
Right now I’m actively angry at the institutions, a huge number of people have taken a sharp turn towards fascism, and I’ve got no problems with the forest still.
Me and the forest are cool, and that’s part of why I’m mad at the institutions.

I have no desire to live in the forest because, if nothing else, that’s not good for the forest. Then the people who opted to live there became insane, and decided to largely gut all of the institutions, and make it easier to destroy the forest.

“I live in a state of natural splendor, and I’m willing to fight to let you cut it down, splash me with mercury , and blot out the sun with smoke because I don’t have healthcare and fuck you for asking. It’s the refugees who are the problem”.

Oh my God, no. “Great place to live if you want you all your neighbors to be frighteningly conservative, the closest store to be a 30 minute drive, and the nearest hospital to be an hour away and shutting down because their public funding got cut”.

And you didn’t even read past the first sentence I see.

Saying they’re the same because they both use a neural network is roughly equivalent to saying things are they same because they’re both manipulating kinetic energy.

… How if flying a spaceship different from driving a car? They’re both controlled applications of kinetic energy to move people or objects.

At the end of the day, it’s all a pile of transistors and the only thing that is of import is the intent behind usage.

In one case it’s saying you can use a neural net to take something rendered at resolution A/4 and make it visually indistinguishable from the same render at resolution A.
The other is rendering something and radically changing the artistic or visual style.

Upsampling can be replicated within some margin by lowering framerate and letting the GPU work longer on each frame. It strives to restore detail left out from working quicker by guessing.
You cannot turn this feature off and get similar results by lowering the frame rate. It aims to add detail that was never present by guessing.

Upsampling methods have been produced that don’t use neural networks. The differences in behavior are in the realm of efficiency, and in many cases you would be hard pressed to tell which is which. The neural network is an implementation detail.
In the other case, the changes are more broad than can be captured by non AI techniques easily. The generative capabilities are central to the feature.

Process matters, but zooming out too far makes everything identical, and the intent matters too. “I want to see your art better” as opposed to “I want to make your art better”.

There’s hardware required to shunt the display out the USB port and since it’s not a super in demand feature they usually don’t implement it. As such the software for looking nice while doing it isn’t as developed.

But yes, it’s been in developer settings for years, and was usable if your hardware supported it.

Yes. And now it’s native in all android! Samsung helped make it!

It’s good when things get better.

Yeah, the conventional ones still draw a good chunk of power, and they’re not clean but they’re not dirty. Same as how a grocery store isn’t good for the environment but you’re not looking at them first for places to clean.

They tend to be boring, and are usually not a public thing but just something owned by a company to house their computers. The only reason I know about the ones near me is I used to work at one and people would move jobs to or from other ones. (As an aside, a datacenter is a great place to nap if you like white noise).

For a sense of scale:

This is the site of an open AI data center. The yellow square is about 1 square mile and mostly encompasses the area they plan to/have filled.

That angle shows more build out.

This photo has two normal data centers in it. The yellow square is also about 1 square mile. I’ve highlighted the data centers in red. One is to the left of the square near the middle, and the other is down from the right side near the big piles of what looks like rocks. (Spoilers: it’s rocks. They make asphalt). The sprawling complex in the upper right is a refrigerated grocery store distribution complex. The middle on the other side of the block from the asphalt is a coal power plant.

Of the things in this picture, I’m most upset about the giant freeway interchange. Coal is shit, but it’s a modern plant so it’s not belching soot, just co2, and the utility is phasing it out anyway. The grocery traffic is mostly dead except between the hours of midnight and 7am when they do restocks.
I can hear the freeway if I go outside.

I think the part you’re missing is that 1) it’s my community too 2) they’re not talking about AI data centers, or new data centers or anything like that, they’re petitioning to ban all data centers, and 3) we have multiple data centers in the city already that no one complained about until AI data centers became a thing people felt concerned about.

There’s a major difference between the 2 square mile hyper scale AI data center that requires a nuclear reactor and a full water treatment plant to cool and the 2 acre data center that’s air cooled and has no more ground pollution than any other parking lot and essentially a warehouse.
The state government has two in the city, at least, for processing electronic tax records, applications and hosting service sites. We have a few national insurance companies that need to process all the things they process. A research university, and a web hosting company round out the list of ones I know about.

This is my entire point about why sometimes it’s really necessary to point out that what someone is referring to is only a small part of what the words they’re using describe. The language being imprecise doesn’t matter until someone proposes a law outlawing chemicals, shuttering all data centers, or banning AI.

LLMs are problematic. My fancy rice maker isn’t.

I take your point. :)

It’s worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say “we should ban chemicals” it’d be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.

I don’t actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it’s just that it’s an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that’s explicable.

I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there’s people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it’s not what they’re trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it’s another issue.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/

The root of the current discussion.

A conservative guess would be around 60 people.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi

You can click around and see the bug reports they’re working on. There are a few, to say the least.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/releases/

This is a way to see what’s in each release. The ones on the left are major releases and tend to have bigger features, and the others tend to be bug fixes.

Web browsers start with core functionality that’s very complex. Then you tack on that they’re being used for things like banking, and managing the critical details of people’s lives. That means security galore, which is hard and constant. Then you have ad people, who are also something that’s hard to defend against.
Then there’s the constant flood of new features you have to implement to keep up with Google.

Chrome has 1,000 to 4,000 people working on it. Mozzila employs about 700 to work on firefox, with maybe 1,000 additional open source developers.

My initial guess was very wrong.

It’s less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn’t call “chemistry” vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.

Yeah, ocr is a type of AI. The big advantage of modern techniques is that it can factor in context a bit better. It’s the same principle but a different mechanism for how you know a red hexagon with S__P on it says stop, even if the sign is dented, a letter fully fell off, it’s raining and dark.

It also means it’s sometimes wildly inaccurate, like in cases where it’s just so much more likely that it said something else. Like how on a bright sunny day, with perfect clarity, and a crisp new sign with extra good visuals, you’ll hit the breaks for a sign that’s a red hexagon that says §¥¢¶. It’s just very unlikely that that would coincidentally be on a red hexagon near the road, so it’s more likely you saw wrong and it was actually the normal thing.

A big part of that is that other countries view to medical staff as a fixed cost. They’re not reflected in the “bill”, much like how you don’t get billed by the fire department. They’re simply paid to be there, and costs for treatment are more reflective of the cost of the treatment.

It’s complicated, because it’s American healthcare.

The hospital charges $200k. The insurance agrees to pay a negotiated discounted rate of $100k. $75k goes to the various insurance plans of the doctors and hospital. $15k goes to the people providing care and materials costs (everything is itemized, so then $50 aspirin you see is because it includes the time of the pharmacy tech who got the order, entered it into the system and checked for interactions, the tech who filled the order, the pharmacist who had to sign off on it, and the nurse who carried it to the patient.). $10k goes to the hospital as profit.
The insurance then makes the patient pay their $5000 deductible, which is what you pay before the insurance you pay for pays for anything, then the patient pays their $2500 coinsurance, which is what you pay after the insurance you pay for starts to pay for things but they only pay for half. After that the insurance covers it. The “perk” is that having met your deductible and coinsurance costs you likely have to pay little or nothing for care for the rest of the calendar year, making January to most financially responsible time to have a medical emergency.

In terms of actual “cost”, I think the biggest difference is the itemization of everything. Universal healthcare is intrinsically more cost efficient, but it still has to pay doctors and nurses. When that cost is viewed as part of the cost of running a hospital as opposed to part of the service “charged” to the patient it can bring the “list price” down a lot. You end up with the price of a broken arm being the cost to treat a broken arm, not then cost to treat a broken arm and have everyone involved show up and your share of building the hospital room, and the cost of the janitor cleaning the room.

It’s time entirely likely they never actually paid anything out of their own pocket. Situations like this are awfully common, so hospitals pretty easily mark a bill as in legal dispute and move on while it gets sorted.

Part of the horrible cycle is that bills are high to cover costs while bills are disputed, which makes them more likely to be disputed.

It’s less to avoid situations like this and more to avoid the stresses of travel and having something come up in a situation where medical care might not be available, or leaving you far away from your usual care team, or in a situation where you have a very fresh baby and you live 5000 miles away, which can make for a very rough trip home or a difficult recovery in a faraway place.

It’s actually the same in the US. Misery increases the birthrate.

Our birthrate is higher because we traditionally have had a higher immigration rate from countries with higher birthrates.

You’re taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.

Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you’ll be living in. Technology is part of that.

Yeah, but why bother? They can just turn off the body camera and shoot them in self defense. Same outcome and way less work.