ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
3hr ago
As a coastal Californian, I'm not sure this alleged snow thing exists. Blasphemy, on the other hand, is very real and even omnipresent.
ThenElection
19hr ago
Arizona
Data center usage: 2,777 acre-ft/year Source: https://www.circleofblue.org/2025/supply/data-centers-a-small-but-growing-factor-in-arizonas-water-budget/
Area under alfalfa cultivation: 280,000 acres Source: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=Arizona&year=2025
Water requirement per acre: 4.69 acre-ft/year Source: https://www.azwater.gov/sites/default/files/media/Phx5MP.pdf (Appendix 4A)
Total water usage: 1.31 million acre-ft/year (470x data centers)
Nevada
Data center usage: 2,200 acre-ft/year Source: https://www.watereducation.org/aquafornia-news/southern-nevada-data-centers-used-ton-water-2024-heres-how
Area under alfalfa cultivation: 215,000 acres Source: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverview.php?state=Nevada&year=2025
Water requirement per acre: 3.5–4.0 acre-ft/year Source: https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=2363
Total water usage: 753,000–860,000 acre-ft/year (340–390x data centers) (I originally had a lower estimate of the water requirements per acre.)
ThenElection
1d ago
Would buying cans of beans for food kitchens and jerseys for the local little leagues actually help?
My gut is mostly "I don't know." But it seems plausible enough that they should have gone for it, purely for the utilitarian reason that it gives them more ability to pursue whatever their objective utility is more effectively, at a cost that would be a rounding error in their budgets.
That is very stupid, but such is life.
ThenElection
1d ago
Nuclear power should be at 100% approval, so it's impossible that datacenters should rank higher.
ThenElection
1d ago
They are genuinely more popular now. See Cremieux's post linked above:
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2090182398247858595/photo/1
62% of people object to datacenters, 57% to nuclear power plants. And 27% of people would support a datacenter being built, while 34% would support a nuclear power plant.
ThenElection
1d ago
Lacking in a bit of imagination and a bit too #nothingeverhappens pilled, but fundamentally reasonable and relying on heuristics that have generally been useful. A year from now, I expect you'll respond to new evidence as it comes in (or enjoy some well-earned gloating time).
ThenElection
1d ago
Nuclear power plants now have a higher standing in public opinion than datacenters.
ThenElection
1d ago
It isn't nutpicking, though; it's the second greatest concern of people objecting to datacenters (see linked Cremieux post above), barely trailing power usage.
I would be extraordinarily pleased if we could start talking about concerns grounded in reality. But anyone who lists water usage as a concern is either desperately misinformed, a propagandist, or indeed low IQ.
ThenElection
1d ago
datacenter water usage is admittedly not risk-free
Even focusing on the regions with the most water stress, this gives an inaccurate impression.
Water usage in acre feet:
Arizona datacenters: 2,777
Arizona alfalfa: 1,310,000
Nevada datacenters: 2,197
Nevada alfalfa: 645,000
Its water usage is orders of magnitude smaller than a single crop. And no one is histrionic about the threat of alfalfa to kill us all by using up all our water.
ThenElection
1d ago
Other datacenter issues are more complicated, but it's worth noting that the risk of "not having potable water" is entirely imaginary, not existential.
ThenElection
1d ago
Fort Mason Park
People just call it Fort Mason. Also, San Francisco already has multiple data centers in city limits, on the east side.
ThenElection
2d ago
The lower bound of the "sociology of education" article values is not zero.
ThenElection
2d ago
The idea that most of the asylum seekers are carefully parsing the connotations of the pamphlet phrasing seems implausible. Most won't read it, and those who do will not be the ones inclined toward consent accidents anyway.
ThenElection
2d ago
The Flight 93 election thesis would support the emergencyism of the Right.
But I don't see it as the central tendency of the Trumpist blob. That's much more personalistic, and Trump himself doesn't seem to think of the political situation as an emergency. He has fits of pique and rhetorical nastiness, but to get on his good side all you need to do is be a bit friendly and he rolls over like a puppy hoping for a belly rub. That's not someone worried about the fate of the Republic. And the Right mostly follows his cues.
One thing, though: you can name emergencies identified by thinkers on both political sides, and they're all wrong. The US would muddle through those. But there is an eminent existential emergency, and neither side is seriously grappling with it: AI. Right now it's just an amorphous recognition that something big is coming, manifested by the public into complaints about data centers drinking all the world's water. But as it becomes more concrete, we are going to see a rapid shift away from our current preoccupations.
ThenElection
2d ago
Is anti-stock, pro-flow a coherent position? It seems like many countries (Singapore, UAE) manage a stable equilibrium with something that could maybe be described as that. The anti-stock makes the pro-flow more manageable.
ThenElection
3d ago
Funny aside: Murati is talented, but she went from product at Leap Motion to VP at OpenAI. That's a pretty big jump, even in 2018.
How? Well, she had a coworker at Leap, the head of revenue, who had substantial connections to OpenAI and who introduced her to Brockman. One thing led to another, and Murati was hired as VP.
That coworker? Cami Clark.
ThenElection
4d ago
RankBrain (2015) was pre-Transformer and was used in production search. Basically a learned embedding model for semantic relevancy.
AlexNet was the turning point, I agree.
ThenElection
4d ago
My Epstein number is 2 via multiple routes, so everyone reading this comment is a 3. The conspiracy is bigger than anyone imagined!
ThenElection
5d ago
I object to your pre-Transformer AI research description. There's a grain of truth in it, but it's better described as a kind of grad student descent than mysticism. People saw these kinds of systems could do very weird and surprisingly things; how do we put it together in a useful way? Try various permutations, loop repeatedly, get marginally better. And vision and NL both had achieved meaningful commercial success before AIAYN: there's a reason Google was already dumping billions of dollars into DL research at that point.
ThenElection
6d ago
Snopes has a FACT CHECK: FALSE!!1! page on that. Photo seems to be just of a Malia Obama's credit card, post cutting drug lines; neither Malia nor Hunter pictured. Much more likely to be coke than crack, and the provenance of the photo is unclear, or if it's even real/the same Malia Obama (Snope's argument is that it's likely a different Malia Obama).
However, we're skeptical that this card actually belongs to Barack Obama's daughter, and not another person perhaps named Malia Obama, as this picture appears to show that whoever owned the card had been a "member since 2011." First daughter Malia Obama was 13 years old in 2011. While some credit card companies allow minors to become authorized users under an adult's account, we don't know if that was the case here, and the minimum age to open a personal credit card is 18.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hunter-biden-malia-obama-cocaine/
(I'm highly skeptical of the story, but that seems almost engineered to be the most tendentious possible objection to it.)
ThenElection
8d ago
You misread me: I said that mercy killing should be illegal and prosecuted. But, if sometimes illegal things are still the moral thing, someone can choose to do the illegal thing and bear the potential consequences if they're certain it's still right. I don't think the person is expected or required to make it easy for the government to prosecute them for the crime, but the government should earnestly do so with the tools at its disposal.
ThenElection
8d ago
Thinking about that slippery slope and the hard cases that introduce it, maybe the structure we want is that mercy killing should be illegal and prosecuted by the legal system, but it always remains a possibility for individual action. Someone knows their parent is in incredible pain and wants to die: it's then their prerogative to perform the killing themselves, taking the moral weight of the act onto themselves. It's a decision that's incredibly weighty and a lot to ask of someone, but that's exactly what we want anyway instead of offloading it onto society and the bureaucratic apparatuses to make it routine. And if the killing is discovered with lots of evidence pointing to the person who did it, it's prosecutable.
It's then up to a jury to decide legal guilt, and they can judge the "cancer patient in extreme pain somehow receives an OD of a painkiller" and the "20 year old TikToker with a terminal case of POTS is killed" differently.
ThenElection
11d ago
Unfortunately, at this point it's clear that telling people bad things are going to happen will not result in those bad things not happening. Even bad things actually happening doesn't seem to do much: see e.g. the response to the HF incident, which should be a five alarm fire but has mostly just reinforced pre-existing camps. If existential risks are imminent, likely the only thing that will move us out of that trajectory is an incident that kills a million people or something.
Given that, it makes the most sense to pick some point on the Pareto frontier of either enjoying life as much as you can or preparing for thriving in those scenarios where we don't inevitably get paperclipped, the exact balance depending on what your P(doom) is.
ThenElection
11d ago
The problem that you mean by recency bias is that as you get further into the past it takes a lot more friction to overcome the cultural and linguistic difference, such that it's worth it to read Chaucer
Maybe someone should write a Gen Z translation.
When April drops and winter gets ratioed,
And every dead group chat is resurrected, bro,
When rain has power-washed the city clean
And suddenly the grass is giving green,
When Zephyrus logs on with soft-launch air
And flowers start posting thirst traps everywhere...
Was that his actual function? His papers were mostly qualitative claims about black people facing discrimination in higher education. Although that's a cousin of more radical racial claims, it's also unambiguously softer and provides no evidence for them.
My take on his function is more cynical: no one expected his research output to convince anyone of anything, inside or outside the field. His function was to be a kind of totem for white academics to dance around and prostrate themselves before. His work could be revolutionary or completely derivative, well-argued or drivel, original or entirely plagiarized: none of that mattered. He probably didn't even need to write any papers at all; Cofnas may have been the first person to give his papers a close reading. His role was to be the Black Cambridge Professor, nothing more and nothing less.
And a totem itself has a lifecycle, and its fall isn't something to be mourned, for it creates the chance for new revelries and festivals to strengthen community bonds.
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