Lovely tribute to CJ Sansom and his quiet faith in the ability of humans who can walk the middle path to improve the world.
Flip. I knew the electricity cost of AI was high, but the water cost is awful, too:
For inference (i.e., conversation with ChatGPT), our estimate shows that ChatGPT needs a 500-ml bottle of water for a short conversation of roughly 20 to 50 questions and answers, depending on when and where the model is deployed. Given ChatGPT’s huge user base, the total water footprint for inference can be enormous.
John Naughton in The Observer:
The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England.
The nice thing about EV tech developing so fast is the realisation that my current EV - good though it is — is probably the absolute worst EV I will ever own.
Things will only get better from here.
Beware! The link controllers don’t want you soiling their pristine websites with your dirty open web linking behaviour.
(People are really still trying to control who links to them in 2024… Mind-boggling. 🤯)
If AI search takes hold, and upends the business model of web publishing and Google itself, the search giant will have been the architect of its own downfall.
By letting search quality decay to maximise profits, it created the perfect conditions for its own disruption.
The US really went and did it. Bytedance faces an ultimatum: sell TikTok - or see it banned in the US.
Now we’ll find out how important the app is to China’s influence operations.
🍿🍿🍿
The last post for Post News: a potential Twitter successor that tried to cosy up to the news industry is shutting down.
The field is thinning… I suspect it’ll come down to X, Threads & Mastodon, and Bluesky.
But can Bluesky find its audience in that context, or is the future all ActivityPub?
The one cost of AI we don’t talk about nearly enough: it’s seriously energy hungry at a time when we’re both trying together to decarbonise and increase our energy security.
New solutions needed…
The new CEO of Vimeo gets ready to sell your content to the AI companies:
Over the next few weeks, we will be gathering input via a survey and community outreach to understand the types of controls our creative community wants with respect to AI. We will be asking your opinions about your use of AI, the training you’re comfortable with, the opt-in and opt-out models you prefer, and how you want us to treat your public, private, and freely distributed videos.
So much “nope”.
spewing mediocrity is a pretty strong sweet spot for AI
📷 #mbApr Day 21
The Cairngorms in early 1989.
For day 21 of the April Photoblogging Challenge: mountain, suggested by David, aka @dejus.
I have a courtesy car while my own car is in the coach works. But, oh sweet happiness, much to my surprise, it has CarPlay. Once you’ve had CarPlay, there’s no going back.