A lot of people are going to be unemployed over the next dacade from this technology, a lot more people than just developers.
So why help by giving training data and give a unnerving lever of control of open source projects to a handful of companies?
Immigrants are a scapegoat that Biden was more than happy to punch down against. He got no electoral benefit for adopting any of the far-right’s proposals. In fact, most people don’t even know that he did. The media’s coverage of immigration is driven by vibes pushed heavily by the far-right who aims to divide and conquer. It will not stop even if there were zero immigrants of any kind anywhere in the world. At best it just shifts to another group and starts all over again
discharging it for some greedy power company’s benefit.
The benefit is not limited to the power company while we are transitioning away from fossil fuels. The more battery capacity is on the grid, the less fossil fuels need to be kept online when the sun is down. This benefits us all
If you have a variable rate, it also put shifts your usage patterns more favorably for pricing
He would become a member of parliament and Farage would no longer be a member of parliament. He might have to take off the Binface costume to actually enter parliament though
Count Binface has run in other elections before as a joke of sorts. It’s just that the major parties are not running anyone in this election. Farage resigned and then immediately ran for his by-election to pause the investigation into his 5 million pound crypto “donation” since the body doing it can only investigate while he’s a member of parliament. The other parties aren’t running so that Farage doesn’t get the narrative win of the byelection making him “vindicated by the people”
I think you may want to read what the article is saying. It is not saying all ultra-processed food are fine. It’s saying that ultra-processsed is an unhelpful label because it lumps too much together
The categories sound tidy. They are not. Many nutrition experts have criticized them as overly broad and hard to apply consistently. Wheat gluten, for example, is an ingredient often added to packaged breads; it’s not used in many household kitchens, and is usually classified as ultra-processed. Yet it’s been used in many Asian cuisines for centuries and can easily be employed in your home kitchen; I use it in my own. There’s no evidence that the ingredient’s rarity in household pantries makes it unhealthy or deserving of a special “ultra-processed” label. Nor is there any reason to assume that a store-bought whole grain bread with added gluten (category 4 under NOVA) is worse for you than, say, a homemade white bread (category 3).
I see, I see
Good news is that they already have dropped the up charge entirely and an increasing number of chains are doing so around the world. From the article:
Notably, all three chains dropped their surcharges before the class action was authorized. Starbucks removed the upcharge in November 2024; Tim Hortons followed in January 2025, and Second Cup in February 2025. The lawsuit, filed by Montreal law firm LPC Avocats, seeks retroactive accountability for charges collected during those periods.
Animal agriculture is especially worse because it plainly demands much more agriculture to happen due to it’s inefficiencies. It requires growing huge amounts of animal feed where most of the energy is lost. Even it’s best case is bad compared to the worst case for eating plants directly
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
What you want to rent a bridge instead? Get roommates for your bridge?
The FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this
In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”
In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.
[…]
Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”
Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.
Graph from the article:
Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it’s just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate
In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens
One way we can help nudge that is to reduce the demand for fish overall and go for for plant-based foods instead. Illegal fishing is unfortunately quite rampant even for places that ban specific practices. It’s really hard to ban enforce bans when most of it all happens quite far away in the oceans
>>> print("proof by counterexample in a python REPL")
proof by counterexample in a python REPL
>>> x = 2; print(x)
2
>>> print("this is not ignored"); print("it's just mostly useless"); print("but you can use as many as you want")
this is not ignored
it's just mostly useless
but you can use as many as you want
Agreed that land and water are smaller compared to agriculture, but the electricity usage change is significant. The LLM boom is unlike prior datacenter workloads. The electrical demand is far higher due to the more power hungry chips and running them at full utilization. It’s projected to go from 5% to 15% of all US electrical demand in quite a short amount of time
This is delaying the closures of fossil fuel plants (here’s an example of 15 coal plants in the US last year), and starting to rely more heavily on generators to install capacity faster despite solar/wind being far cheaper
I have worked on open source projects. I cannot fork sheer number of projects going towards LLMs alone. This is a losing proposition. Open source is not an individualistic action. This is a collective action, and we need developers of open source to live the values of open source
someone else can pick up from here
A big point of my comment earlier was that making a project increasingly LLM generated makes it harder for someone to pick up as quickly. A huge amount of complexity can be added insanely fast. In this rsync example, the entire testing system was changed overnight (while generating issues in the process). The projects become harder to work on in general
EDIT: also to add, this still has the issues of not knowing where the un-copyleftable code lies and/or having to rework large portions of the project are if you want to keep that
deleted by creator
That framing is missing a lot. Open source software is way more than about using the code. For me, it is not the bugs and quality that concern me most about things like this (though I do have concerns with that too). It’s about the broader issues with LLMs in terms of cooperate power, environmental impact, etc. Calling it out is less about any one project and more about stopping the whole open source ecosystem from spiraling into an LLM-dependent mess. LLMs themselves can easily become the death of FOSS in a broader sense
LLMs flip the power dynamics of development on their head. For starters, the outputs are likely no longer copyrightable in many jurisdictions, which undermines copyleft licenses (rsync is under GPL for example).
The kind of code that LLMs generate also tend to add complexity rather fast where it becomes more and more difficult for any human to understand it. Becoming dependent on LLMs makes development more of a question of computing power rather than effort. Companies will be able to spend more than you. FOSS will not be able to compete nearly as well. It’s also an inherent dependency on big tech companies who will be happy to exploit that the second they can or cut you off it you start to hit their bottom line. Software cannot be free in terms of freedom if modifying it in a reasonable amount of time starts to almost require a tool controlled by someone else
Using “Open Source” (which has somehow become “public weights” to most) / local LLMs are hardly freedom from this either given that they will always be behind given the massive financial costs to make models, unlike traditional software. If you find any advantage or way to reduce resource usage to make a better model, the bigger tech companies will just quickly scale that up far bigger than you can and meet or exceed what you have. It still just as well makes your ability to modify software dependent on the hardware you have. How free is open source software if it becomes increasingly difficult to modify without an expensive GPU?
No other way to review long patches besides LGTM says only profession that keeps doing that
Corn is about evenly split between ethanol and animal feed in the US. That’s also based on USDA numbers that under count the amount going to animal feed by excluding exports and excluding more indirect ways corn go to animal feed
Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn. […] Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/
How can a project realistically tell if a contributor used an open-weight model and self hosted it without it being a de facto ban on AI for anyone not heavily involved in the project?
Open-weight models are still giving up control. For one, all LLM outputs are generally recognized to not be copy writable which undermines copy-left license. Additionally, unlike open source software it’s a lot harder to look at what represented in these models. A model can easily be designed to make specific plausible mistake as intentional backdoors, act worse on tasks relevant to an industry a country / maker cares about (like Fable has been designed), etc.