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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t use water in the sense that it is consuming it. It “uses” water in the sense that it is temporarily in a datacenter, gets a little hot, and then leaves the datacenter. I don’t even think a lot of datacenters use actual drinking water, instead taking water directly from a river, warming it slightly, and putting it back in said river.

    Not to say I like AI, or think it’s a good thing. But this phrase that’s been going around just bugs me, because it’s really misleading. We should be focused on the ridiculous amount of energy it consumes, not the water it temporarily uses.


  • The answer to this question is quite simple, because Google (excluding the Pixel line) isn’t making the actual phones, just the software. The actual manufacturers (Samsung, Motorola, Huawei, etc) are taking Google’s OS and putting it on their phones. This case mostly hinges on Googles behavior being monopolistic to them, not to the end consumer.

    On the other hand, Apple make both the OS and the Hardware, there’s no manufacturer they’re forcing the app store on, so the same rules don’t apply here.






  • This was my core point. I don’t consider a business raising prices or gating features as a direct result of those features increasing their cost as “enshittification”. Stickers being paid, custom emojis, etc, that doesn’t cost Discord anything to provide, making that paid is enshittification; But if the feature itself costs the business actual money to provide, does everyone just expect them to eat that cost forever, in a lot of cases for absolutely no revenue from the users?

    Calling out businesses for not giving stuff that costs them money away for free just, doesn’t fundamentally make sense to me. Why is it just expected of Discord that they pay to store all your large files? A lot of “freemium” services like GMail recoup some of that money by mining your email for data that it can sell to advertisers, or eating the cost in an attempt to lock you into an ecosystem where you’ll spend money. Storing files on Discord is neither of those things.

    Don’t get me wrong, a lot of services are enshittifying, and making their services worse so you spend more money with them— but adjusting your quotas and pricing to reflect your real world cost of business is not that. To frame it as though you are entitled to free compute and resources from companies that don’t owe you anything comes off as just that, entitled. The cloud isn’t free. If you want to use a service, you should pay for it if you can.







  • It’s not just random jitter, it also likely adds context, including the device you’re using, other recent queries, and your relative location (like what state you’re in).

    I don’t work for Google, but I am somewhat close to a major AI product, and it’s pretty much the industry standard to give some contextual info to the model in addition to your query. It’s also generally not “one model”, but a set of models run in sequence— with the LLM (think chatGPT) only employed at the end to generate a paragraph from a conclusion and evidence found by a previous model.


  • Relaying a key signal 20 ft when you know the key is there isn’t too tricky, like when you’re home. But I would propose that trying to relay a signal across hundreds of feet, like a busy mall or store, when you’re not even sure the owner is there is quite another thing. You can also require that the IR blaster is in the car before starting. There’s also a technology Google has been using for a while now where the device (car) would emit a constant ultrasonic signal for the other device (key) to pick up on to determine if they are close to each other. Something that could be done through clothing, but not easily relayed.