The consequence of saying they cannot choice to not have them. Is saying your requiring them to have them whether or not the people their want them. Its also a temporary moratorium. Maybe the industry should have been more responsible and not pasted so many externalities on to the public sector if they didnt want to face regulations.
I think the highest parent comment basically hasn't engaged in any of the cost benefit analysis just strawman the subject to banning all industry. They are not doing that and allow other manufacturing to exist maybe the data center business should learn from those industries how to conduct themselves
Usually that's a good approach but it doesn't work as well for industries that are in boom-bust cycles or have externalities which persist longer than the lifetime of the company that caused it -- because you either end up in a situation where you have to tax it all up-front, or end up in a situation where companies disappear and leave you to clean up their mess.
This is notoriously problematic with oil and gas wells. When it's profitable, they're maintained and you get tax revenue. When they're not profitable, the company might just disappear and you're left with an abandoned uncapped well spewing pollution, generating zero tax revenue.
I see no need for a false dichotomy of "require" vs "ban". There aren't laws requiring a state to have lumber mills, or outright banning them. There are many alternatives with a wide spectrum of attributes:
- Limiting the rates of builds allowed (e.g. total area per year, density per area per year).
- Requiring that the companies involved offset their resource usage in any number of ways (could expand this to three paragraphs on its own).
- Placing restrictions on proximity to $THINGS, whether that's residential areas, parks, you name it.
These are just the first three examples that come to mind, and I am confident that people smarter than me could come up with more.
In free societies, bans should be the last weapon of choice. By default, any activity should be allowed, many of the allowed activies should be regulated and/or taxed, but outright bans should be very well justified.
Otherwise you will end up with a chaotic-authoritarian system banning whatever the current Zeitgeist feels icky about, which in the era of social networks means twenty different things each year.
It's a free state. Like the Swiss banned minarets in Geneva the Mainers should be allowed to vote to ban datacenters. AI bros can always opt to build their stuff elsewhere, like Texas or Abu Dhabi.
That’s like saying “Mainers should be allowed to ban speech they don’t like, and private sex acts they find offensive”. Your view of what constitutes freedom is nonsensical.
Your examples are both unconstitutional (see Lawrence v. Texas for the second), so no, there are limits. Also the majority of sane individuals would not bother to vote on that kind of stuff to meet a qualified majority, not in a democracy and not without a massive brainwashing campaign (which should be banned btw).
Also, as others have pointed out, this is not a ban but a moratorium. AI bros just have to wait until the hype cools down to build data centers in Maine, or build them elsewhere.
I was talking about a free society. You changed that into a free state.
State X may be free in the sense that there is no military occupation or outright dictatorship, but that does not mean that its society values freedom highly. There are degrees to "lived freedom", and being too ban-happy is on the (for me) bad side of the spectrum.
Imagine a very religious society, something like a Puritan state, or a Wahhabist colony, where the faith itself imposes significant restrictions on everyday life of an individual and all laws are derived from religion. Would you call it a free society? What about the few non-believers who live among them, what level of freedom do they enjoy (except the freedom to move away, if they have the means to do so)?
That alfalfa gets extensively exported as livestock feed... and alfalfa is literally mostly water by weight. So the arrangement is literally shipping out local groundwater in bulk to other countries.
The "Creator" sets in particular I feel harken the most to the company's roots. They usually have a few different builds per set and include all sorts of unique pieces for making your own creations. They also usually have very fun designs.
I have the re-release secondhand unopened and I think I paid about that much, so even in a collector's market, not terrible at all. An expensive toy to be sure but a deeply satisfying experience if you like that kind of thing.
Buying buckets of used bricks is pretty cheap, too. I bought an adult's old lifetime collection for $30 CAD. My 2 year old son and I are still sorting them.
Sorting Lego is such a pain in the ass. I have like a huge stash from when I was a kid. Back then we just had it all in a few tubs and dug to find a part. But somehow now I feel I must sort them… but the “right way” is ill defined and kind of sucks the joy out of playing (especially disassembling)
And there is no “right way” that I’ve even found. Sort by color and now the little pieces fall to the bottom and are hard to dig for. The best I can see is part type and size… maybe… even then it sucks out the fun. I want to build cool shit with my daughter not spend every moment of Lego time sorting. There is no joy in sorting…
Maybe I just revert back to the “big tub” approach.
I dunno. Thanks for listening to my TED talk I guess.
Yeah go for it! I'll add a comment though, now we are working on automated shifting bins with stacks of different size grids to filter the littles to the bottom and still easily pick up the top bigs to see them. There was been a discussion (by my children) about something involving a Lego vacuum they saw online.
Why sort by color if human eyes (unless colorblind) are great at recognizing different colors? Back when I was a kid, I used the big tub approach (with the Spyrius base octant as my shovel).
Build with what pieces you can find, rather than plan the perfect structure ahead. Improvising keeps the creativity going! Wheres fun if sorting legos sucks all the Joy from it
> Build with what pieces you can find, rather than plan the perfect structure ahead. Improvising keeps the creativity going!
That's a valid perspective. It can be a lot of fun to dig through the bricks and build freely, letting things take shape.
But it's also valid to have a design phase, where designs are crafted (perhaps even very precisely) and to enjoy that part -- perhaps even using some manner of LEGO-oriented CAD. (Or SolidWorks; I won't judge.)
And then: It's OK to find pleasure in following a plan to build a tangible thing in reality. This concept is strongly reinforced by the fact that LEGO sets come with instructions that are organized into simple steps.
One of the joys of LEGO is that it's very inclusively all fine.
As the brother of a young, amazing man who we lost due to another genetic ailment (CF), whenever I see stories like this, it makes me so hopeful for families in the future never having to see a loved one deteriorate due to a bad roll of the dice.
Hats off to everyone out there putting in the hours to make the lived experience of these folks much better than they would have otherwise been. If only we had more of you in the world.
Spina Bifida is not primarily a genetic disease. It's caused by a failure of the neural tube in the developing embryo to close fully. No one knows the exact causes, but folic acid deficiency in the mother before and during pregnancy makes it more likely. It also seems to run in families a little, but only weakly, and we haven't identified any specific genetic cause. This treatment is very promising, but it's not a cure, just a (hopefully) even better treatment than the existing in-utero surgery that doesn't include stem cells.
> I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world)
Crikey, this isn't sensible, this is completely misanthropic and nihilistic. How can anyone be ok with a machine unilaterally deciding (outside of the courts or any other check mechanism) to murder someone?
I also take issue with the author's postulation that the Defense Production act could be used here. It's one thing to make sheet metal companies build plane parts, but requiring companies to be put themselves "in the loop" so to speak with regards to actual military strategy or defense puts those companies and their employees at unwilling and extraordinary risk. It's basically enlistment. Plus, it can only be used in extraordinary circumstances.
There's actually another possibility here: Anthropic really doesn't care about being in the loop, and are protesting as theater, but behind the scenes, hammering out a deal with the Pentagon, and they'll help under classified status, and none of us will be the wiser.
It is a perfectly fine rhetorical device, and I don't consider a text that just has that to be automatically LLM-made. However, it is also a powerful rhetorical device, and I find that the average human writer right now is better at using these than whatever LLM most people use to generate essays. It's supposed to signify a contrast, a mood shift, something impactful, but LLMs tend to spam these all over the place, as if trying to maximize the number of times the readers gasp. It's too intense in its writing, and that's what stands out the most.
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