Check it out: As millions of people have recognized, we have a new discoverability problem! How about, out of the 9 billion people on Earth, we figure out how to get a few dozen of them motivated to work on that instead of sitting and moping for the rest of our lives about the end of human creativity?
They are ridiculous because the reality of the situation is boring. Boring doesn’t drive engagement. So, all the clickbait headlines and ragebait comments imply scandal. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get attention.
After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.
This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.
Lots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain.
Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like:
If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result.
You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
Seems about right. Copyright is supposed to literally prevent outright copying. The output from an LLM is not a creative work of the prompter. It's genuinely the opposite, I use them when I don't care about something but have to do it anyway for whatever reason. It makes more time for me to do the things I like working on.
It feels shitty that they have been trained on the life sums of all of our work and online presences with absolutely no credit given... But then again, I'm not sure I'd want to know what parts of the weights were from me and which weren't.
I feel like people will be upset by this take... But you don't get credit for the creativity of an idea alone. Every asshole has ideas. It's called a work of art for a reason, emphasis on WORK.
I’m trying to imaging what giving credit would look like… “Credit: Everyone who has made anything freely observable on the internet.” Would folks be less upset if that was included?
Frankly, I should have been putting something similar attached to any drawings or paintings I make physically. My entire life I’ve been training my brain on countless works of others. And, I’ve never asked one of them for permission or given anyone any credit.
You are reacting to the author reacting to Zuck reacting to Zuck's daughter mentioning she uses AI to help plan recipes. It's a one-sentence, third-hand anecdote in a large article that folks in here are fixating on because of bike shedding.
Maybe Zuck's daughter appreciates cooking differently than you do. If AI helps her enjoy the part she likes about cooking by getting her past whatever friction would make her less likely to cook otherwise, then good for her.
Does anyone have any numbers on what percentage of recent datacenters don't follow those rules? Those are completely reasonable requirements. But, the high-pitched online discussion tends to imply building a datacenter requires doing everything the worst possible way every time.
I know there are problematic data centers. I just want to know what the stats are vs. the rhetoric.
I don't have all the numbers but as someone who lives in VA and has had their power bill _double_ over the last year, I'd be hard-pressed to think DCs are commonly paying their fair share when tariffs like this need to be passed: https://virginiamercury.com/2026/08/05/scc-orders-dominion-t...
When I see stories about how a hardware startup like SpinLaunch has had to move over and over because no matter where they go, locals flood the town hall meetings to declare their relatively boring technology is too scary, I'm not surprised town halls are being flooded over AI datacenters.
Are you talking about the Box Elder County Stratos project? I did some digging into that. AFAIK, they are mostly going to be powered by a natural gas pipeline. I haven't heard of them using nuclear. Got any links?
It is in a remote valley. And, it's going to use less groundwater than the previous use of the land. The only things to really complain about are huge amounts of gas consumption and AI bad. If the locals pinned them down to building out solar and mini-nuke power, the only thing left would be AI bad.
Maybe my feed is biased. But, I’ve been seeing good arguments lately that “The rent is too damned high!” is largely a problem created by voters. And, I don’t know how we’re going to fix that.
Ex: https://youtu.be/yoT76zITRx8 TLDR: 60% of both left and right wing voters like rent control. 98% of economists oppose it. Even liberal lefty economists. Even though they support price controls elsewhere like utility monopolies. Rent control feels good in the short term, but is detrimental to the vast majority in the long term in a large variety of ways.
The actual solution, to the surprise of no one, is to increase supply.
Unfortunately, there was a paper I don’t have a link to showing that not just old NIMBY homeowners, but largely everyone consistently vote against measures that increase supply. It’s part of a larger effect where people measurably bias their voting against policies that sound like they will benefit rich people. Very similar policies in similar areas will get different votes depending on how the wording makes it clear the rich will benefit.
Well guess who almost always benefits immediately from real estate construction? So… we keep voting to prevent construction and then complaining that the rent keeps going up.
Rent control doesn’t “feel good” — it allows for housing stability in a volatile economic environment. Without rent control, I would be de facto evicted from my home with a 50–100% rent increase from the recent AI boom. (This is literally happening to other folks in my neighborhood.) Why on earth would I vote against it? Because some economist said so? (And no, it’s not 98%, you made that figure up.)
Fortunately, you can have rent control and incentivize housing construction. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Economists don't say no one would ever need to move without rent control. They do say the situation is a whole lot worse for all of the other folks in your neighborhood because you have rent control. And, in the long run, rent control is likely to be detrimental even to you in ways that take more than a single sentence to understand.
I didn't make up 98%. I got it from the video who got it from https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent-control/ Reading more closely, I stated it wrong. 2% agree rent control has helped. 81% explicitly do not, then there are the "other" categories.
OK, but as rental pressure increases, people will vote to protect themselves from arbitrary eviction. Period. No amount of hand-wringing over abstract economic theories will change this.
No renter should have to live with the constant threat of losing their housing due to perturbations of the local economy or the whims of their landlord. As is often the case, economists are asking the wrong question.
Exactly. The problem I don't know how to fix is that voting for rent control is short term thinking that ends up causing rental pressure to become much worse in the long run. There are few things more difficult than convincing large numbers of people to think long term.
So, here we are. Living today in the long-term consequences of decades of voting for more rent control while opposing urban real estate development. And, the solution everyone is calling for is more rent control while opposing urban real estate development.
It is my experience that renters in my cohort (SF yuppie) are very much pro urban development. It’s the homeowners who are the biggest NIMBYs. They want their home values to increase and rent to go up. Reduced housing stock is a benefit to them; it’s not a benefit to renters.
Also: no amount of “thinking long term” will convince a renter to vote for their own eviction in order to make housing (maybe) cheaper for someone else many years down the line. It makes no sense. That is absolutely the wrong way to frame the problem.
There is a path where we expand rent control and incentivize housing development. They are not inherently contradictory policies.
Sure, it's possible. But, rent control is a serious disincentive to housing development. It requires correspondingly serious investment from the politicians to overcome that. In practice, what is done is to disincentivize for short term gain, not invest in long term gain, and complain that it's going terribly in the long term.
Rent control is really about curbing opportunist pricing and gauging, which people do because of course they do.
Realistically, a, say, capped 10% rent growth is MORE than enough to turn a profit on a property. In fact, you wouldn't just be turning a profit, you'd be compounding. Because your mortgage doesn't go up like that.
When we see this insane 100% rent bumps or whatever, that's opportunistic behavior. The landlord knows they can get away with it because of some blip in the current market, some temporary volatility they can leverage. That's bad for everyone involved.
For the landlord, they're trading off security in their investment for "more money now". They might not realize it, but it's a bad choice. Because eventually they will be forced to aggressively cut the rent or be pushed out. If they had just taken a modest hike year over year, they likely would've come out on top.
> It’s part of a larger effect where people measurably bias their voting against policies that sound like they will benefit rich people.
Blaming this on voters gives up the propagandists' game. A statement like "we'll make sure more houses are built to lower housing costs" does not sound like "we'll let business owners do business they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to do", even if they happen to describe the same policy.
I find what people want from the data center build-out is pretty reasonable:
1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house.
2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid.
3. Don't burn the earth with CO2.
4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance.
5. Pay a lot of taxes.
But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.
What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters
1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles.
2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent.
3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good.
4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty.
5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.
Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.
Just require them to also pay for a new local power plant with the capacity to cover them before they get building permits, honestly. Maybe say they can't qualify for tax breaks too?
I did some analysis on this, although I’m not a finance expert. If you put $100M of GPUs in a Virginia datacenter then you might pay $2M per year in local taxes over the 5 year life of the equipment. (I don’t think tech companies tend to pay much corporate income tax.) If you took the same money and put up an office with 150 people making $150k/year, you’d pay less property tax but like $7M in income taxes, not to mention the other taxes those people pay as they go about their lives nearby, and the fact that their incomes are re-invested in the community. So companies shifting their spending from employees to GPUs seems to massively reduce their tax burden, and datacenters are a vastly worse deal than offices for whatever community ends up stuck with them.
It does seem like civil society could hold out for a better deal here, and not lose what little tax base we are currently getting from these tech giants.
Absolutely this. If you think about different types of objections to nearby data centers and do some pretty minimal research, you come up with a reasonable set of solutions that most people would agree on.
That's not what people are doing though. People are genuinely afraid for the future, and much of the data center backlash is driven by emotion. You can see this reflected in populist political movements. People have a (well-founded) sense that those in power don't have their interests in mind and they're lashing out without much thought.
A human is born, lives a life, ingests the wrong chemical and becomes brain-dead. Now you have a human that is alive, but the person who was that human is permanently gone. To avoid murder, are we obliged to keep the body alive as long as possible by all available means? I don’t expect you would think so. I expect you’d agree terminating the life of the human body is the preferable and not a great ethical quandary.
I would agree that at conception we have a human life. But, not that we have a human person. There are no thoughts, emotions, memories, hopes, dreams. There is a very strong potential for a person. But, at conception what makes a person is not there yet.
At some point in time between the human existing a single living cell and the human voting in elections and joining the military, a person develops. But, it’s not a definite transition point in time. It’s a gradient.
Unfortunately, for practical reasons, the law must pick a definite point in time. The consensus seems to be “around the time that the fetus can be kept alive and continue developing independent from the mother using current technology.” A practical choice, for sure.
One might argue that the official transition point should be a bit earlier. But, that’s not the core of the disagreement.
The core seems to be that some living people do not appear to take into consideration the difference between being alive vs. being a person.
Except it is. In fact, the difference between alive and personhood and the point of transition are, fundamentally, the same issue: if the point of transition is considered the embryo, then the distinction doesn't really exist.
While there's legal consensus based on practicality, that doesn't mean people agree with it. Until a properly formal and objective ethical answer can be found, this disagreement will remain.
One could argue that a human body with a mostly-functional brain that will never again be conscious is human but not a person. And, simultaneously argue that a few million human stem cells, none of which are neurons yet, is a personified human. But, that would be a clearly inconsistent stance.
And, I’d argue that consensus literally means that a significant population agrees.
Formally and objectively it could be argued that even shortly post-birth, barely-conscious infants lack the required characteristics of an individual person. But, obviously it would require an unacceptable degree of callousness to terminate an infant. Certainly not a practice we agree should be encoded into law in this modern era.
In general, I find the pro-choice consensus to be reasonably conservative regarding the rights of an embryo vs. the rights of a fully-realized mid-life person. Strongly weighted towards the mother before 24 weeks and strongly weighted towards the embryo afterwards. But, if it comes down to the life of the fully-realized person vs. the life of the potential person, the choice goes to the mother. Or, if the potential is clearly a life of suffering and early death, the ethical choice is to reduce suffering via difficult actions.
Generally, I find that the pro-life arguments are largely based on a lack of consideration. I.e. “Life begins at the instant of insemination.” with literally zero further consideration. Or, on knowingly false propaganda: “Evil baby-killers are celebrating killing babies minutes before birth.”
To my knowledge, neither of those stances were in the mainstream before American politicians accepted that the Civil Rights Movement was not going away.
Before that, The Church saw its role in the abortion issue as charitably offering grief counseling to women who had experienced that difficult choice. After the political situation changed, the role of The Church changed to the demonization of unfortunate women for the purpose of manufacturing single-issue voters for the benefit of specific politicians.
Holding the "a permanently comatose human is not a person" and a "a fetus could be a person" aren't incompatible. The first statement presumes a definitive state to body where as the second statement holds a potential.
A significant portion of the population might agree, but it isn't all. If it isn't all, there's disagreement. It bears reminding, witch hunting was consensus at some point. I think this serves as a sufficient counterproof for majority consensus as a source of objective truth.
I'd like to press on this unnaceptable callousness: if it's objectively proven that newborns lack sufficient potential for personhood, why would there be an issue with post-birth abortion? It's not like the "conservative" approach here is victimless, the guardians of the newborn will have to bear a responsabily they have no duty to, infringing on their right to live. And infringing on this right is as unacceptable as it can get. Of course, this is presume an extreme pro-choice position is true, which I personally find unlikely.
In the end, I find that the majority of pro-choicers (not saying this includes you) aren't much better than religious pro-lifers. Most of the time, there isn't a deeper consideration beyond "my body, my rules" or "the law says humans with at least X age are people". Sometimes, it's even "evil misogynists want to enslave woman into baby factories." At least, the religious pro-lifers are transparent about being about their creed. These pro-choicers stiffle discussion under the pretense of legal consensus, which makes discussion harder.
But, because question of abortion, as you have stated before, is directly related to when personhood emerges, it's also related to the origin of personhood and, going further, human rights themselves. As such, I think there's less consensus on this topic, most just haven't given the proper consideration - we can kind of see it already: not every pro-lifer is against abortion in cases of rape/possibility of mother's death, and some pro-choicers are very strict: a fetus only becomes a person after being born.
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