Five

Tom Nicholas is really great in this piece. SLRPNK link

People who get angry at Just Stop Oil tactics are just showing their ignorance of civil rights and protest history.

Yes, unsubstantiated means "no evidence."

As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It's being posted to Reddit, without a date, as chum for bootlickers. !california hasn't discussed this one yet, consider it a vaccination shot for this Reddit mind virus.

Unsubstantiated by Snopes is not the same as false.

Alex de Vries predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). For comparison, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index suggests Bitcoin uses 141-160 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity annually. That’s ~0.7% of the world's consumed electricity in 2022. The process of minting cryptocurrency is a very public activity, so the numbers are difficult to fudge. The cost of bringing extremely expensive nuclear reactors back online and driving demand for environmentally destructive Uranium mining and processing suggests de Vries' guess was conservative.

I'm reminded of Jevon's Paradox as applied to energy generation. I hope the AI bubble pops before much more investment goes into nuclear energy.

'AI' in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer's artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to 'fill in the blanks.' The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

In the podcast, they're talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to 'fill in the blanks' in a new dimension -- to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say 'Artificial Intelligence' -- and that is evidently false.

The petro-billionaire people who brought you "The Line" are joining up with the badly conceived Octopus Crane Tower idea people to bring you something that definitely will never be built and probably has deep conceptual flaws.

The important take away from this performance art is that the people causing global warming and who stand to benefit from pumping even more carbon into the air to are working on clever solutions to reverse it, and you can continue living your life as if things will eventually return to the pre-climate crisis status quo.

CNN is part of the Warner Bros. Discovery advertising portfolio.

MBFC classifies pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, and anti-genocide bias in reporting as left-biased, but also classifies CNN as Left-Center biased. CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’.

ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising.

Manufacturing Consent has this to say about Disney news media:

Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.

Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates-Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world's major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens. Bagdikian concludes that "it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual's role in the American democracy."

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA's remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.