You're not wrong that the position of many anti-datacenter people isn't entirely rational (in the sense of "backed by solid numbers"), but you're entirely missing the point of why they are angry.
Consider this:
- People are struggling more and more financially, with income that does not keep up with inflation
- People are seeing inequality rise with the ultra-rich getting ultra-richer
- People are seeing climate change quickly changing their environment for the worst: droughts, heatwaves, storms...
- People are expecting climate change to make their financial prospect worse, too
And now, they see a wave of building datacenters. Not only do these data centers have externalities for the climate, but their _purpose_ seems like a negative: putting their jobs at risk because AI, redirecting this wealth to the ultra-rich. There's nothing for them in this, it's lose-lose!
And they see their own government encouraging and subsidising these projects, how could they not feel betrayed?
> People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”.
I don't think so. People would rather these benefits weren't there, but people exist in society and balance principle with practicality. You're allowed to criticise how AI is being brought into society while also using AI yourself, moral purity isn't a requirement to having opinions.
Hell, I don’t even use gen AI, I still think it’s unreliable junk.
However, most of the things that the people in my community are concerned about don’t apply to our region specifically. We’re actually in a position to benefit GREATLY. It’s useful to have that conversation.
Property taxes. Construction jobs. The land is unused and already had tax incentives. Remember, tax incentives don’t eliminate taxes, they just reduce them for a period of time to encourage development.
Many of these data centers are demanding tax breaks from the local governments, so taxes isn't a great excuse. The construction jobs are a one off deal, most of which will be done by non-local firms that specialize in large construction projects that don't exist in areas with "unused land". And then you also have to account for the higher power costs people in the area will be paying which is just another subsidy to big business on top of the stack of them that area already paid out to big business.
Society broadly agrees, enough that it's illegal in the US to stop someone just for "unusual behavior." You have to have an actual concrete reason to suspect someone of a crime. Not that police always follow the law on this.
Only in specific edge cases and definitions, which I’m guessing you don’t know. And calling it ‘illegal’ is a stretch in 95% of them. Generally worst case any evidence gathered would just be inadmissible.
After all, even if not a legal stop/detention, that doesn’t mean they committed a crime by doing it.
But tell me, do you think any of these officers would have struggled to come up with probable cause to detain the driver of a giant banana car on a public roadway? Or any other ‘suspicious’ or ‘weird’ vehicle?
Because I can think of at least 3 California vehicle codes off the top of my head that would likely apply, including CVC 26708, 24008.5, and 5201. And I’m not a cop.
And all you need is an articulable and reasonable suspicion to detain.
Stopping someone to chat (aka they can leave without penalty) is a much lower bar, though I doubt they did that.
You've now completely shifted from "unusual behavior is sufficient justification to detain someone and this is necessary for 99% of real traffic stops" to "the police can usually come up with probable cause if they want."
Which I completely agree with. But that's a very different statement.
If a cop saw someone hiding in my bushes at 2AM, that strikes me as reason to think that the person is trespassing if not worse, and would thus justify a further look. It would not be done solely on the basis of "unusual behavior."
It's trivial. Playing the bagpipes while riding a unicycle. Very weird and unusual but not reasonable suspicion of anything.
I'm happy to come up with a dozen more if you lack imagination.
Similarly, there's plenty of non-weird, non-unusual behavior that legally justifies a traffic stop, such as exceeding the speed limit or rolling through a stop sign.
Have you ever tried it in public, except in perhaps a college town or another handful of special places or circumstances?
Because you’d definitely get threatened with disturbing the peace, entertaining without a license, or be evaluated for public intoxication or drug use anywhere else.
People generally get speeding or traffic tickets when they stick out.
You have this weird overconfident naïveté about how the world actually works. Let me guess, 20 something white male, college educated, lives in SF or NYC? Loving parents who are still together?
I specifically mentioned that police don’t necessarily follow the law here. So I don’t know where you get the idea that I’m naive about how the world works. Police might hassle you, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal for them to do so.
Meaning it only leads to suppression of evidence and not punishment for the perpetrators? Or that they'll have to come up with some probable cause to make it legal, but they can do that more or less at will? Or something else?
Yeah, it is pretty bizarre, seeing as how I’ve been very clear that police will gin up probable cause or just ignore the requirement for it, and you keep acting like I’m a poor naive little soul who thinks cops are nice and friendly.
I said it repeatedly. Nearly every comment of mine in this chain contains a disclaimer about police misbehaving in real life. Not my fault if you managed to miss them all.
> there's few hundred years tradition behind it, at least in the west
Not even close to being true!
- There's not been any real convention for most of the history of western music (and no tuning fork anyway) and pitch varied hugely between regions, people and time. Different musician groups in the same church would likely be on different pitches. 415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times.
- 432Hz was somewhat conventional at the end of the 1800s, start of 1900s
- 440Hz is the "official" standard since then
- Many orchestras are tuning to 442, 443, or even 445Hz nowadays
So there's not been any such thing as hundreds of years of tradition, and even now that we do have standards (and ways to measure frequency precisely), pitch inflation continues to be a thing.
>415Hz is often used for baroque music but that's just a modern convention, there was no such standard in baroque times
415Hz is one modern semitone below the standard 440Hz. Many (but not all) baroque instruments were tuned slightly lower than modern ones, and 415Hz is the most convenient slightly lower tuning that retains compatibility with modern instruments by transposing down a semitone.
Ah yes, Jacob Collier. What I like is that he suggests an exercise that he used to practice microtonal singing: see how many intermediate pitches you can sing between two notes (could be a half step apart or you could start with a wider interval) and try to increase that number.
Of course if you sing Indian classical music (or several other non-Western musical traditions) then you will learn to sing quarter tones.
Baroque was 415Hz. I'm not aware of 436Hz having been a thing but 432Hz used to be standard before 440Hz came along. And nowadays, 442Hz is getting pretty common.
Afaik there wasn't a single widely accepted standard in the Baroque era, but rather different places had different tunings, with the "normal A" varying roughly between 400 and 500 Hz.
Most people without absolute pitch have some level of "pitch memory", but it's not comprehensive or reliable. For instance, if you ask people to sing a pop song, they're significantly more likely than chance to sing it in the original key.
I know the Super Mario Bros. theme starts on an E, so I can identify an unknown pitch by recalling that theme and comparing using relative pitch. But that's quite a slow and unintuitive process, and it's easy to make a mistake. People with absolute pitch just hear the pitch without having to "recall" a reference note to compare to like that.
It's really not that deep: they're characterising the business, you're characterising the hobby. The owner having a good time doesn't make it a successful business. A failing business can be a successful hobby, sure, that's still a failing business.
I've worked at a company whose product involved some decently advanced computer vision, marketed as AI (which isn't incorrect).
I've also seen companies that were doing machine learning before the LLM boom, who remarketed their machine-learning-based product as AI (which isn't incorrect).
Do you think we will recognize any walls? Or is there a point where the output might look different with respect to different paradigms / modalities we throw at it, but we won't be able to understand the quantitative differences as good/bad/scalable?
Consider this:
And now, they see a wave of building datacenters. Not only do these data centers have externalities for the climate, but their _purpose_ seems like a negative: putting their jobs at risk because AI, redirecting this wealth to the ultra-rich. There's nothing for them in this, it's lose-lose!And they see their own government encouraging and subsidising these projects, how could they not feel betrayed?
> People want to enjoy the benefits of progress and data centers while still being loudly “moral”.
I don't think so. People would rather these benefits weren't there, but people exist in society and balance principle with practicality. You're allowed to criticise how AI is being brought into society while also using AI yourself, moral purity isn't a requirement to having opinions.
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