Certainly commensurate to the price. It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price.
AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.
I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.
What people feel about things is almost an entirely a function of their information environment, rather than the facts of the events themselves. Almost nobody truly aware of the number of slaughtered and starved Palestinian children would be "okay" with it; the people defending it are more-or-less viewing these events in terms so different from that that those basic facts cannot reach their understanding at all.
I’d personally put myself in this camp. I think what Israel is doing is horrible. But the us-versus-them dynamic in the American Palestinian-activist community is exhausting. Furthermore, it is focused on personal showboating—messaging and rallying—versus helping anyone on the ground.
So I’m continuing to focus on Ukraine, my pet war, and northern Ethiopia, my pet FP issue. I’ve been able to materially aid folks there and—twice, on the margin—influence U.S. policy in their respects. I don’t have to deal with partners who want to convince me that each of my friends who doesn’t post daily on Instagram about Tigray is Hitler. Instead, they’re focused on the folks there.
I have opinions on Gaza. But I’m not taking a stand. And let’s be honest, that’s a fair characterization of 90% of folks who constantly go off on rants about Zionists or genocides but have never given a dollar to a humanitarian cause, called an elected or tried to travel to their region in question.
> Please explain the us–versus–them dynamic you referred to?
The tendency to tar and feather anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with one as a Zionist. (Which, in these circles, carries the same weight as being a bona fide racist.)
This memorably presented itself a few months ago when folks—potentially on the way to changing their minds—would be called Nazis for referring to the war as a war, as if a genocide within a war is somehow inconceivable.
Absolute morality rallies the base. It doesn’t usually convert moderates. And the situation in Gaza defies absolute morality.
Don't you see the same problems with Ukraine and Ethiopia? I've seen if you don't 100% agree with a Ukraine supporter they call you a Putin bootlicker, a Russian bot, a Nazi, and so on.
> Don't you see the same problems with Ukraine and Ethiopia?
Not commonly.
> I've seen if you don't 100% agree with a Ukraine supporter they call you a Putin bootlicker
I’m sorry. Fuck those guys.
They’re doing damage to the cause in exchange for self aggrandizement. Ersatz therapy through others’ misery is ghoulish.
Perhaps it’s a problem of degrees and segregation. I see much less of that with those fronts. And to the degree it exists, it sequesters itself online and away from the people doing anything useful for the folks on the ground. (My work in Ukraine involved some arms early and then purely political help. In Ethiopia it’s been humanitarian.)
When it comes to Palestine, I see basically zero people quietly focused on the work. (I’ll grant this may be due to ignorance. But it’s exhausting to trawl through shit. And I don’t think I’m alone in disengaging on that basis.)
If I ignore it, it is as if it never happened. Part of it is willful ignorance though. For Ross, he is deeply religious and views the security of Israel as that of the Jewish people (having a home to run away to if shit hits the fan). Children dying is a sacrifice he is willing to make. For the majority of America though, I believe they are a) either scared, because they saw a witch hunt orchestrated by people in power (like Ackman). If 3 female deans, many of them minorities, can get ousted at the whim of a billionaire, then the typical engineer or employee will be easily labeled antisemitic for defending those who are denied their rights to life and property, and will lose their job. Canary Mission and other groups are funded by successful billionaires like Ackman, Adelsons etc and harass students on campuses for protesting. They doxx them, blacklist them (no boss will hire someone on those letters, at the expense of being labeled an antisemite, and you are in it for a suprise once you notice how many of our tech companies and finance sectors are run by religious sociopaths). I know a few victims of those efforts. Interestingly, 90% of them are white middle class, and I think they are mostly women. Their courage is to be admired. Or b) people are okay with it, because Ghaza is so far away and because of Israel's blockade on the media covering ghaza (Israel has already killed more journalists last year than all other nations combined btw. I do not know of any democracy that does this).
Not that I'm anyone important, but at this point if I google someone and they show up on the Canary Mission website, I'm inclined to hold them in higher regard.
> If one compares the [British] Gem and Magnet with a genuinely modern [British] paper, the thing that immediately strikes one is... there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the reader of the Skipper, Hotspur, etc., is led to identify with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist... This character is intended as a superman... There is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the threepenny Yank Mags... In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence.
The gutless liberals that dominate your country’s preconceptions of “the left” are not your anti-police state faction, but you do their work for them by conflating the two. The anti-police state faction are the ones habitually being physically brutalised if not outright murdered by the cops while the media wags their finger at them for their apparent lack of civility.
It's a leaky abstraction, in software terms. Ideally, an abstraction models the semantics of the problem domain "opaquely"; ideally our natural numbers have only the properties of the natural numbers and no others. An additional property leaking through is not like handy "bonus", but a point of confusion. You can't rely on it in proofs involving natural numbers without being careful to delineate which conclusions follow from the construction vs. which are inherent.
No, not at all, the word trauma is predominately used today as the name for a sort of "psychic damage", like that which sometimes occurs when one is severely injured but which can also occur in many other circumstances, often purely social or emotional.
Location: Currently NC, but I'd like to move back to NYC. Open to in-person in either state.
Remote: Open to full remote or hybrid in NC/NYC
Willing to relocate: only on the East coast.
Technologies: Python, SQL, some Scala, some Typescript. DBT, Postgres, Spark, Flink. Various AWS like Kinesis, Firehose, Glue, Redshift. Various data pipelines
I'd be interested in working on any of: data platforms, data pipelines, data engineering, or data-intensive backend applications. I would enjoy either a greenfield/early-stage data team where I could create a lot of value quickly, or, a more mature team with some veterans I can learn from.
AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a data center is approximately the same as agriculture per acre.
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