Silicon Cities (2017) By: Heiko Hellwig

TED Talks to end the Year on a high note

Brain Magic by Keith Barry

The brain changing benefits of exercise by Wendy Suzuki

Power foods for the brain by Neal Barnard

Intermittent fasting: Transformational Technique by Cynthia Thurlow

You don't find happiness, you create it by Katarina Bloom

The Art of being yourself by Caroline McHugh

The magic of not caring by Sarah Knight

How to not take things personally by Frederik Imbo

Speaking Up Without Freaking Out by Matt Abrahams

How to motivate yourself to change your behavior by Tali Sharot

james mccrae

Have to study statistical physics today... How's your day going?

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

"If you don't like trigonometry you'll suffer"

Something that schools don't teach you but is much needed: how to have a work/life balance that works for you.

As someone who works fulltime and does classes and attempts a social life and hobbies, this gets very hard and stressful. But here are some tips I have for helping:

Learn to say no and not feel guilty. Picking up that extra shift when you had plans? Politely decline. Your friend is begging you to take ANOTHER class when your plate is full so you can have one together? Just be honest and say you can't.

Prioritize your sleep and eating. You can't function well if you don't sleep and eat enough. These are not things you can just push aside and do when you get the time. These are basic things you need to survive. These are literally basic needs. Don't throw them to the side. Your body does its best to take care of you. Make sure you take care of it too.

Have boundaries and be firm with them. If you tell your manager you can only work x, y, and z, don't let them add a or b to it. Respectfully but firmly let them know that you can't take on those things and if they have you do a or b, your work overall is going to majorly decrease in quality. Schedule time for yourself. For studying. For going out. And treat those set aside times just like you would if they were work or school times or appointments. You are the most important part of your life.

Understand that some weeks are going to be absolute hell. You're not going to have enough time. You're going to be exhausted and cry and throw things and want to quit everything. You got this babe. Take breaks and remind yourself how amazing you are and treat yourself after.

Prioritize things and adopt better habits. Wash your dishes right after using them. Get a set bedtime. Get easy breakfast things. Take a walk.

Your friends will understand if you just need time alone. I promise. They love you and don't hate you because you're overwhelmed. I PROMISE. And if they don't, maybe they aren't really your friends.

Not everyone is a friend. Some people are acquaintances. Some people are a 5 minute smoke break at work for your sanity. Some people are drinking buddies. Some people are library study date friends. And that's ok! Not everyone has to be your bestie. And trying to put that much energy into that many people will drain you.

ScienceAlert

JWST May Have Finally Confirmed How Planets Take Shape

A crucial piece of evidence in support of a long-standing hypothesis on planet formation has been observed by the James Webb Space Telescope

A crucial piece of evidence in support of a long-standing hypothesis on planet formation has been observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), meaning astronomers are confident they've got a part of the cosmic process right. JWST data processed by an international team of researchers backs up the theory of 'icy pebble drift', which is thought to be vital in bringing together the dust and rocks that eventually turn into planets like our own. Simply put, icy pebble drift works like this: as tiny, ice-covered bits of material bump together in the outer reaches of a young protoplanetary disk they lose momentum, allowing them to fall towards the star into a warmer zone where their frozen coating sublimates. It's from this ring of fine debris and water vapor that rocky planets form, effectively serving as a delivery service of building materials right across a newborn solar system.

Continue Reading.

non-basic study tips ive derived myself as a stem major lol

going from easiest to hardest to implement

i have very big trouble with focusing and interest so a lot of this will relate to attention retention

- look up the problems on your past tests. chances are your lecturer is consistently pulling them from 1-3 sources (true for most intro classes)

-practice with a timer since day 0 of learning about a new topic. this will prevent you from short circuiting on the exam and forgetting all about the topic you've studied for hours

-as you are going through a problem, mumble your thought process as if you are ochem tutor 2.0

- if you are multilingual, try taking lecture notes in a language other than the one they are provided in - this will force you to think critically about the material you are writing down

-leave. work. at the work table. dont think about assignments when you are spending time with friends or family.

-in general, the intensity of my background noise is inversely proportional to my stimulation levels usually i try to go ambient noise -> lofi/instrumentals -> study vlogs -> music with lyrics however, if you can take a break instead of listening to music that will make you more restless, it is better to do that

-usually, the boredom from practicing something boring does not feel as bad as realizing you have understudied that topic. persevere. you can do it!