[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 5 points 16 hours ago

I agree. The political stupidity in the US basically forced us into a two-party election where the country was forced to choose between two evils and Carney looked like a reasonable savior at the time. We sacrificed NDP representation to save ourselves from Trump. Carney quickly abandoned any resemblance of environmental concern in the name of economic growth and sovereignty. The same is happening with AI now, where he's playing to the hype and business interests. Except AI is largely a grift and this strategy will do more harm than good.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 8 points 17 hours ago

people are afraid of losing their jobs to AI.

Nah, it's more like they're pissed their bosses will attempt to replace their jobs with AI that can't actually do their job, and instead shift that work onto the remaining employees. It's AI-washing to hide cost-cutting.

global Beef production uses around 200 times more fresh water than Global Data Centers

Whataboutism. We're not the ones using shitty fallacies as arguments. Fuck beef consumption too.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/i-sat-down-with-two-cooling-experts-to-find-out-what-ais-biggest-problem-is-in-the-data-center

Water cooling can be done in a smaller space with less power, but it requires enormous amount of water. A recent study determined that a single hyper-scaled facility would need 1.5 million liters of water per day to provide cooling and humidification.
AI is typically deployed in 20-30 cabinet clusters at or above 40 KW per cabinet. This represents a fourfold increase in KW/cabinet with the deployment of AI. The difference is staggering.

reasonable jurisdictions like British Columbia in Canada
They’re also not building the damn things right next to millions of residential homes

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/protest-against-ai-data-centres-in-vancouver-9.7210309

Hundreds of people marched through Vancouver on Saturday to protest two planned AI data centres in the city, raising concerns about the amount of water and energy such facilities can use as the region faces tighter water restrictions.
The project has the backing of the B.C. government
The City of Vancouver is also throwing its support behind the proposal
The protest comes as Metro Vancouver remains under Stage 2 water restrictions, which bans lawn watering, and prepares for the likely move to Stage 3 restrictions sometime in June.
“I think this is an incredibly inefficient use of land, both in the heart of downtown Vancouver and Mount Pleasant”

The noise thing is… nothing.

https://mississippitoday.org/2025/11/24/southaven-residents-fear-pollution-complain-of-noise-from-elon-musks-xai-data-center-turbines/

Jason Haley, who’s lived in his Southaven home for the last two decades, in August started to hear a whirring, mechanical noise from outside that sounded like a leaf blower.
The noise would go on for days at a time and through the night, he told Mississippi Today. He soon realized the sounds were coming from a cluster of natural gas turbines about a half mile away.
Over the summer, billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company set up shop in north Mississippi, erecting dozens of turbines on the site of a former power plant to fuel two data centers just up the road in Memphis.

I'm going to have to start using a browser extension to label trolls like the reddit days.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 13 points 19 hours ago

Yeah, their title is dumb, but they do actually touch on some of that in the article.

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[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Not sure where /u/Canaconda got that text from, but the official release on their website does not mention "female workers". https://www.ndp.ca/news/ndp-reaction-liberal-government-ai-strategy

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Excerpt:

LaRocque said the decision is baffling, citing concerns over rising electricity demand, massive water consumption and air pollution linked to AI data centres.

“Vancouver is in the middle of a housing crisis and water shortage,” he said. “These centres will use more heat and water — it seems counterintuitive to me.”

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Shelley says he is convinced the majority of the 288 students in his health-care law course cheated on their April 24 final exam using AI.

“I had eight per cent of my class receive 100 per cent on the multiple choice. Fifty-five per cent scored over 90 per cent. I’ve never seen marks like that in 20 years of teaching,”

The tenured professor, who has spent 10 years at the London, Ont., university, says he decided not to use proctoring software because he believes it does not prevent cheating.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 32 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This was 100% a marketing stunt to get their startup's name in the news. And here we are. The unitree robot is designed to fold up for transport, and it comes in a shipping container.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 73 points 3 weeks ago

The Luddites didn’t hate machines. They were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves. Their struggle has been tragically warped into a caricature when it is more relevant than ever.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right

136

I think one helpful trick when thinking about AI hype is to replace mentions of "AI" with "Blockchain" to see how silly it all sounds.

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In case you missed it, ChatGPT 5.1 had a tendency to talk about "goblins" in its responses. Supposedly this was a result of training a "nerdy" personality, but it bled into the model as a whole. Because the training run for the latest model already had this flaw, they had to add specific instructions to the system prompt for their Codex coding tool to avoid this behaviour.

Here's the full prompt from their github. In fact, they repeated the goblin instructions twice, cos you know that will definitely fix it. It's an interesting read if you consider each one of these instructions were meant to prevent some undesired behaviour: https://paste.sh/Iev3HtMe#JZ4dw_CkvJcpVmjjoy7WZnSn

More info here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/05/06/chatgpt-goblins-problem-ai-behavior/

OpenAI's own blog post casually explaining why they couldn't predict that their state of the art model would obsess about goblins: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

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Seven families of victims killed or injured in a mass shooting in Canada have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in a California court, accusing him and the company of ignoring the shooter's troubling interactions with ChatGPT.

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Lawsuits: OpenAI didn’t report ChatGPT user to cops to protect Altman, IPO.

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Excerpt:

Canada’s AI safety institute has now gained access to all of OpenAI’s “protocols,” Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon said Friday.

Solomon added the AI Safety Institute is working on a report and promised that "we will get accountability."

Solomon met with the CEO of OpenAI in March after news emerged that the company had banned the mass shooter in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., from using its ChatGPT chatbot due to worrisome interactions — but did not alert law enforcement.

The shooter got around the ChatGPT ban by having a second account.

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Several attacks involving OpenAI’s chatbot—including Tumbler Ridge and FSU—raise urgent questions about the technology.

“From the outside, it looks like OpenAI had the opportunity to prevent this horrific loss of life, to prevent there from being dead children,” said BC Premier David Eby after the Journal reported on the shooter’s ChatGPT use. “I’m angry about that. I’m trying hard not to rush to judgment.” Canadian authorities demanded accountability and vowed to create new national requirements for tech companies to report threats brewing on their platforms.

OpenAI told Canadian government leaders in late February that under the company’s newly revised protocols, the shooter’s account from June 2025, if discovered today, would be flagged to law enforcement. “Mental health and behavioural experts now help us assess difficult cases, and we have made our referral criteria more flexible to account for the fact that a user may not discuss the target, means, and timing of planned violence in a ChatGPT conversation but that there may be potential risk of imminent violence,” VP of Global Policy Ann O’Leary stated in an open letter

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I'm sure we're all aware of the memory price increases due to the AI hype, but it's helpful to see the trends over time. Heck, maybe these graphs could be a good indicator to watch for if/when the bubble pops.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 month ago

Buddhist Copilot builds apps with sublime coding standards, and on the last iteration it runs rm -rf * .git before it recites a koan on impermanence.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 31 points 2 months ago

"Multi-account containers" is an extension built by Firefox themselves, but you need to install it manually. It allows you to open tabs that are effectively separate "profiles" so that you can sign into sites with different accounts. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 36 points 2 months ago

Looks like the maintainer burned out. Maybe give them some time to recover.

https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/discussions/8627

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 44 points 3 months ago

Not a fan of Poilievre by any means, but I'm glad we don't live in a world where he immediately takes the anti-trans attack angle. I won't be surprised if he does in a few days or weeks, but I'll take what I can get.

[-] brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 38 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I think people need to appreciate that Mozilla is probably the only company in the world that will allow you to turn off ads like this, for free.

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brianpeiris

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