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4·2 days agoWhat you want to rent a bridge instead? Get roommates for your bridge?
5·2 days agoThe FAO, unfortunately, has quite a history in downplaying things and sticking their thumb on the scale in favor of the meat and dairy industry on things like this
In a sign of the atmosphere in the FAO at this time, a fourth veteran insider, “Mary Wagyu”, claims to have been admonished after preparing Meatless Monday leaflets for distribution in the cafeteria of an FAO heads of state food security summit in 2008. “Remove and destroy them,” a senior FAO executive said, according to Wagyu. “These will not be put in people’s trays.”
In 2009 a second FAO report called Livestock in the Balance was delayed for several months while the FAO’s leadership tried to dilute references to harm caused by the meat industry, arguing that this had already been covered by Livestock’s Long Shadow. When the research team resisted the pressure, management stepped in and manually rewrote key passages over their heads, sparking what Steinfeld called “a mini-revolution”. About a dozen staff members involved in preparing the report withdrew their names from the paper in protest.
[…]
Between 2012 and 2019, “the lobbyists obviously managed to influence things”, Holstein said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism. You had to accept relatively small steps forward in changing the narrative on livestock.”
Steinfeld added that meat lobby representatives and diplomats would talk to senior FAO managers and encourage them not to invest in work that dealt with environmental impacts.
Graph from the article:
Per capita beef consumption is down slightly, but not as much as chicken / poultry consumption has increased. People are generally eating much more meat overall per capita. Chicken and poultry still have a pretty heavy emissions profile, it’s just that beef is somehow worse. The net increase in meat consumption is still a massive net negative on the climate
In terms of ethics, switching to chicken results in significantly more induvidial chickens being killed because of their lower slaughter weight. The factory farms that house the vast majority of chickens keep growing larger and larger and quite disturbing. This is true around the world. For example just in England alone, there are at minimum over 700 factory farms for chickens, four of which have over a million chickens
3·3 days agoOne way we can help nudge that is to reduce the demand for fish overall and go for for plant-based foods instead. Illegal fishing is unfortunately quite rampant even for places that ban specific practices. It’s really hard to ban enforce bans when most of it all happens quite far away in the oceans
>>> print("proof by counterexample in a python REPL") proof by counterexample in a python REPL >>> x = 2; print(x) 2 >>> print("this is not ignored"); print("it's just mostly useless"); print("but you can use as many as you want") this is not ignored it's just mostly useless but you can use as many as you want
Not sure I get the joke?
Agreed that land and water are smaller compared to agriculture, but the electricity usage change is significant. The LLM boom is unlike prior datacenter workloads. The electrical demand is far higher due to the more power hungry chips and running them at full utilization. It’s projected to go from 5% to 15% of all US electrical demand in quite a short amount of time
This is delaying the closures of fossil fuel plants (here’s an example of 15 coal plants in the US last year), and starting to rely more heavily on generators to install capacity faster despite solar/wind being far cheaper
1·12 days agoI have worked on open source projects. I cannot fork sheer number of projects going towards LLMs alone. This is a losing proposition. Open source is not an individualistic action. This is a collective action, and we need developers of open source to live the values of open source
someone else can pick up from here
A big point of my comment earlier was that making a project increasingly LLM generated makes it harder for someone to pick up as quickly. A huge amount of complexity can be added insanely fast. In this rsync example, the entire testing system was changed overnight (while generating issues in the process). The projects become harder to work on in general
EDIT: also to add, this still has the issues of not knowing where the un-copyleftable code lies and/or having to rework large portions of the project are if you want to keep that
deleted by creator
That framing is missing a lot. Open source software is way more than about using the code. For me, it is not the bugs and quality that concern me most about things like this (though I do have concerns with that too). It’s about the broader issues with LLMs in terms of cooperate power, environmental impact, etc. Calling it out is less about any one project and more about stopping the whole open source ecosystem from spiraling into an LLM-dependent mess. LLMs themselves can easily become the death of FOSS in a broader sense
LLMs flip the power dynamics of development on their head. For starters, the outputs are likely no longer copyrightable in many jurisdictions, which undermines copyleft licenses (rsync is under GPL for example).
The kind of code that LLMs generate also tend to add complexity rather fast where it becomes more and more difficult for any human to understand it. Becoming dependent on LLMs makes development more of a question of computing power rather than effort. Companies will be able to spend more than you. FOSS will not be able to compete nearly as well. It’s also an inherent dependency on big tech companies who will be happy to exploit that the second they can or cut you off it you start to hit their bottom line. Software cannot be free in terms of freedom if modifying it in a reasonable amount of time starts to almost require a tool controlled by someone else
Using “Open Source” (which has somehow become “public weights” to most) / local LLMs are hardly freedom from this either given that they will always be behind given the massive financial costs to make models, unlike traditional software. If you find any advantage or way to reduce resource usage to make a better model, the bigger tech companies will just quickly scale that up far bigger than you can and meet or exceed what you have. It still just as well makes your ability to modify software dependent on the hardware you have. How free is open source software if it becomes increasingly difficult to modify without an expensive GPU?
No other way to review long patches besides LGTM says only profession that keeps doing that
Corn is about evenly split between ethanol and animal feed in the US. That’s also based on USDA numbers that under count the amount going to animal feed by excluding exports and excluding more indirect ways corn go to animal feed
Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn. […] Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/
Not who are replying to, but I’ve got some good news, moving to plant-based diets is also better for wild animals too
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
And not only that but fewer crops are needed for animal feed so less disruption overall from that end too
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
Almost all of the latest commits on the project now :/
https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commits/master/
Not that datacenters are great, but agriculture should not be glossed over like that. The place the water goes for agriculture is not where we want / need the water to go. I.e into the plants moved elsewhere and into the air carried away. It depletes these waterways
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
“meanwhile it’s eternally captured by a data”
The closed-water loop systems are that concerning water-usage wise at all. They don’t use as much water. It’s the open-loop ones with evaporation tower that use much more water. Those also go into the air and flow somewhere else, same as it is with agriculture
“if not contaminated with chemicals too”
Runoff with pollution from datacenters is more of an issue from construction from my understanding rather than the cooling (not that this isn’t an issue!)
It’s worth noting that agriculture has continuous problems with runoff. Fertilizer and manure runoff is a massive concern from agriculture, often a massive one for local water quality. For instance, one region in NZ needs a 12x reduction in the dairy industry nearby just to meet safe drinking water standards
And that place is not where we want / need the water to go. I.e into the plants moved elsewhere and into the air carried away. It depletes these waterways
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
It’s around 15% exported in the American west and 4% nation wide. That’s not nothing, but it’s mostly for domestic consumption, the headlines about it are kind of misleading by making it sound like a majority
Alfalfa is the third largest economic product in the US, but only 4% is exported annually. In the western states, however, which are high producers close to shipping ports to major export markets like China, Saudi Arabia and Japan, about 15% is exported each year
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/california-water-drought-scarce-saudi-arabia
Current datacenters are much more concerning environmentally for their electricity usage. The previous 20 years before the current LLM boom, their electrical usage was more or less flat. In the US, it’s now estimated to go from 5% of the US electrical demand to 15% in the next few years and is delaying fossil fuel plant closures
The water usage is concerning in some local situations (often more so from pollution from poor construction) for various data centers, but agriculture and especially animal agriculture really does dominate water usage in water scarce areas and is enormously wasteful with water. For instance, in the American West, it’s mostly all going to animal feed where plants for human consumption use significantly less
This is not to say it’s good that it’s using this water. Just that we really should actually also be very much concerned about the agricultural impact because it’s horribly inefficient. Producing animal products is massively inefficient
10·14 days agoSpeaking broadly: Plenty of other issues or security vulnerabilities can exist that a good sandbox won’t catch. Like software can insecurely store and transmit passwords, have bad randomness for something security sensitive, secretly be mining crypto behind the scenes and burn through battery/electricity, etc.
Animal agriculture is especially worse because it plainly demands much more agriculture to happen due to it’s inefficiencies. It requires growing huge amounts of animal feed where most of the energy is lost. Even it’s best case is bad compared to the worst case for eating plants directly
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html