Yup. It's a scary time. You take some LinkedIn data, some Walmart shopping habits, a Spotify user catalog, a Google timeline, combined with Flock footage - mix it all together with "AI" - and suddenly you've got an extremely detailed profile of any individual you want. And we're only in the early stages. That is, spying, prediction, eavesdropping... The only logical conclusion to the surveillance apparatus is an evolution towards an apparatus for control. And it will be the most sinister, subtle, and undetectable type of coercion imaginable.

I just want to grill for gods sake.

I heard someone say the other day that most of the time when there's a 'bad' technology it starts off as something good that everyone likes, and gradually becomes bad over time, like social media. But AI is something a bit more rare in that it came out and the majority of people didn't especially want or like it, but it really feels like it's being 'forced' into existence, so to speak. Which makes me think there's something else going on.

People talk shit about Palantir's valuation but if it's the new Stasi OS, it's relatively cheap looking forward to a totalitarian police state.

They’re definitely not. Hard drives use a fraction of the energy a single LLM prompt does. A study calculated that every 100 words uses an entire water bottle’s worth of water. That’s a lot of cooling for 100 words. It’s very likely that these companies use several gpus for every single prompt, meaning huge servers for just a few users.

Meanwhile the internet archive has archived a significant portion of the internet with nary a data center in sight.

You can compress video. You can’t compress the energy needed to generate output.