From a systems perspective, civilization is the greatest pollutant. Whether it's Mesopotamia, Rome, industrial Britain, or the modern global economy, each civilization is a complex machine that extracts resources, generates waste and disrupts ecosystems. There’s no version of it that’s truly sustainable long-term, just degrees of delay or harm reduction.
There is absolutely nothing special about beef. We could replace beef with palm oil, lithium, air travel, or even data centers. The same system logic applies: convert energy and resources into power, growth, and order, while displacing entropy elsewhere.
A clean planet is a planet without civilization. This is a factual observation, not nihilism.
So you are saying that we should adhere to a binary logic, where we either accept the destruction of the Earth as a fact, or we form a doomsday cult ?
I don't understand. It is quite clear that we are what is polluting the planet, sure.
There are multiple ways to reduce our impact and try to reach some sort of balance. Of course everything is imbalanced right now, we are only a couple of generations after the industrial revolution after all.
Of course it is. Every civilization so far has ended due to internal collapse. I'd love to hear arguments and evidence about why you believe our society is on a different path.
To begin with, a planet can be "dirty" without any civilization. Most planets are. Look at Venus. Our own planet had already gone through 5 mass extinction events before we came up. The Great Oxigenation Event in particular does look like "pollution until planet death" without any civilization involved.
On the other side, it possible to have clean civilization - even one that cleans up more as it advances. You make it sound like it's an inherent problem - like civilization is "by definition" unclean. That is not at all the case. We have seen it is possible. What it isn't, is (as) profitable as simply not dealing with the externalities.
> To begin with, a planet can be "dirty" without any civilization. Most planets are.
They can also be clean. Look at Earth. Don't see an argument here. We are discussing whether civilization pollutes or not, not whether planets are inherently habitable or inhibitable.
Fair point. I was too dismissive in my earlier response, and I apologize. You raised strong and valid arguments. My perspective is shaped by a long pattern of historical collapses, but I’d truly welcome any examples or evidence that point to a different trajectory.
Any living creature would fit that definition of "civilization". A sponge takes up resources from its environment, and releases its waste products into the environment. Non-native species often disrupt ecosystems when introduced somewhere new. So unless you moderate your argument by including some required scale it doesn't make any sense. But it would follow that we could reduce resource inputs and outputs to such an extent that civilization is no longer harmful, which puts a damper on your statement that this is "factual observation, not nihilism".
> Any living creature would fit that definition of "civilization"
It would not. I said civilization "extracts resources, generates waste and disrupts ecosystems". A sponge does not disrupt its ecosystem. In fact, it keeps it alive.
> Non-native species often disrupt ecosystems when introduced somewhere new.
And how does this happen exactly? Non-native species do not just walk around - you need humans and civilization to move them around, and create exactly these kinds of issues.
Ultimately it's about the energy invested to on one hand keep civilization running and on the other dispose of its products in a non-disruptive manner. There's an overabundance of it from the sun, we just haven't scaled up our means of extracting it.
A solar panel throughout its lifetime gathers way more energy than is required to produce it and later turn into materials for new solar panels. There exists a process for that and I'm sure eventually legislation will follow as the number of end-of-life panels grows.
I think OP is saying it's impossible to have no impact - both theoretically and practically.
From a theoretical perspective, that sunlight on your solar panel isn't free - there was some tree or plant who would have used it if you had not.
Even if you build over the ocean, there would be some algae grown with that light and fish who ate the algae.
From a practical perspective, good luck making and deploying huge amounts of solar panels without huge mines for materials, a big road network cutting through the forest to deliver the parts, huge cities for people to live in who operate the factories etc.
> From a theoretical perspective, that sunlight on your solar panel isn't free - there was some tree or plant who would have used it if you had not.
Actually, no. Plants typically use just the two chlorophyll bands and the carotenoids band and they really don't need all of the 1000W/m2 of solar radiation - you see this in how plants in direct sunlight turn red to absorb less. For the same reason they're typically green, not black.
On top of that the Earth's albedo is 0.367 - much of the energy which reaches our planet is reflected back to space.
I was addressing this comment:
> There’s no version of it that’s truly sustainable long-term, just degrees of delay or harm reduction.
Yes, we have an impact on the ecosystem, no matter what we do. But the ecosystem is also able to regenerate and sustainability is just a matter of not straining it beyond that ability. It's entirely feasible, we just need to scale up certain technologies available today.
Ecosystems can repair themselves from moderate amounts of damage and adapt to coexist with the thing that causes it. The problem is that we're causing too much damage too quickly.
It's also entirely possible to sustain a civilization without causing continuous damage to the planet, it just isn't allowed to be constantly growing in population and resource consumption. That's not a necessary part of civilization, it's just the way we're doing it currently.
> That's not a necessary part of civilization, it's just the way we're doing it currently.
All civilizations including ours have been doing it this way, so you can argue it is a part of the civilization. It’s a comforting fiction that humanity can fundamentally change its character, but the history proves otherwise.
The knowledge that our growth harms the environment and will end up destroying the planet and us along with it has not been front and center in those civilisations, so it's not a fair comparison.
Apple is simply continuing to do what Apple does best - building strong products and protecting their ecosystem.
Does that mean some vendors will be treated unfairly? Of course.
Does it mean Apple users will remain happy? Absolutely.
If there is one OS that is anti-tinkering by design it is iOS, and yet people keep criticizing this intentional design decision that forms a large part of Apple’s moat.
Clearly not ALL users are happy because users of non-Apple watches are unhappy that their watch can do things with Android it's not allowed to do on iOS.
It's not reasonable to make a blanket absolutist statement like that.
Language helps us shape our thoughts, in a way a ruler helps us draw straight lines, but thoughts do not begin with language.
Our thoughts and ideas come from an unknown source. We might call it intuition, but scientifically speaking, it remains a black box.
Lethologica - a temporary inability to remember a particular word or name - is one evidence of this. You can have a fully formed thought in your mind, but be unable to express it with words.
This "AI detecting AI" method is a lost cause and a distraction from a larger problem of AI regulation.
The success of generative AI depends on producing human-like content, and the models are only improving. This means the signal used to detect the AI will only grow weaker, causing detection technology to fail more often, get more expensive, and end up with diminishing returns.
From a cost and accuracy perspective, Twitter's community notes system is a far superior solution, albeit a low-tech one.
What we need to do is regulate watermarking at all levels of the content pipeline: production, editing, and reproduction.
This involves prescribing mandatory watermarks for AI tools, ensuring they cannot be removed by digital editing software (and making it illegal to do so), and finally, ensuring all software dealing with the production, editing, or reproduction of content must display the watermark information to the users.
In practical terms, this means that if you get a video produced by SORA, it will have a watermark. If you use it in Adobe Premiere, Movie Maker, or another video editing tool, you will see but won't be able to remove the watermark. If you add filters, the tool might add a piece of history to the video clip indicating you made an edit. When you output a final video file, the watermark in your clip is preserved and displayed to anyone watching your video, including any editing notes added by your tool.
This is a tall order, but achievable.
It is not bulletproof by any means, and someone would inevitably find a way to crack the technology and remove the watermark.
But this happens in software all the time - the goal isn't to make the technology impossible to crack but to make it incredibly hard to do so, which protects the large majority of parties involved.
Any word can become generic when overused. As more people get access to Grammarly and CharGPT, more of them will apply the same recommendations, turning previously rare words into generics.
Chose your words carefully, if lucky you might find some that only fit you.
Thus therefore to provide an example thereof one may replaces all instances of "important" or "essential" with "splendid", "brilliant" "magnificent","gorgeous" or "sophisticated".
—"The carriage of goods under international commercial law is a sophisticated and gorgeous aspect of international trade."
Looking at the screenshots in the article, the readings are wrong. You are reading the first number as if that's the amount of JS being loaded, but it's the second number (i.e. if it says 6 MB / 3MB, it's 3 MB of JavaScript, out of 6 MB total page size).
Excellent work. This is a perfect demonstration of how valuable content curation can be, paired with an excellent presentation and user experience. You made it much easier to discover interesting people in the corners of the Internet, and I am grateful for that.
From a logical standpoint, questioning whether Consciousness "exists" is ludicrous. Consciousness is the foundation of our capability to observe the world around us and make conclusions about it. Protons, electrons, atoms, molecules and other phenomena do not exist outside of our Consciousness and we cannot prove absolutely anything about the world that is not a part of our Consciousness. Therefore, if something is to be questioned, it is our strange desire to prove the existence of the only thing we are directly experiencing all the time - Consciousness. It's like a computer program becoming aware of itself and trying to find that awareness in the source code. It's not there.
There is absolutely nothing special about beef. We could replace beef with palm oil, lithium, air travel, or even data centers. The same system logic applies: convert energy and resources into power, growth, and order, while displacing entropy elsewhere.
A clean planet is a planet without civilization. This is a factual observation, not nihilism.