>the photons aren't travelling in a direct path down the fiber like water down a pipe. They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable.
I know there are many other mundane technologies that can be described in sci-fi-ish way, but for some reason I'm particularly amazed by fiber transmitters being compact and cheap enough to be used in mass-produced killer drones.
Not just that but your average russian or ukrainian used expendable munition UAV that uses a singlemode fiber spool uses the cheapest and most mundane of fiber transceivers. There's no requirement for data rates above 1 Gbps, so ordinary SFP optics (not SFP+ or anything) are used, and the distances involved means it works fine with a extended range 1550nm to 1610nm reach thing that can nominally handle 40 to 80 km of fiber.
When I say data rates are way below 1 Gbps, it's because commonly you've got two things going on, a UART serial bridge from operator to flight controller board (same idea as what is implemented in RF with ExpressLRS, TBS Crossfire or similar), this is at most a Mbps or two. Then a possible live video feed over IP which will be easily under 50 Mbps.
The only thing a little bit out of the ordinary about them is that they're often bidirectional single strand optics with the prism built in, and tx/rx on different wavelengths (like 1550 and 1570, or 1550 and 1610, or whatever). Basically same thing that somebody lighting a very low cost metro dark fiber circuit might do to use only 1 strand for a gigabit or 10 Gbps link.
You can get a pretty good 1080p60 video at only 6mbps. Depends on how well the sender is encoding I guess, but it shouldn't be too much more than that.
Some of the more basic ones are a very rudimentary NTSC analog video in to H264 encoder board that is tiny in weight and power consumption. They're using the same NTSC analog video-out forward flight cameras as are used in pure analog FPV. It's also not doing really 'complex' H264 encoding. Very similar to what you would get for the H264 encoder in a cheap $60 IP (RTSP) security camera.
There's more advanced ones that take video input from a MIPI digital video interface or native HDMI input.
Not just because latency but also because of cost, size, weight, power.
I don't think his base is as happy as you seem to believe. I lurked thedonald during the early days of your Special Military Operation, and it is now as anally moderated as r/politics, r/europe, and Russian social media -- inconvenient submissions get removed, detractors get banned. the orange man will eventually shit himself in public and the commissars will ban anyone mentioning it.
a significant percentage of his supporters voted for a respite from the clown world antics of the previous administration and nothing else. the percentage of those who want neocon MIGA bullshit is insignificant, as demonstrated by him trampling over ¡Jeb! and the rest of those fucks in 2016. and now that he had definitely lost that significant chunk, I think republicans will lose the midterms and they won't be in power again until after 8 years of AOC's Clown World Pro Max happening against the background of accelerating decline of your empire.
this. leftpad as a service bullshit SaaS companies somehow raising millions was a temporary insanity driven by ZIRP and incestuous VC money currents. we see the same thing happening now with companies whose products are paper-thin vibecoded wrappers over someone else's models.
not just the internet, but every commercially published written work in existence, and I doubt their highly publicized destructive scanning thing had managed to legitimize even a fraction of a percent.
this what is permissible for Jupiter is not permissible for a cow bullshit alone should tell people all they need to know about what kind of greasy sociopaths run "open"ai and (mis)anthropic, and how seriously you should take their purported stances on "safety" and other self-serving shit.
After the blatant marketing campaigns of the summer, you mean. do you need a reminder that those very same people had touted GPT-2 as a dangerous model?
worrying about sci-fi doomsday scenarios with the current AI tech is absurd. LLMs predict the next token, that's literally all they do. they aren't going to escape into the cyberspace, self-replicate, self-improve, jump over air gaps and launch the nukes at John Connor's grandma. they can't. people pretend to believe the dumbest shit.
“We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):
* Generate misleading news articles
* Impersonate others online
* Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
* Automate the production of spam/phishing content”
“Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT‑2 along with sampling code (opens in a new window). ”
So you aren't claiming that they said GPT-2 was dangerous in the sense that it could disempower humanity, kill all humans, etc.
You are just claiming that OpenAI execs said that GPT-2 might "generate misleading news articles, impersonate others online, automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media, automate the production of spam/phishing content." Then, what is unreasonable or bad about the OpenAI execs saying this in 2019?
How did they know that people wouldn't find a way to use "the dataset, training code, or GPT‑2 model weights" to "generate misleading news articles, impersonate others online, automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media, automate the production of spam/phishing content."?
If I remember correctly, it seemed like a plausible outcome to me (especially spam and junk social media content). Was there some conclusive evidence that I was missing?
Coppicing or pollarding are both well-historied techniques that can be used to keep trees growing short. They differ significantly from topping and require a lot of expertise. They also have to be started when the tree is young
This is often not useful advice, as it is common to acquire responsibility for a tree than has been badly managed. The GP's link actually gives a solution for this case: pruning more accurately over a slightly longer period.
More generally, I've found as the maintainer of a building that while mainstream practices (of property generally, not specifically trees) often undershoot good practice, heritage techniques are often impractically expensive, and function more as a status signalling mechanism than really as a way of doing better. Even more generally, economy-wide; there is a tendency to criticise the mainstream but then promote expensive, semi-artisanal products and services, which while better, simply offer an escape valve to pressure for reform. Better techniques can only benefit the populace as a whole if they are cost reduced under the discipline of serving the mass market, not just offered as a premium version for the well-to-do.
Well I agree it'd be ideal for our society would be organized in such a way that effective semi-artisanal trades are cheaper than practices that do more harm than good.
The real advice I should've given was to construct protection for a window or hire a certified arborist to do a proper thinning of the canopy. But I wanted to remain on the topic of interest dendrology info
Someone needs to name this fallacy. The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms. I propose naming it the "GenAI Defender Fallacy".
Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.
> The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms
The point isn't to justify anything.
It's to put things into perspective, and give people a more informed and holistic point of view, and then to ask them to reconsider their opinions in light of more information. There's nothing bad about that. In fact it's a good thing.
Especially in a world where people are so easily misled by others who cherrypick unexceptional statistics and then intentionally present them as exceptional in order to generate outrage, retweets, clicks, whatever.
It's a combination of argument from analogy and reductio ad absurdum. It's not a fallacy. You're free to dispute the validity of the analogy, or you can dispute the absurdity, which you did, by confirming that you would indeed love carbon receipts for everything.
What's the goal of complaining about it though? What's more likely, you persuade people to stop all of these habits that use electricity that burns carbon, or you convert the electricity supply to renewables?
Whataboutism isn’t a fallacy and is widely misused online.
If someone says “I think x should stop because of y”. It is a valid argumentative response to say “y also occurs with z, so should z also stop?”. It is argumentatively revealing either hypocrisy, or that the original imperative relies on additional, unstated arguments/assumptions/biases.
Maybe I’m confused, but I thought whataboutism was more like “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
It’s a deflection technique, not a check on logical consistency.
> “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
no one is generally expecting or even asking for "let’s discuss that instead". what they are doing is trying to point out that your lack of of care about Y implies that you never actually cared about X in the first place but rather you only care about me doing X.
often times X is actually bad but human nature is such that no one actually cares about it while wanting to appear to when locked down on it. for this reason arguing about X directly is bad optics.
whataboustism is basically an effort to draw attention to the selective enforcement of norms, laws, morality, whatever. hypocrisy is implied.
It can also be used to derail a conversation. I.e. "I find subject X unpleasant, so I am going to imply that you don't care enough about subject Y, which has a passing similarity to it, so that the subject of the conversation turns to Y rather than X. I do not actually care about subject Y, but I won't say that out loud". See also "concern trolling".
Considering that especially leftists have spent literal decades hating on vegans for telling them about their individual footprint, there is no real fallacy here.
AI haters have somehow discovered personal responsibility. Awesome. They've never ever applied that to anything else they PERSONALLY do, though. It's only things others do. For any personal choices, suddenly it's all the governments fault or the corporations fault. No personal responsibility to be seen.
My 5-ish years of veganism have easily made up for a life time of prompting. Yet, I still would never generate video or images in part because of their impact.
How many of you non-vegan AI haters are going to be vegan now?
This is such a strange reply I don't even know what to do with it. Good on you for being vegan, and not prompting?
I have gone lacto-ovo vegetarian in the past year, so I'll take your 5 years of veganism as inspiration. Otherwise, I welcome people waking up to the harm they cause, regardless of their past hypocrisy.
Being flawed isn't the issue. Everyone is flawed. The issue is blaming people for problems like environmental damage, while at the same time needlessly causing more damage yourself. The problem is being hypocritical. Some people are certainly more hypocritical than others.
I mean, I actively advocate for better fuel efficiency standards but also haven't entirely eliminated red meat from my diet. If I'm discussing fuel efficiency standards and you call me hypocritical, even if I granted that, it doesn't seem like a useful turn of the conversation for anyone unless it's a rhetorical move to change the topic of conversation?
Advocating vs blaming. Blaming people for using inefficient vehicles when you eat red meat (assuming you eat enough red meat to have more of an impact than the fuel) is hypocritical. Advocating for better alternatives to inefficient vehicles while eating red meat is not hypocritical.
I've gone chicken only. Mostly because pork and beef are too expensive. It is very hard to get 150+ grams of protein a day on a vegan diet. And butter is in almost every delicious baked good. Avoiding it is like having the worst allergy.
Bad examples. Use meat consumption. It will blow any other kind of "non-essential" resource use out of the water, on ALL fronts.
It's really hard to believe that people care about the personal impact of their decisions, when it's only ever other peoples decisions that get talked about.
Meat is particularly ironic because it uses an obscene amount of water. Even worse, a lot of the feed for cattle comes from the imperial valley in CA, which has first dibs on the Colorado River, which is on the verge of collapsing. Obviously they aren't cutting usage.
But datacenters using water is what the public needs to fear...
No one was talking about the ethical part (which you may or may not agree with). Carbon footprint is an actually measurable quantity that we can compare - what's your problem?
that would be actually pretty cool and would cause more awareness for a lot of people. but something like this would go in both directions i am afraid, as with everything there surely would be people trying to do carbonmaxxing just for the sake of it, kind of like breaking a highscore. i am sure people like this already exist anyway, though.
It is because you know this and you continually choose to keep using it.
It’s be like if your 2001 BMW car was super fuel efficient, and then for whatever reason the 2028 model guzzled gas and you chose to buy it anyway
Just because the thing you did once upon a time was efficient, does not mean you have a lifetime pass to engage with it no matter the updated circumstances
reddit used to shared how much gold purchases went towards their server costs (pretty sure it wasn't 100% accurate but at least good to an order of magnitude). It was approximately $1/hour and they served ~100M monthly active users. So I don't think those metrics would demonstrate how wasteful traditional data centers are like you think it would.
this would be amazing, absolutely. Especially if they were able to see specifically where my power comes from, the embedded carbon in the chipsets used to serve my requests, all the costs associated with the datacenter(s), etc. A weekly breakdown would be excellent.
You must have your units really messed up because there's no way that's right. A GPU drawing 700W for 10s would be 1.9444 Wh or 0.0019444 kWh and that's if the GPU was only serving your image gen for the whole 10s which is unlikely, most of the time is probably queuing since even a much lower powered GPU in a desktop PC can generate the same image in well under 10s.
Do you have a source for 1-2.5kWh for 10s of content? It takes about a minute or two to generate, so you'd be talking about a GPU consuming 30_000W-150_000W, it's just not possible. Even if it was distributed (which I don't think it is), that'd be 30-100 datacenter GPUs running at 100% to generate one clip? There's no way that would make financial sense.
I know there are many other mundane technologies that can be described in sci-fi-ish way, but for some reason I'm particularly amazed by fiber transmitters being compact and cheap enough to be used in mass-produced killer drones.
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