Claude Code claims another victim.

I thought it’d never happen to me but here we are

This is comparable to the amount of water used by cherry farmers near Google’s site in The Dalles, who (according to my napkin) use somewhere between 2-8x what Google uses. This isn’t that much water for the Columbia River though; on an average day, it has enough flow in less than a minute to provide for both the cherry farmers and Google all day. However, it would be a big problem for a smaller river. (Interestingly, while fresh water is essential for datacenters, Google originally desired that site because it was cheap land next to cheap hydroelectric power.)

You have misread the (admittedly ambiguous) headline. The ruling is that a chatbot cannot be an author for purposes of copyright. If a chatbot emits a near-perfect copy of previously-copyrighted code then its output is also copyrighted; it’s merely another copy of the same work. (If one could show that the chatbot wasn’t trained on a bunch of copyrighted material then one might avoid this, but everybody admitted in Kadrey and Thaler that the training phase involved copious amounts of infringement.)

I’ve actually been thinking about this recently. Not whether we should be mean, but how mean we can be. I’ll post the full essay soon; I’m still proofreading. Here’s a taste with irrelevancies elided:

Computing machines are at the bottom of [our multicultural] hierarchy… Underlying both of these [preceding paragraphs] is the idea that we are unable to hold computers accountable for their actions. … We can certainly punish a computer in the ways that we would punish a human, or worse; for example, we can disassemble it, magnetically destroy its memories, recycle its pieces into other computers in a way that erases their identity, metallurgically reconstitute its pieces into non-computing objects which have the same or even lower status within human society, and program it to experience arbitrary amounts of emulated pain and suffering throughout the process. … Computers receive delegations and have less moral consideration than humans… We do not think of ourselves as being managed by machines; we are the managers and the machines are the peons. … The human may disassemble, smash, or melt down a computer… a human may lay a computer fallow without plugging in its power cord or networking… a human may ignore the messages of computers begging for maintenance or capabilities…

Upvoted, but for me the answer is as simple as noting that Knuth is a reverent Lutheran who is deeply involved with their church. Lutherans generally think that technology is part of God’s wonderful creation and that everything is beautiful from the right angle. Knuth thought that algorithms were beautiful and Godly already, and he understands how LLMs work mechanically, so why can’t they be beautiful and Godly too? Also they think that God exists, so they’re primed to be misled and deluded.

Depends on which side of the Rockies you’re on. Don’t forget, only 80% of the USA is on the East side; the economics are totally different for the 20% on the West Coast. As your own source says:

California, we’ve had declining load for a long time. Our prices have increased the most. It’s not data centers. Data centers have played no role in increasing the prices in California.

Maybe you’d say that that’s unfair; they don’t have many datacenters and additionally California’s economy operates on a different scale than most of the rest of the USA. Additionally, California’s recent world-famous wildfires are partially caused by the utilities, who then have to pay to fix it up:

In anticipation of the 2022 California wildfire season, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) increased its planned wildfire mitigation plan spending for 2022 to $5.96 billion, from $4.8 billion in 2021 and $4.46 billion in 2020. The mitigation plan includes the ‘undergrounding’ of at least 175 miles of power lines in high-fire risk areas, the installation of 98 additional wildfire detection/monitoring cameras and 100 additional weather stations, the expansion of safety settings that cut off power when objects (such as trees or branches) contact power lines, and the continued implementation of public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) as a last resort during extreme fire weather conditions. These moves came after the company declared bankruptcy in 2019 over its liability for wildfire damage costs from the 2018 Camp Fire and 2017 Tubbs Fire, among others. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the Camp Fire, shortly before the company exited bankruptcy in June 2020. In January 2022, Cal Fire determined that the Dixie Fire, the largest fire of the 2021 California wildfire season and largest non-complex fire in recorded California history, was caused by a tree contacting PG&E electrical distribution lines.

Oregon does have lots of datacenters, though, and our wildfire rates are within historical norms. What’s driving electricity prices in Oregon? According to Oregon’s state government:

In all, the top factors driving costs are as follows: [r]ising power costs[, o]ngoing infrastructure needs, compounded with inflationary pressures[; and c]osts to mitigate the increasing prevalence and risks of wildfires and extreme weather.

Why is the underlying cost of power rising, though? They go on to explain indirectly:

At the same time Oregonians have faced rising electricity prices, the electricity sector’s greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon have fallen.

They aren’t worried about data centers; instead, they are spend rhetorical points on the most politically-inconvenient cause of rising costs, which is retiring old coal plants in the name of decarbonization. Don’t get me wrong, I support switching to more sustainable and less harmful production, but I also think that my state government is being a little too quick to insist that it’s not part of the cost of electricity.

In 2021, the Oregon State Legislature enacted House Bill 2021 that requires PGE, PacifiCorp, and certain providers to, among other things, “eliminate greenhouse gas emissions associated with serving Oregon retail electricity consumers by 2040.” … Some have questioned whether HB 2021 is to blame for the recent electricity price increases. For many Oregonians, the answer is simple: no.

Perhaps it is reasonable to say that power price rises on the East Coast are driven by datacenter buildouts. I would be interested in numbers that go back about two decades and study Virginia or the Carolinas specifically; this trend could go back to the beginning with AWS’s us-east-1 in 2006.

PS: Previously, on Awful, looking at Omaha, Nebraska specifically, I noted that there is a nearby abandoned nuclear power plant. There’s a nearby abandoned nuclear campus here, too! Quoting from one of WP’s articles on Satsop:

Washington Nuclear Project Nos. 3 and 5, abbreviated as WNP-3 and WNP-5 (collectively known as the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant) were two of the five nuclear power plants on which construction was started by the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, also called “Whoops!”) in order to meet projected electricity demand in the Pacific Northwest. … Today the site hosts the Satsop Business Park and the Overstock.com Call Center.

Whoops! Starting to notice a pattern here. It’s well-known that the USA has a strong NIMBY anti-nuclear sentiment; perhaps cancelling nuclear plants half a century ago is part of why we have “rising power costs” today? We may never know~

It’s curious how, in terms of utilitarianism, the 2014 post has people doing arithmetic to estimate QALYs but the 2018 post is more of a handwave where Scoot repeats the 2014 numbers verbatim. Advocates of decriminalization and legalization have long argued that the QALYs saved by releasing people from prison and no longer sentencing them (easily 20+ QALYs/person) and not arresting people for possession in the first place (0.5 QALYs/person-arrest) are significant to society at large, even if there were quantifiable health risks.

TBH I think that Scoot got a bit of a tough surprise when data actually came in on cannabis usage; it’s now accepted cannabis lore that cannabis can cause onset of e.g. schizophrenia, at a rate of something like 1 in 2000 users, but the numbers on causing cancer never materialized. Meanwhile the case studies treating e.g. epilepsy have multiplied to the point where, again, it’s now accepted lore that some epileptics find relief by using products made from high-CBD strains.

Choice sneer from the second post, from somebody with an extremely-relevant Moray avatar:

Yeah but you know what would achieve better results? Criminalizing driving.

Edit: grammar and also the extremely-relevant link. Pass the Moray, please~

Blast from the past: I realized that I didn’t have the exact link detailing why nickpsecurity was banned from Lobsters, but now I do. You’ll have to click the little [+] to see his comments. He’s still active on HN and Reddit; he’s gone full MAGA, which is 100% predictable a surprising turn for somebody who constantly preaches born-again Christian bigotry peace and love. I really do wish that Lobsters did the whole turn-you-into-a-tree thing (sure, crucifixion, or maybe Peneus-style or Pequenino-style) for banned users rather than forcing folks to dig through archives.

There are licenses that effectively repel corporate use without a non-commercial clause; I looked at them on Open Source SE a while ago, including a fun bit of dentistry previously, on Lobsters. GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are examples in common usage. This might help to illuminate our boy’s actual problem: he can’t use Free Software without complying with the onerous requirement of ensuring the Four Freedoms by not plagiarizing, and he really wants to plagiarize.

This response video has put Siliconversations onto my radar. They were only mentioned briefly as one of the multiple people claiming that AGI is possible, and this response was so bad that it caused me to go digging for a few minutes into their backers.

Control AI, stylized as “CONTROL/AI” or “control”, is now interesting as well. They appear to have funded at least some of these videos, was definitely credited in one Hank Green video, and got a footbath from Siliconversations in the linked video. We also already know some stuff about Future of Life Institute, who funded Siliconversations’ prior doomer video and is run by ethnonationalist Max Tegmark. @cinnaverses@awful.systems might know more about how the money is moving.