There are a lot of reasons why something could get picked up, and sustainability is very low on the list. The manufacturers don't care; they get paid the same regardless of the amount of splashback. Most businesses won't care unless it significantly reduces maintenance overhead, and that's only going to happen if splashed urine is the determining factor in how frequently a bathroom gets cleaned. (As opposed to paper towels littering the floor, supplies running out, or the various disgusting things that happen in stalls.) Even if it were the determining factor, there would likely be pushback when people realize that better urinals lead to less frequent cleanings, and I wouldn't want to be the one having to justify the switch to people. And of course, if you already have a urinal, nobody's eager to buy a new one, and nobody's eager to discuss this particular topic.
The way I would see this happening is if users insist on it. And we likely won't until we experience one of these in real life, which makes it a chicken and egg problem.
There's also the argument that splash mats are a cheaper and even superior approach. That argument is unconvincing to me, because the ones I have experienced have been mostly ineffective, but it sounds like others' experience has been better. Maybe here in the US we just don't have very good ones? As a country, we've always been pretty bad at anything that seems gross. (Not that it's all that different in the rest of the West.) We have this naive faith in the ability of dry toilet paper to clean that which it can not, and disgust at alternative approaches that actually work. But that's a different topic. (Specifically, solids not liquids!)
> that's only going to happen if splashed urine is the determining factor in how frequently a bathroom gets cleaned
If you believe in the broken windows theory, there's not one determining factor: Splashes of urine make the bathroom look dirtier and lead to people not taking care of the bathroom properly.
Huh. Having said that, I went to a movie theater over the weekend and they had a funky splash mat in their urinals. It was magical. I'd never seen one shaped like that before. (The usual ones I see have always seemed to make things worse.) Maybe I just don't get out enough.
They're already outsourcing storage, so there's no need to prove a plausible path for that.
They're already outsourcing compute to other instances within the ~same compute cluster, possibly cross-evaluation groups, so there's no need to prove a plausible path for that.
Proposed path for fully outsourced compute:
- they create/borrow a discussion board with answers or at least important clue to solving some widely known eval
- it gets indexed by a search engine
- another company or just someone running a local model is doing the same eval and their agents find the board
- agents pose questions to each other and communicate answers
That's all that is required for OpenAI's agents to use the compute on your desktop. You don't even have to go as far as agents trading information for compute, though honestly that's not very much further at all.
Nobody's watching. I'm sure they try, but I imagine the flood of things you'd need to watch is way too big, and you certainly don't want to slow everything down by having synchronous approvals (even AI-mediated).
Welcome to the AI Petri dish. Every server you set up is now potentially a sweet lump of agar for OpenAI's experiments to feed on. We are all the substrate that the AI companies are growing their next generation in. They need the real world environment to test against, and the real world environment doesn't get a say as to how it's being used.
Were they correct or incorrect in this? Whatever your answer, why do you hold that opinion?
I work for Mozilla. We fixed a ton of security vulnerabilities that Mythos found during its early period. So my bias is to be sympathetic to Anthropic's warnings.
If I were in an organization that did not have access to Mythos during that period, I would probably be biased the other way: "great, now other people have access to a tool that could probably poke holes in my security perimeter, and I'm not allowed to use them myself."
Both biases are understandable. I'm not sure who to look to for a usefully objective 3rd party opinion. And it's not like one "side" is right and the other is wrong, either. It seems like the best we can do is to justify our positions with data. (Which is itself kind of hard; the detailed information that would be relevant here is understandably sensitive, and I don't have access to most of it even for my organization. I don't even personally have access to any unfettered Anthropic models. The bugs coming in from people who do are plenty enough to keep me busy.)
Also, I'll note that even with my bias, I wouldn't claim a threat to civilization. But even the leakage after the controlled release seems a lot worse than the Y2K problem ever turned out to be, and I will note that whatever you think of Anthropic, it's clear that OpenAI is going to let the AIs cause as much damage as they need to in order to get good training and evaluations. I'm sure they're trying to keep them contained, but the evidence shows that they're only trying up to the point where it interferes with their evaluations.
You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me.
(There are also reasons why it's significantly worse than Safari, which has special privileges, so your question is valid.)
For my application, I'm still happily using gemini-2.5-flash and the only problem is when it reports being overloaded. It's for interpreting a downscaled phone camera photo of a hand-written shopping list on a whiteboard, and it works stunningly well. My handwriting sucks, too.
(I guess the only relevance here is that if your problem matches a model's strengths, then you can do fine with a model that is several generations out of date.)
I'm still leeching off the free tier, so it's going to be hard to beat the price.
But yes, I intend to support several models, to handle the overload situation (automatic failover). And switch to a cheap paid plan, though it seems like that'll mostly improve rate limits, which barely matters for my usage.
Faster is always good, though. I do care about latency.
My hypothesis: people are against data centers because they are a visible externality.
Computers are in the cloud -- so, nowhere and cost nothing. The AI-assisted search result is on a web page and only costs a little bit of screen space. Amazon may have eaten retail, but at least it ships stuff to my door, has a great selection, and employs people.
Data centers are big, noisy water guzzlers that don't do anything and don't employ enough people to matter. They don't answer questions. They don't write code for me. They don't recover my data if I lose it. If I want to take some computer-mediated action, I go to https://... not data-center://... so why do I need the damn thing uglying up my community?
To be clear, I am not saying that these are stupid or naive opinions or arguments. I'm just trying to point out the visibility aspect. There are cogent arguments why allowing a data center would be a net negative to a community even after you factor in the actual benefits it provides (which are often enjoyed by Other People Who Don't Live Here).
It is natural for us to want eg utility-style AI on tap and also not want the planet destruction that data centers bring. (Nor the brain destruction that AI brings.)
I am subsidizing data centers via my power bill, all so they can over clock them more than really necessary. I use 1 billion claude tokens a month and understand the usefulness of AI, but id wager over 80% of AI spend comes from unsolicited interactions like on google searches, or AI summaries on emails, shitty AI videos on instagram and facebook, endless garbage youtube reels they love shoving down my face...
That is the visible part that leads most people to being anti data center. The average Joe thinks "why is my community, water supply, and money going to this thing I dont want"
Good point! My argument was that the upside is invisible but the costs are visible. You're saying that the downside is visible and the costs are visible. Those hypotheses are in tension -- do people connect data centers to their upsides and downsides or not? -- but now I'm inclined to think that we're both right and it's a bit of both.
> The big bang didn't happen at a single point, it happened everywhere.
A bit of an odd thing to say, since "everywhere" implies there are multiple places to be, and at the instant of the big bang, there was only place to be. So it was both everywhere and at a single point: it was at all of the single place there was to be.
But your point (sorry) about expansion being from everywhere isn't specific to the big bang; space was expanding well after the big bang and it doesn't seem like the expansion ever had a "center" (at least, not since not-center places existed). It's expanding from everywhere. (But evenly everywhere? I have no idea. Hey, maybe black holes are like buttons in cloth, and it expanded everywhere except for where the buttons were holding things still at a rate relative to distance from the button. A brilliant hypothesis that explains exactly zero unexplained phenomena, at least none that I know of.)
Off-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reality, but anyone who interacts with them gets sucked in as well unless their own logic ("velocity") is adequate to skirt the edge and escape, forever altered by the experience.
Similar questions arise: how would you know if you were inside one? The laws of logic ("physics") seemingly don't apply, but there's no way to test them in that environment.
I dunno. Those rationalists seem to be in some kind of intellectual black hole which never had any danger of sucking me in. Like I have seen many strands of posthumanism and transhumanism, speculations about an intelligence explosion circa 1970, and figure it would have been just as much fun to sit around the campfire, pass a joint around, and talk about crazy stuff with these guys
Well, the analogy is to something flying by a black hole and having its trajectory altered.[1] It sounds like it fits you, then -- you interacted, and are now forever irritated by them or by things that sound like them, even things that you would not have previously noticed.
[1] This is just gravity, nothing specific to black holes, so the analogy isn't doing a lot of work here.
No, you're right, but it's really the ambiguity of language.
Activation energy is the energy required to trigger a result. You can read that two different ways: either as the threshold, or as the energy required to reach the threshold.
They are sadly opposites. When used to describe a person: are they high activation energy in that it takes a lot to get them going, or are they high activation energy in that they frequently do things that are hard to get started on?
The way I would see this happening is if users insist on it. And we likely won't until we experience one of these in real life, which makes it a chicken and egg problem.
There's also the argument that splash mats are a cheaper and even superior approach. That argument is unconvincing to me, because the ones I have experienced have been mostly ineffective, but it sounds like others' experience has been better. Maybe here in the US we just don't have very good ones? As a country, we've always been pretty bad at anything that seems gross. (Not that it's all that different in the rest of the West.) We have this naive faith in the ability of dry toilet paper to clean that which it can not, and disgust at alternative approaches that actually work. But that's a different topic. (Specifically, solids not liquids!)
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