Thanks for adding the preprint. Also thanks for this summary, you explained it far better than I could (I left my comment in a bit of a hurry)

Diminishing returns on steroids? No, clearly we just need to pump EVEN MORE MONEY AND DATA into this

Here’s an academic article titled xm"AI and the problem of knowledge collapse". It’s paywalled though, so DM me if you’d like the pdf.

It looks more at the problem of our collective knowledge being at risk, which I think is a big thing. So much of our institutional knowledge is contained within people, and outsourcing that to AI is just a recipe for disaster on many fronts — not least of all because if an organisation ends up becoming dependent on AI, then it’s just making itself more brittle; if a model is updated, leading to significantly different performance, or it the cost model changes, then that has some big problems.

This next link isn’t an academic study, but hopefully helpful. It’s looking at how many companies are backtracking after the charging model for many AI companies meant costs skyrocketed. If IT gets people to start using AI en masse, are they really willing to be on the hook if the same thing happens with your organisation? AI is still not profitable for the people selling it, so this is unlikely to be the last time that the up the fees

I think the big beef here is that this isn’t the needs of the many, as data centres are just enriching the few and provide little benefit to the many — especially people local to the data centres

The absurd rate of data centres being built (often in places with insufficient power infrastructure) is a product of the absurd AI hype machine, and so I think it sucks that this family were forced to leave their family home for this. I am glad that the article doesn’t mention how much they were paid — not least of all because I don’t have any context for what would be a reasonable price in that part of Georgia, but because it would distract from the point of the article — the question of whether this is actually a case where them having to move was morally justified and whether this is actually benefitting the many.

Edit: I realised that the tone of my comment sounds like I’m disagreeing with you more than I actually am. I do disagree about the omission of what they were paid — I think that’s actually a good thing. Besides that though, it sounds like we’re fairly aligned in our views

Edit 2: saw your replies to other people, and I want to emphasise that I understand that this is because more power is needed, because the data centres already exist and given that the state isn’t reining in the data centre power usage, we do need more power. My stance is that I am unhappy that families like this are being forced to move because I think that before it came to this, local data centres should have had limits placed upon them to reduce the likelihood of this needing to happen.

I mean, I think this data centre probably shouldn’t have been built in the first place, but given that it has been, at minimum the state should be taking steps to reduce impact on local residents

The world would be a better place if he were diagnosed with Mangione Syndrome. I heard a health insurance CEO was diagnosed with it in late 2024, and died very shortly after

I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.

Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can^[1]:

"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes."

Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.

I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)

Edit: forgot to add the citation [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

29 year old woman. A few times a week, on average, I’d say. Potentially multiple times in a day.

When I have a partner, I tend to do it way less though, because I find that the sex is way better if I refrain from masturbating. Orgasms from masturbation aren’t particularly satisfying for me unless I try to do a whole build up that I rarely have the time or energy for.

Worth mentioning that autism makes my general sensory experience pretty weird — I’m hypersensitive to most stimuli, and that also affects touch. This feeds into my above preferences in complex ways.

I also have a few physical disabilities that mean I’m less likely to be able to enjoy sexual pleasure as much unless I’m in the right mindset (i.e. chronic pain can distract from the physical pleasure).

It’s possible that you’re ahead of the curve when it comes to knowing what you like. I had a friend who was capable of reaching orgasm through masturbation, but it took so much effort that she rarely did it. Then she had a partner who helped her to figure out her own idiosyncratic preferences in terms of what she needed to reach orgasm, and that sparked a period where she “felt like a teenage boy” with how often she was masturbating. She was 32 at this point.

I have another friend who didn’t even orgasm until she was 31 due to only having dated guys who were stereotypical straight dudes, which had calibrated her bar of what to expect super low (not just in what she expected from partners, but in terms of what sexual pleasure could feel like in general).

Another friend didn’t masturbate at all until she was 28 (with the exception of some occasional pillow humping that she would feel tremendous shame about) due to religious trauma.

Unfortunately, the society we live in doesn’t really equip women well to be able to come to understand our bodies and communicate our sexual needs. A lot of my friends in their 30s (especially the women) have said that they’re loving their 30s way more than their 20s because of this kind of thing. 30 is still relatively young, so maybe (likely in addition to a naturally higher libido) you just have figured out what you like sooner than your friends have. Maybe some of them are yet to have an awakening of some sort, and the average rate of masturbation will be higher in a few years.

“[my name], you have more punk in your little finger than I do in my entire body”.

Said to me by my late best friend, who was the punkest dude I have ever had the privilege of knowing — the kind of punk that reminds me to get angry at systemic injustice in the world rather than internalising it all and spiralling. I can’t do much to fix the world, but it’s good to be angry at the right things.

When someone gives a compliment, the weight of it is determined by a combination of what the compliment-giver values, and the values of the person receiving that compliment. For instance, I deeply value ideological pinkness, and so that compliment hit harder than if I didn’t. But even if I didn’t especially value punkness, the compliment would’ve still landed because I knew my friend deeply valued punkness.

Man, I miss the dude. But I carry him with me everywhere I go. I loved him so dearly because at the start of our friendship, he saw aspects of myself that I couldn’t see. Knowing him helped me to become who I am today, and it’s compliments like this that helped me along the way.

I like crochet or knitting. When I’m working on something, there’s usually a period where I do have to focus on the task, but once I get going, I love how I can just do it ambiently, as I’m either doing something else, or nothing at all — I used to take crochet to my university lectures, and it actually helped me to focus on the lecture.

Similarly, when I made a chainmaille hauberk, I liked how easily I could just zone out once I had a bag of rings and I just needed to interlock them, using pliers. When I was piecing all of it together, I needed to focus, but I spent tens of hours just mindlessly linking rings together

I came here to recommend SIGNALIS. One of my favourite games of all time. It’s a love letter to the genre, but also has so much of its own thing to say. I could talk for hours on this game

I genuinely think that Binface would be a better MP than Farage. That’s a low bar actually — perhaps it would be better to say that I think he’d actually be a better than average MP. Some people have gotten all pissy about Count Binface, saying that he is making a mockery of British elections, but the reason why it’s effective satire is because British politics is already a shit show; I’d argue that someone putting so much effort into trying to highlight this is someone who is actually taking the whole thing pretty seriously, and that Count Binface probably respects the system and the voters way more than Farage and his ilk

With her name she gets a lot of power in the form of a platform. Well, an initial platform, at least. I only know of her because she has been insistent on using her platform well — that is, she says things worth listening to