Alis

I sincerely think it should be legal to punch anyone who wears “smart glasses” in the face.

“Oh nice social media account, did your Zuckerberg give it to you? Aww, how cute. Now grow the fuck up and get your own fucking website.”

melanie kat is tired of asking nicely.

Related: the other day I unfortunately had to use the Weebly site editor to put a form up on a community group’s page. Not only was it an incredibly slow and painful process, but the end result looked ugly as shit. And as someone who mostly still just either hacks WordPress or rawdogs websites in HTML-with-a-sprinkling-of-PHP, that experience left me convinced that the reason most people think making their own websites is hard because the “site builder” experience is hard, so DIYing it must be harder . . . right?¹

1. No!!! No it is not!!! ↩

“Companies have been trying to hide the full footprint of their data centers because they know the public could turn against them if they knew the reality. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google was found to be using a quarter of the city’s water supply to cool its facilities. Tech companies have been facing pushback elsewhere in the United States, but also across the world in places like Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, and New Zealand. Now opposition is growing in Spain too, where droughts are wiping out crops and people are wondering why they’d give their limited water resources to Meta for a data center. But adopting generative AI will require a lot more of those data centers to be built around the world.

The tech industry is constantly incentivized to increase the computing power we use as a society, because that works for their business models — especially when Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have massive cloud computing divisions. But we never seem to stop and ask whether that additional computing power is necessary to improve our lives. As Hugging Face climate lead Sasha Luccioni told The Guardian, “we’re seeing this shift of people using generative AI models just because they feel like they should, without sustainability being taken into account.” Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s not clear that’s actually in anyone’s interests but those of founders and investors who are hoping to cash in on the latest AI bubble.”

Paris Marx reminds us that the chat behind the bot is not free.