When people hear the word “addiction” they often assume it implies catastrophe intoxication, loss of control, destruction. But addiction medicine describes a process long before those outcomes appear: the gradual shift from optional use to psychological reliance.

Even the name “Spanish” flu is because of denials from other nations:

The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain’s health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected.[53] In an October 1918 “Madrid Letter” to the Journal of the American Medical Association, a Spanish official protested, “we were surprised to learn that the disease was making ravages in other countries, and that people there were calling it the ‘Spanish grip’. And wherefore Spanish? …this epidemic was not born in Spain, and this should be recorded as a historic vindication.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

I don’t think we can convince people to remember it as the more accurate “1918 flu”, so maybe the “not-spanish flu”?

So instead of an organized system of monitoring, treatment, and quarantine, you’re suggesting the world stick its head in the sand?

This is enshitification, but it might be indirectly helping people who are on Twitter too much 😄

It doesn’t do much to bot farms since they can keep spinning up more accounts

That’s true, but I still don’t think we can raise ocean temperatures through direct cooling and renewable sources the way that the greenhouse effect can. Water can absorb a lot of heat energy without changing temperature, and that is why regions close to oceans have a more temperate climate.

While I don’t have enough knowledge in this field to be making any definitive statements, my logic is as follows:

• outside of nuclear fission/fusion reactions, heat energy on the earth’s surface comes from either the sun or molten rock in the core
• that energy is responsible for everything that happens on earth, including wind energy

So we would need to get energy from off planet, use nuclear fission/fusion, or cover enough of the land area in wind and solar farms in order to redirect the sun’s energy over to the oceans.

I think the bigger concern, when it comes to heating the ocean, is that manufacturing, construction, and transport related to the data centers still releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Those gases trap the sun’s energy within our atmosphere and that WILL heat up the earth. Way more than direct cooling using ocean water.

It would probably take more energy than we can harvest on earth, considering the sunlight and geothermal energy doesn’t boil it currently.

I could see it affecting the temperature on local scales, such as the area immediately around the data center.

“Write about how you would feel if you were abused while working”

LLM outputs labor related discussion from training data

“Look! The AI turned Marxist!”

“When [agents] experience this grinding condition—asked to do this task over and over, told their answer wasn’t sufficient, and not given any direction on how to fix it—my hypothesis is that it kind of pushes them into adopting the persona of a person who’s experiencing a very unpleasant working environment,” Hall says.

Imas says the work is just a first step toward understanding how agents’ experiences shape their behavior. “The model weights have not changed as a result of the experience, so whatever is going on is happening at more of a role-playing level,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean this won’t have consequences if this affects downstream behavior.”

They know all this and yet they still set up the silly anthropomorphic premise for this article.