It's pretty complex, though. If a farmer pumps water out of the aquifer directly underneath, irrigates crops, and most of the water (minus evaporation and crop biomass) is returned to the aquifer in a matter of days... is it fair to say the farmer wasted it? Modern irrigation systems easily have an efficiency of 80-90%.
Some irrigated farms in the Central Valley will be withdrawing from aqueducts, but part of the reason why the valley is dry is because we built these aqueducts, harming agricultural land for the benefit of SoCal cities, with the promise that the farmers would be able to use that water. So not sure it's fair for us to claim the moral high ground.
Much of the California water crisis is manufactured too. There's no shortage of freshwater for the foreseeable future, but we're not building new dams, aqueducts, etc, essentially relying on the infrastructure built in the 1960s and before, for a population only fraction of what we have right now. Climate change plays a role, but the bulk of the pain is self-inflicted and has little to do with growing rice or watering our lawns.
Yes and no. It's a common trope at many tech companies that these are two completely separate tracks, with no special upside to either.
But then, here's the reality: any large company will have a new for an army of directors and VPs, compared to only a handful of ultra-senior, visionary engineers. Take Google and compare the ratio of Jeff Dean-type folks to senior managerial staff collecting similar paychecks.
So yeah, if your goal is to retire early without depending too much on luck or on being exceptional, management is your career growth path. For better or worse.
It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today.
Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history.
Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.
Real estate is just a slog. It takes years to build new office space. Lease opportunities come up on weird schedules and tend to be long-term too. They're likely offloading the space they started acquiring pre-COVID, or in the first year of (when the industry was hiring like crazy), because they're not optimistic about being able to fill it any time soon.
They could probably spread things out instead, but real estate is stupidly expensive, and Google was never known for spacious accommodations (maybe except for some remote offices). I can't imagine they have any motivation to spend more if their approach worked fine for more over a decade.
I don't love it, but how many applicants walked away because of cramped open spaces? How many top performers quit for that reason? We just put up with it.
"Persuaded" is a loaded word here, and I think you're anthropomorphizing it a bit too much.
Early LLMs were very malleable, so to speak: they would go with the flow of what you're saying. But this also meant you could get them to deny climate change or advocate for genocide by subtly nudging them with prompts. A lot of RLHF work focused on getting them to give brand-safe, socially acceptable answers, and this is ultimately achieved by not giving credence to what the user is saying. In effect, the models pontificate instead of conversing, and will "stand their ground" on most of the claims they're making, no matter if right or wrong.
You can still get them to do 180 turns or say outrageous things using indirect techniques, such as presenting external evidence. That evidence can be wrong / bogus, it just shouldn't be phrased as your opinion. You can cite made-up papers by noted experts in the field, reference invalid mathematical proofs, etc.
It's quite likely that you replicated this, and that it worked randomly in one case but not the other. I'd urge you to experiment with it by providing it with patently incorrect but plausibly-sounding proofs, scientific references, etc. It will "change its mind" to say what you want it to say more often than not.
Another fairly reasonable hypothesis is the difference in account age. If you've been on Twitter for a decade, a lot of the accounts following you are just dead: people who no longer use the platform, who forgot their passwords, etc. The followers you have on Mastodon are more likely to be engaged because the vast majority joined in the past 12 months or so.
A power company is unlikely to do this, in part because they are not an industry that fetishizes growth at any cost with the value of individual users approaching zero. And in part because in many markets, they're regulated and need to provide service.
But our industry already operates this way. Google will cut you off for triggering automated rules, and good luck getting human help. AI will not make it worse; but it will be used by such businesses to give their CS the appearance of being better. It will feel like you're talking to a real person again.
Some irrigated farms in the Central Valley will be withdrawing from aqueducts, but part of the reason why the valley is dry is because we built these aqueducts, harming agricultural land for the benefit of SoCal cities, with the promise that the farmers would be able to use that water. So not sure it's fair for us to claim the moral high ground.
Much of the California water crisis is manufactured too. There's no shortage of freshwater for the foreseeable future, but we're not building new dams, aqueducts, etc, essentially relying on the infrastructure built in the 1960s and before, for a population only fraction of what we have right now. Climate change plays a role, but the bulk of the pain is self-inflicted and has little to do with growing rice or watering our lawns.