Colby Brown @colby@transportation.social

2020: Microsoft sets goal to be carbon negative by end of the decade.

2023: Microsoft's emissions are 30% higher than in 2020.

Main cause? The relentless push to meet AI demand, which requires new data centers built out of carbon-intensive steel, cement, chips.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/microsoft-s-ai-investment-imperils-climate-goal-as-emissions-jump-30

What good is AI if you don't have a planet to use it on?

Microsoft released its 2024 Sustainability Report on Wednesday, and it's mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft's emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to "new technologies, including generative AI."

https://au.pcmag.com/news/105283/microsofts-emissions-spike-29-as-ai-gobbles-up-resources

The Great Lying Machine is eating our environment and spewing out toxic misinformation. Big Tech has become a clear and present danger to all our futures.

Tokyo has BBBase, a train designed for road cyclists to take their bikes out of the city for a ride.

It has big, comfortable seats and special racks for road bikes.

I am an old white guy with no bicycle. I'm sure everyone is wondering what the heck I'm doing on this train on an early Saturday morning. 😂

Bullet 1: Led by Netanyahu, Israel has killed 14,000 children, and 9,000 women in Gaza. And now Netanyahu ends press freedom by shutting down media and seizing their equipment.

Bullet 2: ICC prepares arrest order of Israeli leaders for their actions, and Netanyahu calls it a lasting stain on justice.

The Israeli people deserves better leaders.

I know the joke for May 4th is May the Fourth Be With You.

I prefer Metaphors Be With You.

travel by rail and discover a world beyond the litter box

#Caturday

The TinyChart-3B LLM answers questions about data visualizations. It can also generate underlying data from a dataviz and Python code to re-create a similar chart.

Demo on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mPLUG/TinyChart-3B

Code: https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/TinyChart

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16635 8 authors from the Alibaba Group and Renmin University of China

#GenAI #LLMs

The results are in, after seeing about 800 boosts on the post to see how the Mastodon embed actually affects our server load. Here's what happened....basically nothing for us.

OMG just got a CAPTCHA with an honest to goodness Treachery of Images "is this a pipe" problem

This is truly one of the more baffling decisions I’ve seen in a long time. Tesla is a leader in charging infrastructure, to the degree that virtually every other carmaker is even adopting its standard.

Then Elon Musk laid off the entire Supercharger team.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/30/24145621/tesla-layoff-supercharger-ev-charging-nacs-elon-musk

#tesla #elonmusk #tech #cars #evs

Everyone seems to be obsessed with passive income but I’m set on passive-aggressive income, so you should probably pay me back if you care even the slightest amount about our friendship and how much I thought it meant to you.

Loops is a new platform for sharing short videos, and it's open source + federated using #ActivityPub

We're really excited to share this sneak peek that showcases the new onboarding flow and discovery features (Connect Mastodon) and look forward to the upcoming beta release!

Are you ready for #Loops ?

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely - not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

1/

This is the coolest project and I highly recommend checking out an e-bike. It can be life-changing.

@crschmidt is behind the project

#BikeTooter

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/somerville-camberville-e-bike-lending-library-loan-free/

Let's be clear. There is no place for antisemitic harassment or violence on campuses or anywhere else. None.

But protesting the slaughter in Gaza is not in itself antisemitic, and having armed police arrest peaceful student demonstrators is never acceptable.

"Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity." - Lewis Mumford in 1955.

We’ve known this for a LONG time, but we’ve put massive energy, money, space, and time into pretending we don’t know it.
#InducedDemand #lawofcongestion