exchemist

I don’t think so for a minute. He’s just had a lifetime of entitlement and is now trying to minimise as much as possible the opprobrium that has finally caught up him. Nor do I think Zuckerberg is on the spectrum. He’s just talking his own book, as these guys always do.

Oh I see, yes sanding would definitely release airborne fibres.

My understanding is that it is the free fibres that are the problem. With mastic, I would imagine they are all stuck down pretty firmly and won't come free and float in the air. But one might wear gloves, I suppose.

I am currently reading "Careless People", by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a New Zealander who used to work at Meta (or Facebook as it was) and left because of disillusionment about its true goals. I have only read a quarter so far but it is already clear that, for all the high-minded talk at the time, the only real goal was more hours on-line, by more eyeballs, and collecting as much monetisable personal data as possible, with little consideration of the consequences. LLMs are fairly clearly a means to turbocharge that effort. As yet, there is almost no body of law or regulation to moderate and balance this drive of the tech corporations with what is in the public interest. The EU is working on it - which is one reason why Vance and the tech bros hate the EU more than China or Russia and desperately yearn for it to fail (Exhibit A being the new US National Security Strategy).

Is this related to Yanis Varoukaface's concept of "technofeudalism"?

It seems to me your experience in academia is very valuable. Like other posters, I feel sure AI has a big contribution to make, but more selectively than its proponents (who have a strong commercial interest) currently claim. The perceived Luddism is really just a natural reaction against something that is being pushed upon us too far and too fast and without any controls. Society is already reeling under the impact of social media, which has only recently arrived and is already causing serious damage to the mental health of our children and even to democracy itself. We have not had time to adapt to it and control it properly, though some countries are getting better laws in place as we speak. Now LLMs come along, on top of this and using the self-same channels that we are slowly trying to get under control. These plainly have the potential to make things far worse for society, especially in terms of the mental health and intellectual development of individuals and on broader social cohesion. The most problematic aspect, as I see it, is that both social media and LLMs are designed to induce dependency. The fight for personal autonomy and against dependency is as old as civilisation itself. You see it in historical concern about alcohol, nicotine and drug abuse, about overindulgence in eating, or sex, and of course about economic and political systems. So pushback against uncontrolled use of LLMs strikes me as a healthy thing. We need time to adjust to its promises and threats.

I have to correct my earlier statement. I have discovered I can actually deactivate the AI feature in my browser - and have done so.

You don't seem to know what demagogy means. The offsetting trick does not invalidate my point. While these corporations may pat themselves on the back for buying up "green" power, that leaves less to go round for everyone else. In other words, because of the net increase in power demand LLMs create, a lot of other users are forced to source power from fossil fuel sources instead of renewable sources. So the climate suffers - because of LLM usage. Yes we know. And it is irrelevant.

Irrelevant.

Is this really true, though? For instance: QUOTE Conventional search engines are the result of decades of optimization. They are designed to process billions of queries every day with incredible efficiency. A typical Google search, for example, is estimated to use between 0.3 and 0.5 watt-hours (Wh) of energy and returns results in milliseconds. These results are drawn from massive, pre-indexed databases of the web, meaning the system doesn’t have to “think” in real time — it simply retrieves the most relevant links based on your keywords. In contrast, LLMs operate on a completely different model. Instead of fetching pre-written content, an LLM processes your query and then generates a custom answer, word by word, using massive neural networks with billions of parameters. This process, known as inference, is computationally expensive and energy-intensive. Depending on the size of the model and the hardware it runs on, a single LLM query may consume between 2 and 5 watt-hours — sometimes even more. In some comparisons, LLM queries have been found to require up to 100 times more energy than a standard search engine query. UNQUOTE From: https://best.baffour.digital/llms-vs-conventional-search-engines-energy-efficiency-requirements-and-use-cases/

And Bach thought the piano would never catch on......... But then, don't you also remember the dotcom bubble? AI will of course have its place, but there is little doubt it is currently being hyped and misapplied. What makes this hype cycle especially dangerous is that it is a product liable to induce dependency (cf. cigarettes) that is being bolted onto the internet and thereby sold to billions of people by the tech capitalists, willy-nilly, without any regulatory guard rails. I even get an AI answer now every time I use my web browser. I get no say in this, even though AI responses are of zero interest to me and in fact I actively do not want them, because of the damage to the climate caused by their outsized power requirements.

Yes I could find no reference to any paper by Fowler to support any of this. Hallucinated by AI and mindlessly copied by bad lazy news organisations perhaps.

Here is a rather nice example of how US states can bypass Trump: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/16/gavin-newsom-a-loser-says-trump-california-green-energy-deal-uk I find it significant the way so many US politicians have decided to become pro-active in building or maintaining bridges to the EU and the UK. The Munich security conference has been an eye-opener. So many Democrats pitched up, from Newsom to AOC. They are sending a message that this aberration squatting in the White House should be seen as just that. I hope they are right and meanwhile it seems to me these contacts with individual states are an excellent stop-gap.

I note the terms "incisive feedback" and "framework". Is this a person, I wonder.

It’s an antifungal I think. I don’t know if it is used intensively enough to pollute watercourses.

Does it matter? Neither picture is anything like the actual physical arrangement, after all. It’s just a diagram to convey the idea of shells. It does not tell you anything about the real distribution of the electrons in space. (By the way there is something wrong with the atoms, or ions, in your picture. Neither has the right number of electrons.)

There is nothing in QM to suggest observation by a conscious or intelligent observer has anything to do with it. The popular misconception to the contrary is a result of the language used by the developers of the theory in the early days, which talked in terms of observable properties and hence of observers making observations. Pauli, for one, made it clear that “observation” referred just to interaction with the inanimate measuring apparatus employed in the measurement.

So presumably measures to reduce CO2 emission will continue to be implemented in the more enlightened states at least. Trump can’t ban EVs, wind farms and solar arrays.

I thought a lot of climate initiatives took place at state, not federal level, though. Will these be affected by this nonsense?

Encouraging. Though I imagine the fall in cement production may be due to excessive speculative housing developments, which I understand have led to a slump in the Chinese property market and left a number of real estate and construction companies seriously under water. So may be an economically driven fall rather than the result of +ve climate policies.

Yes, in my experience on these forums a lot of relativity eccentrics - I won't say cranks - and QM eccentrics too have an engineering background. I suspect it is because much of engineering is a sort of apotheosis of c.19th physics, seeming to achieve mastery over nature. This view was shaken by the advent of relativity and QM in the early c.20th, which told us a number of uncomfortably counterintuitive things about nature. (I was in fact taught 1st yr 6th form physics by a brilliant teacher who claimed to be agnostic about the existence of molecules! His degree was in engineering and he was great - at classical physics. But we got a different teacher in the 2nd year.) As Feynman said: "You don't like it? Go somewhere else! To another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy........I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something like a ball bearing on a spring when it isn't. " Common sense is not enough.

From what I have read, it seems to me almost all were young women of 18+, with agency as adults. He did get done for underage girls of course but my impression is that there has been an extension, by the media, into implying most of these women were underage girls. But is that true? How many were actually under age?

That is quite funny.

I’m not sure that knowing Epstein socially even indicates creepiness. Seems just about everybody knew Epstein: he was a vigorous, ubiquitous socialite, by the sound of it. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that most of these people were involved with Epstein’s prostitutes.

Oh yes I don’t mean to suggest it’s wrong or anything like that. Just a bit weird - and in my opinion of doubtful utility to someone trying to learn the principles of chemistry at school level.