Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
There's no reason ethical vegans wouldn't go for ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat just isn't a great option, it's expensive and not good enough to justify it. The selling point for them seems to be that they taste more like meat than most meat substitutes but as someone who has been vegan for a while that doesn't matter to me (unless I'm trying to match a non-vegan recipe). I get Morningstar Farms products vastly more often than Beyond Meat ones. Beyond and Impossible are maybe like my 4th and 5th most bought meat imitation brands and it's not like those other brands are less salty or processed. Idk why I only ever hear non-vegans mention Beyond and Impossible.
My experience with researchers (though not in AI) is that it's a bunch of very opinionated nerds who are mostly motivated by loving a subject. My experience is that most people who think really deeply and care about what they do also care more that their work is prosocial.
These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely believe it; but let's not kid ourselves that that is actually the case. The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another.
Even funnier is that researchers (people who are supposed to be really smart) either ignore or are blissfully unaware of this fact. When you take that into consideration, the pro-social argument falls on its face, and you're left with the reality that they do this to satiate their ego.
Although the Rand corporation did contribute some ideas theoretically connected to nuclear survivability (packet switching in particular). All that work was pre-ARPAnet and don’t really motivate the design in that way.
It was designed to handle partial breaks and disconnections though. Wikipedia quotes Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director at the time as below. And has much ore discussion as to why this belief is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
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The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.[113]
So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population.
Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medical technologies) and also a huge amount of technology isn't for war. We've all worked in tech here, "The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another" just isn't true. I've at the very least developed new technologies meant to make rich assholes into slightly richer assholes. Technology is complex and motivations for it are equally so and won't fit into some trite saying.
I never claimed any techology is good or bad; you also seem to be in agreement with me that technology used in warfare _can_ have "good" applications (I mentioned that the benefits are secondary to their applications in war, that doesn't sound like me saying there are no benefits).
Lastly, the only point I was trying to make is that the argument that researchers do these things for "pro-social" causes is kind of a facade; the macro environment that incentivizes technological development *is* mostly due to government investment. Sure, the individuals working on it may all have different motivations, but they wouldn't be able to do so without large sums of money. The CIA [1] literally has a venture capital firm dedicated to the investing in the development of technology - do you really believe they are doing that to help people?
Also you mention albino and I can't find what that would mean in this context. At first I assumed you meant albedo but that doesn't seem to contextually match either. So I might just be misunderstanding your post.
You don't sign an EULA saying you can't do those things because scanning then distributing is already prohibited by copyright. The way to start a license war is to keep the status quo of these companies being able to ingest and essentially reproduce human work for free. One of my big worries about AI is that it will accelerate companies locking everything down and hoarding their own data.
I suspect it’s already has a dampening effect on individuals sharing. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to know that anything you share intending to help fellow humans will immediately be ripped and profited from by companies that want to take your job and profit from it.
I remember a couple years ago my family was worried about the Amazon burning and I was like "well, you could eat less beef as that's driving a lot of that in Brazil". Turns out they didn't care that much. With how generally hippie my family is it really made me realize how absolutely screwed we are ecologically.
I went to a military high school up until 2011 and never remember hearing it. My dad and grandpa were military for 20 years each and I've never heard either say it. It definitely hasn't been used broadly in the US for very long (maybe in very specific circles). Even my friends who work as engineers for defense contractors now have never called people "war fighters" around me.
Idk, it might've been used on stuff in the past. My point was that it wasn't a thing that normal people (even normal people in the military) would say. The person I'm responding to described it as "common use" for the last couple decades and that just doesn't match up with my experience at all.
My experience with grad school is that they are shockingly stuck in their ways when it comes to organizational practices. They make even large tech companies look nimble.
Though at least in my field part of that is budgets are so tight it seems like most of the effort is needed to just keep the lights on. I don't see anyone who has bandwidth to help burn things down or rebuild in my department as much of the staff are already working unpaid overtime (and good luck getting funding for hiring many more).
I think most people found StackOverflow to be pretty easy and useful since it's a pretty small minority of people that ever asked questions on it so many people didn't interact at all with the more annoying parts.
I ended up taking an 87% pay cut to get out of advertising specifically and tech in general (eventually it will only be a 60% pay cut once I gave enough experience in the new field). It is too bad that high pay is done by capturing value for yourself. You see this a lot in tech where open source is such a huge net productivity increase but it pays worse than other less useful things.
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
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