dynm

I bought a google play card (or whatever it's called) with cash due to these issues. Result: Instantly rejected + locked after entering the code, no credit, no dispute, no customer service, no refund.

People are asking for evidence. FWIW, pangram classifies this post as 97% AI, 3% human.

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."

My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.

(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)

I think you're getting a lot of unfair pushback on this, when you're making some excellent points. Just to clarify, I think you're making these points:

- Existing air pollution causes a ton of harm.

- Realistically, the optimal amount of air pollution is probably not zero.

- Logically, we should treat the cost/benefit of adding this "new" air pollution the same as the cost/benefit of removing existing air pollution.

- As an absolute number, the harm caused by this facility is very large, but as a percentage it is tiny.

People seem to be interpreting your conclusion as, "therefore it's completely fine to build this facility because only percentages matter, not absolute numbers." But I think your conclusion is more like, "our society has a complex relationship with air pollution and our existing choices reveal that we are willing to accept some air pollution sometimes, so you have to do a cost/benefit analysis, not just look at costs."

I've withdrawn this claim, which I believe was overstated. Thank you for following up!

I don't want to stop anyone from debating the merits of using plants for carbon sequestration. But the ones explaining why my article did such a bad job of explaining those merits are kind of eye-opening, yes.

(Author here) I've added the word "indoor" to the title, which will hopefully make it harder to miss that this is not about climate change or carbon sequestration.

It might not be clearly worded, but 132.5 watts is the power used by 2 incandescent light bulbs, whereas 918 watts is the power present in the light produced by 765 light bulbs. The factor of 50 comes from the fact that incandescent lightbulbs are only ~2% efficient at turning power into light.

Like most people, surveillance pricing feels gross to me. But I think we need to separate two things: Surveillance pricing is a combination of (a) price discrimination and (b) surveillance.

If it were up to me, I'd probably give people much stronger legal rights to control their personal information, which would in turn decrease "surveillance".

But I haven't seen a convincing argument to ban price discrimination. There seems to be some kind of implicit assumption that price discrimination reduces consumer surplus on average. But I've never seen a convincing argument to that effect.

For example: Pharmaceuticals are often priced much low in poor countries. That's price discrimination. (You could think of it as a primitive form of surveillance pricing.) But if that were banned, pharmaceutical companies wouldn't lower prices for everyone. That would destroy almost all their revenue which comes from high prices in rich countries. Instead, they'd charge rich-country prices to everyone, and most people in poor countries would simply have to go without. That seems like it would be pure harm.

It's entirely possible that some kind of "coarse" price discrimination is OK/good but "fine-grained" price discrimination is bad. But where's the argument?

For what it's worth, I have a markdown-based website with a domain I own, and I stubbornly link to that website only, treating substack as just a temporary distribution channel.[^1] And I am constantly, endlessly asking myself if all the extra friction I've added to my life is worth it.

[^1]: I can't stand how slow and tracking-heavy substack is, but the problem of "send email and not get filtered as spam" is non-trivial.

Perhaps on brand for Meta, there appears to be no mention anywhere on this page or any of the docs pages, of any data retention policy. Maybe this is hidden in an agreement you need to sign when making an account? Has anyone actually done that?

> I'd like to know how long it takes to write a post like this.

In this case, about three weeks.

> The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.

Interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I had a little trouble understanding what the link was saying at first, but it seems to (correctly) state that many "mineral" sunscreens contain active chemical ingredients like butyloctyl salicylate. (And they're sometimes labeled as non-active ingredients?)