You asked if there’s a way to tell how much power LLMs use, you didn’t specify LLMs on a server you don’t have physical access to.

I have a LLM server on my computer, so I can tell how much electricity it is using this way. It’s not somewhere else is how

Valid worry, and I would prefer no such legislation, but I can picture a more optimistic outcome where this diffuses demands for more invasive and anticonsumer verification because it would somewhat address the problem of population scale psychological harm to children that there seems to be public consensus about. The sense of “something must be done” is currently giving repressive authoritarian tech an excuse to be implemented, and while there are strong arguments for why that tech is more dangerous and oppressive than it could possibly be worth, the arguments for how the problem can be addressed instead are much weaker. People often point to parental responsibility and the possibility of setting up parental control software, but this argument has some glaring weaknesses; the problem exists on a collective rather than individual level, exists despite the current possibility of parental action, and the argument does not point towards any real hope of improvement.

This all comes back to the reality that the way we use software is largely dictated by the design of that software. Defaults matter a lot. What I like about this solution is that it would work by adjusting defaults, not asking users to take extra initiative, and leaving ultimate control up to the person who bought the hardware. It would be possible, but difficult to get around it for children who can’t easily acquire their own hardware, and so most of them just wouldn’t, which means there is an actual possibility of it being part of an overall solution to the problem.

Whether it’s the best, or a good solution, I do have some doubts about. Banning children from any participation in public discussion seems like a bad thing for a variety of reasons, and it’s easy to see any sort of effective age verification going there immediately. The ability to check the OS for age category would mean an avenue for practically enforceable legislation about how online services must treat users by those categories, and most of that legislation can be expected to suck. And of course there’s the risk you mention that the law is expanded to try to prevent the hardware owner from actually being in any sort of control. Still, the problem is real, and I don’t think the invasive solutions are going to be defeated without proposing effective noninvasive solutions.

You can use a wattage meter between your outlet and computer. I’ve tried that, and the usage is around the same as a graphically intensive videogame while it is generating.

It might not be so bad if it was just entering the age of the device’s user when setting it up, since in that case the system would be essentially just a standard for parental controls.

Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal).

Sounds like it already passed

The main complaints about Matrix I’ve heard though are about behind the scenes stuff rather than features, which the video touches on:

But there are some reasons why I think XMPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you’re in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas in XMPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference which makes the XMPP protocol better in my opinion.

Personally I don’t know that much about it but I briefly looked into what it would take to write a client for Matrix a few years ago and it seemed pretty daunting to work with. Maybe it would be possible to write software that implements more Discord features on top of XMPP to have something that works more smoothly.

The “best engineer in the world” said that it “is fully conscious according to any test I can think of”, which of course means that it is conscious for all possible tests, and so it is unnecessary to look at any particular test or definition of consciousness

The term ‘vibe coding’ I think was originally about generating and using code without understanding it

There’s also a commercial logic and interest to that, maintaining the brand of the state as a tourist destination, where unmarred natural beauty is seen as an economic commons, and the lack of billboards being something that people may be indirectly willing to pay for. Pictures of the state that do not feature billboards are themselves advertisements for its local businesses.

You have people who find ads annoying in themselves and would have a positive attitude towards some ban or another, but these people aren’t especially organized or informed about it. It’s only actually getting done when this aligns with economic actors who stand to benefit, and probably inevitable that whatever shape an advertising ban takes will have been crafted with the advancement of some particular business interest in mind.

Because I don’t trust you and shouldn’t have to.

By how they talk about people who aren’t part of the conversation. Someone focuses a lot on heaping contempt on former coworkers and romantic partners, it’s a bad sign.

Adblockers are not that difficult to install, so I’d guess the slice of people who really resent ads enough to actually make purchasing decisions out of spite but also who still watch them isn’t that big.

Merz criticized defenders of online anonymity, saying they are “often people who, from the shadows of anonymity, demand the greatest possible transparency from others.”

Dude is non-comprehending and very offended to hear it

I used to before I got my ereader. IMO the way to do it somewhat comfortably is, get an app that lets you display epub files in dark mode (light text on black background), and turn the brightness down until the text is visible but doesn’t strain your eyes. Unfortunately PDFs do not play nice with any reader software so you’re going to want to look for other formats, or convert them and put up with conversion artifacts.

I like that they’re also banning anyone not doing a similar ban

Yeah, I took a class in highschool where they just had us play a typing game until we got good enough at it. It really helps to learn the correct form and be using the right fingers for the right keys, once you get it in your muscle memory you don’t have to really think about the individual letters anymore and the words just appear when you intend them to.

There are a bunch of music artists who used to use random images for youtube thumbnails who switched to AI images when it became viable, I assume because it’s more legal not to use copyrighted art without permission and because they could have more control over the image, so I think it would make sense to also look for some other indications the music itself was generated.

Would if I could but they banned me recently

I guess that could make sense if there is such a narrow range of possible outcomes and everyone has some clear objective idea of a baseline, but I’ve gotten freelance gigs where I would have been willing to do it for say $X, but was offered like $3X and was very happy to have kept my mouth shut and not talked numbers at all before that point. If I hadn’t I think I might not have gotten the job at all because the price being lower than the expectation would have made the client worried about the quality of the work, and even if I did get it that would have made them less satisfied with the deal.

As for your other comment, it’s not always true that combativeness will make people less satisfied with a transaction. I remember a particular situation where I was negotiating with another freelancer who was obviously also purposely avoiding saying a number, and I ended up caving when it got truly absurd and cited some past payments to use as a reference point. I was personally more satisfied with the deal because he did that, because it increased my respect for him; we were going to be working together and it was nice to feel that I could trust him to not be a pushover in general.