Am sad to report that a friend and I went to a very authentic Hunan restaurant, added stinky tofu to our order, was told by the waiter "No that's only for people from China, you won't like it," we both said that we were excited to try it, received it, and in fact couldn't eat it

The waiter looked very satisfied when he saw the full plate

I reference this Onion headline at least once a week at this point

My openness to experience score rapidly falling

I asked Claude to make a 15-letter version of Wordle where I get 15 guesses and I have to admit I'm a little mad

Used to think "knowing how to cook" meant having a massive set of built-up intuitions for how complex flavors pair well or how to get just the right consistency and texture in food but it turns out when people say that they mean "the ability to read"

It depresses me to see how many young people have reoriented their entire belief system around ideas like this which are so obviously fake and designed to make them feel like they're in a Marvel movie. Just completely giving up on understanding the world.

I can believe car deaths are bad but an acceptable trade-off for people being able to travel freely. Doesn’t mean I deserve to die in a car accident etc.

I did but couldn’t get passed the smell

Since Luigi I've been driven kind of insane by how many people can look at stuff like this and decide that the insurance companies need some kind of violent retribution when they're the ones coming up with elaborate schemes to help manage these insane costs in the first place

Good friend is single, late 30s, self-made. He likes giving strangers dried fruits. People will hang out for hours while he keeps giving them more and more raisins. Prunes are a big hit too. But he's consistently ignored, ghosted, or told "this isn't working" after a few dates

Small sample size but in my time as a teacher it was becoming more and more noticeable just how many students had truly bizarre beliefs if you asked just a few follow-up questions to what they said. Wasn't the case when I started teaching.

I remember meeting a friend for the first time years ago and he said "I feel politically homeless" and I said "Oh yeah?" expecting some boring rant about being socially liberal and fiscally conservative and then he said "Yeah, my ideal society is hunter gatherer plus big pharma"

Non-physicalists be like they forgot to add the ethereal otherworldly essence of butter

I feel like a lot of people forgot that everyone in 2016 was talking the entire year about how it was the worst year to ever happen

Hasan is incredibly toxic and only seems wholesome because he’s being compared to people like Tate. Horrible for young people to look up to. Don’t know why progressives can’t get this stuff right.

I agree with this but it’s important to clarify that “the rich” here is anyone making above $16,000/year

Every day I find a new way of trying to get across just how ridiculously fake the problem of AI water use is

Seems like trains have about 1/3rd of the death rate per mile traveled as cars. Feels completely counter-intuitive to me, would've expected them to be like 100x safer.

Andy's Iron Law: Media outlets are physically incapable of comparing AI water use to any other industry. They only compare it to massive multiples of personal household use. All AI water use in Scotland is less than a single car factory uses.

I feel no personal sense of offense at the NYT men are bad piece, but making it clear that a sizable chunk of the left coalition does believe that half the population needs to be permanently apologetic for something they can't change does seem like it's harming us electorally

My theory? Out the window. Forget about it.

The Acquired episode about Lockheed Martin did not disappoint

What is happening in the UK? What is in the water? A wifi router uses as much power as a single LED bulb!

The shape of the visual field is one of the funniest facts to me. This is the shape of the screen in our theater of experience, but no one knows what it looks like without being shown

So many women insist guys order the stinky tofu it's such an unfair test 😭

Google publishes a paper showing that its AI models only use 0.26 mL of water in data centers per prompt. After, this article gets published: "Google says a typical AI prompt only uses 5 drops of water - experts say that's misleading." The reason the expert says this is misleading? They didn't include the water used in the nearby power plant to generate electricity. The expert, Shaolei Ren says: “They’re just hiding the critical information. This really spreads the wrong message to the world.” Each prompt uses about 0.3 Wh in the data center. To generate that much electricity, power plants need (at most) 2.50 mL of water. That raises the total water cost per prompt to 2.76 mL. 2.76 mL is 0.0001% of the average American lifestyle's daily consumptive use of fresh water and groundwater. It's nothing. Would you know this from the headline, or the quote? Why do so many reporters on this topic do this?

This is an extremely bad way of talking and thinking and normalizing it will make society worse

Oh no oh no

Since World War 2, there have been just 2 events which caused a significant blip on the global death rate: the Great Leap Forward, and COVID

This is one of the funniest podcast moments that I know of. Tyler Cowen asks Sam Altman about YIMBY stuff, Sam says "I haven't thought about that because we're about to build God" and Cowen just ploughs through and asks him about Chattanooga's land use policy

Burning a single Waymo emits as much CO2 as about 500,000 ChatGPT prompts

This is the single most massive factual error in a major book I've ever personally noticed on my own, and I think I'm the first person to notice it? Empire of AI asserts that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city. In reality, it's 22% of the city's water.

I have found that quite a few critics of Nate Silver's forecasting skills believe that events with a 30% probably of happening never happen

If you're having any personal life problems my advice is to hold off on solving them until Gemini 3, the benchmarks are looking good enough that it'll probably be better at solving them than you

It finally happened where someone swooped in and literally said "yes 30% odds events don't happen"

I think a welfare state is very different from collective ownership of the means of production

A follow up where I pointed out that philanthropist has 14 letters and it keeps offering other words that also don't have 15 letters

This new article from the NYT is one of the most blatant misrepresentations of the AI water issue I've seen. A ton of pictures and close-ups of faucets run dry and people suffering from drought, with a subtitle saying "When Microsoft opened a data center in central Mexico last year.... Water outages, which once lasted days, stretched for weeks" Nowhere in the article does it make clear how much of the community's water the data center is using. Surprise, again, when you dig in, you find out that the data center is using tiny fractions of the region's water, comparable to any other industry in the region. The data center seems to have a maximum permit of 25 million gallons per year (about 1/4th of a large car factory). context.news/ai/thirsty-data… A maximum permit is often way higher than actual use. It's there for worst-case scenarios, because permits are hard to change once you get them. Microsoft claims it only draws water 5% of the year. news.microsoft.com/source/la… The area the data center is in draws 25 billion gallons per year if we multiply the population by the government's given water per person number. es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_m… ceaqueretaro.gob.mx/en-litro… So the maximum amount of the region's water the data center is permitted to draw is only 0.1% of the water there. If this article said "After a factory was built, a region's water demand went up by 1/1000th. Droughts that lasted days now lasted weeks" and then featured a ton of pictures of people suffering from lack of water, I think the average reader would ask "Wait, what? That's clearly not the cause of the water issue then." The authors surely know that they could just look into how the data center compares to any other regional use of water, but as usual they don't, and leave the reader to infer it must be the main culprit. Intentionally misleading. When I have time I can look into the other region's mentioned, but this is all pretty easy, and you the reader can do the same! NYT article: nytimes.com/2025/10/20/techn…

A wild argument I heard in favor of legacy admissions came from a first gen college student who went to Harvard. He said that the purpose of Harvard is to network with powerful people so that you join the elite, and the legacies are your access point to that elite.

Net Neutrality was one of my first "Oh my entire media environment got this decisively completely wrong" moments, was pretty disorienting. Literally every source I was reading was going into so much detail about how ending Net Neutrality was going to end the good internet.

Every time I stop by a group of people who are all into a big ideology I disagree with, I notice how their speech patterns are basically perfectly designed to make it impossible to even bring up or consider the kinds of objections I think are actually threatening to their beliefs

Visiting a doctor, should I do it?

Luigi discourse kind of singlehandedly lowered my opinion of a lot of people's basic ability to think through a problem. If you see this and think "The insurance company is the main problem here, and they're so evil we should be violent against them" I think you're basically lost

Nothing made me feel more like a low trust conspiracy theorist than realizing how much of the field of education studies is completely made up vibes, very often by people who haven’t had personal experience in advanced science classes

One of the funnier sentences I've heard recently was someone saying "I think it's okay if humanity goes extinct because of climate change. We're messing up the planet" but then adding "...but of course that would be really bad for all the low income communities"

Was walking around for years in my early 20s making all my food with a bunch of different healthy tasty recipes but announcing to the world that I "didn't know how to cook" because I didn't have a huge store of intuitions about what goes with what. Massive L

This headline from the NYT, that came complete with a really nice photo series of the local impacted community, is I think a full lie rather than just misleading. It is not the case, anywhere, that data centers taking water has caused problems for communities.

One especially jarring experience was a substitute teacher for another class having a meltdown in front of students because his friend had died of COVID recently and the students were all jeering at him for thinking COVID was a serious illness.

I think the hyper-focus on the very small number of billionaires (who to be clear I do think should aim to donate most of their wealth) has mostly harmed people's ability to think about the real problems of economic inequality. Many problems are caused by middle and upper middle class people walling off opportunities, and applying political pressure so more resources are redistributed to themselves.

One of my sharpest students once told me that he and everyone he knew his age got information about the world from exactly two places: school, and TikTok, and that was it. Hard not to think there's something bad happening.

A big lesson of adulthood is that a lot of the terrible ways of thinking about the world I ascribed to the 2007 Republican Party as a teenager are actually endemic to the human condition

Separate from the ad hominem, it's not acceptable for someone with a science degree from MIT and a strong background in AI to take a guess at units and then confidently write that a building is using 1000x as much water as an entire city in what's presented as an authoritative work without doing a very basic sanity check first. I attribute zero malice to Hao. She was also super kind and respectful in engaging with this and I'm left with a very positive impression. I think this was an honest mistake, and have read and admired a lot of her other reporting. But this is a bigger mistake than just "guessing the wrong units" and we should be able to talk about how thousands of readers now believe a data center uses 1000x as much water as a city, and how it is actually very bad that so many people got such a wildly off impression of an important issue.

Massive NATO flex to have a chunk of the Berlin Wall on permanent display outside its headquarters

Wild to see something mimicking one of the greatest ever programs of any government ever and the comments are at least 50% "Oh great, it worked SOOO well last time 🙄"

Even in my most advanced physics courses I'd regularly have conversations with students where they'd just casually drop that they thought that the Earth was flat or that the government knew the cure for cancer and was hiding it from us

Almost all popular critics of economics know basically nothing about it. Economics is predominantly left of center as a discipline. College econ departments have 5.5 dems for every 1 registered republican. People just make up what economists are like for no reason.

I think about this a lot

Had posted "It's weird that the moon's the same size as the sun" and got the funniest anonymous comment I've ever received the next day

Matt looks so cool here that I'm worried this is a false flag by Big Abundance

My vague guess for what happened with gender polarization: -Short form video content takes off in 2020 -Suddenly most of the info you receive is video, not written -You see the gender of the person presenting the info a lot more -Short form video also rewards traditional attractiveness and (therefore, often) more adherence to gender roles -People gravitate more to information ecosystems being presented by people they want to be more like, which are probably going to be their own gender more often -Ideas people present become more male or female coded because you can see the presenter much more. -The ecosystem rewards traditional attractiveness more, people feel more motivated to acquire the general vibes of successful examples of their own gender. Part of that vibe is beliefs the male or female ecosystems are promoting. -Males and females diverge more in their beliefs. So imo it does seem like a problem of The Phones.

All throughout the 2010s I had a pretty shocking number of people very confidently tell me that it was "too late to stop the climate apocalypse" and that civilization would end by 2030. This was a pretty extreme type of "misinformation" that doesn't ever get classified as such.

A lot more fringe politics too. It seemed like a lot more students were either communists or Jordan Peterson/manosphere types and there was a lot less stuff happening in the middle

There is literally nothing that will prepare you for the future more than reading analytic philosophy

Wtf is going on at MIT "If you send a ChatGPT prompt every single minute over the course of 10 hours, it will use as much energy as a single use of your coffee maker. Shocking!"

The most racist thing I've ever heard in person happened in a space that was purportedly about educational equity, when a white teacher confidently claimed that teaching nonwhite children to read is an act of colonization. Permanently made me wary of where ed politics was going.

I love the idea of looking for a guy who’s constantly mentally punishing himself just for existing but also doesn’t have any anxiety

There's basically no way to avoid believing at least a few things that are very weird

My family dog was killed by a hit and run driver years ago. Obviously lots of people have similar stories. We didn't get news coverage or a supervisor pushing to have voters choose to allow cars in each individual town. The way this is being covered is insane.

This is something Chapo Trap House made up 10 years ago and it was funny for like a few months but it is long past time for the founding myth of the founding myth of the West Wing to die

"As a good Bayesian I knew AGI would arrive around the 2020s" "Oh because of scaling laws?" "Oh no not at all. Anyone in 1850 could've called this too if they just projected the trend in GDP growth since 400 BC. Lincoln should've known o3 would arrive around 2025"

The fact that falafel isn’t actually that good for you is something I know intellectually but haven’t accepted in my heart

Ezra is in many ways the lib Paul Atreides. I think he can see the narrow way.

Imagine the US went so far right that approval for interracial marriage dropped to 50%, only 10% of Americans ever traveled abroad, and a majority thought it was "always wrong" to be gay. This was America in 1991, the year I was born. The recent past was really terrible.

Bloomberg did a weird thing where they made a map showing that almost everywhere people live within 50 miles of data centers, electric prices have gone up. But almost everyone lives within 50 miles of data centers. It's basically just a population heat map.

I bought my car for $13k which is half of what the average American pays. If I spent that extra $13k on like, an insane workstation or a new wardrobe, it'd look ridiculously opulent, but people see a slightly nicer/newer car as totally reasonable. Obvious point but like wow

Separate from the ad hominem, it's not acceptable for someone with a science degree from MIT and a strong background in AI to take a guess at units and then confidently write that a building is using 1000x as much water as an entire city in what's presented as an authoritative work without doing a very basic sanity check first. I attribute zero malice to Hao. She was also super kind and respectful in engaging with this and I'm left with a very positive impression. I think this was an honest mistake, and have read and admired a lot of her other reporting. But this is a bigger mistake than just "guessing the wrong units" and we should be able to talk about how thousands of readers now believe a data center uses 1000x as much water as a city, and how it is actually very bad that so many people got such a wildly off impression of an important issue. Anyone can decide for themselves if my criticisms were fair. I'm pretty confident that readers are leaving the book with a much worse understanding of the water issue, can back up what I say, and think this is worth talking about. I don't believe in the general concept of discrediting authors outside extreme cases, I only believe in addressing things directly and firmly on a case by case basis. andymasley.substack.com/p/em…

Am I right in thinking that "neoliberal" as it's used by /r/neoliberal world means "Basically anyone, from social democrats to free market right wing libertarians, who believes that economics is basically real"?

I guess I don’t know anyone who thinks that voting is all you should do, I read the video as implying that there’s this coming violent showdown against the far right and voting’s a meaningless distraction

Asking Claude 3.5 to code stuff is the first time I've felt really strong personal unease at a step forward in AI. I'd really strongly recommend you play around with it if you haven't yet.

When did so many people on the left decide that phrenology's basically fine? "Haha your genetics make you look like a creep" isn't a winning egalitarian message

I've been called a fascist 3 times: Age 18: I say in a philosophy class I think it's okay to use language implying humans are separate from nature (so we can say cities are "unnatural" but anthills are "natural"). Much older student next to me gets red in the face and calls me a fascist and threatens to beat me up because I'm denigrating nature. Age 25: I say I like solarpunk. Guy I know who turned out to have bad mental health problems goes on a half hour rant at me about how solarpunk is fascist. Age 33: I say that a laptop uses 1 Wh per minute.

Nominative determinism is everywhere

More Perfect Union videos on data centers are basically the most straight-up misinformation directed at people left-of-center that I can remember watching, it's really wild. They've getting huge audiences and seem to be influencing the conversation a lot.

I love it when people say that caring about anyone other than your immediate family is a luxury belief and then immediately whip around to saying we should all be heavily invested in the longterm career viability of cattle ranching.

A second ChatGPT image trend has hit the timeline

I feel like the statement "AI labs are specifically trying to create machines that can outperform humans in all economically useful cognitive tasks and don't think they're super far away" hasn't really inspired the public to go "Hey wait a minute" in the way I would've expected

I think the difference in scale between these two boxes is meaningful enough to comment on

The homeowner class does not want you to know that building more housing is positive-sum

Last thoughts on the Empire of AI situation for now: 1) It was very nice of the author to reply and to engage, and to circle back on this one fact I pointed out. 2) I was pretty disappointed that she described everything else I brought up in the post as "philosophical disagreements" in her reply. I really don't think they are. The screenshots below are a pretty clear example of a description that will almost always leave readers less informed, and here it's based on a very readable simple study. Want to give her time on the main question but will circle back on this description later. 3) I unfortunately think the whole water section actually gives the reader such a bad misreading of the situation that my ideal ask would be to have the whole thing changed, though I think that's not likely. Would encourage people to read my full post: andymasley.substack.com/p/em… 4) I want attention on these issues because they've confused tens of thousands of people and a lot of media outlets, but I don't want anyone being cruel. If you're using this stuff to be uncivil at all I'd really really really you just not engage at all. Being firm and direct about the stats themselves is good, going off topic or using ad hominem isn't. 5) I'm trying to balance civility with firmness that it's a really big problem that one of the most popular books on AI in the last year is confusing so many readers on the water question. Any feedback on my engagement is appreciated.

It really does feel like a mild mass psychosis event. It’s just so odd talking to adults speaking so grimly about using 3 Wh of energy. I’ve been a climate guy since I was a kid and I didn’t anticipate how many strange beliefs the scene would pick up.

This is a clear case where wild animal suffering creates blind spots. If I said "I'm gonna take care of the deer population by introducing machines that ferociously bite and claw them to death" people would be correctly horrified, but wolves are seen as humane bc natural

I don't want to ever post about gender politics stuff but at some point I need to stick my head up and say "I would like us to win another election"

Claude's logo is the exact halfway point between kiki and bouba has this been discussed yet

I keep thinking about this

I was looking into how safe biking is. Found this study that says in America biking has a death rate of 79 per billion miles, which makes biking look insanely unsafe ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studi…

Thank you Karen! I'm very grateful for the reply but unfortunately I think your source mistyped meters cubed as liters. I think the evidence for this is extremely strong, I explain why in the reply comment here. I really think you should update this claim in the book open.substack.com/pub/andyma…

Sorry the joke here is that I'm using dates in the dried fruit sense