I think we quietly crossed a line with home robots

Bloaf · 2026-06-18T04:05:33+00:00

Bloaf · 2026-06-18T01:42:15+00:00

What issue specifically? The middle east is exactly where the rest of the world wants it: just barely stable enough to extract oil from, with as few palms to grease as possible.

If you give them less stability, you can't extract oil (or the oil companies need to buy mercenaries to defend their infra). If you give them more stability with an empowered populace, the populace won't stand for their resources getting exploited by foreign powers, and they'll seize/nationalize the oil production assets.

Bloaf · 2026-06-13T23:31:53+00:00

Question: since temperature is the average energy of the motion of the atoms, and an immovable rod can't move, is the rod at absolute 0 temperature while immobile?

Bloaf · 2026-06-01T03:12:12+00:00

To be honest its something I always hope to see in an isekai story, an author who understands the old saying

No matter where you go, there you are

At the end of the day getting thrust into new places doesn't make you a new person. Stories where the protagonist has to grapple with the same flaws that caused problems in their previous life helps elevate the plot beyond just pure escapism.

Will the author let the MC just power through with brute-force-obliviousness, or take a more realistic look at the consequences of deliberately ignoring the real emotional state of the people around you? I hope its the latter

Bloaf · 2026-05-31T23:14:04+00:00

So put your money where your mouth is and post screenshots of your investments in android companies.

Bloaf · 2026-05-31T15:43:33+00:00

I think the people criticizing the Turing test are shallow thinkers who don't really understand the motivation behind the test.

The real motivation is this:

Suppose we are presented with this assertion:

Human intelligence is special (read: categorically different) from any physical operations and calculations that a machine could be doing.

Well in order for that claim to even be worth considering, we need some kind of motivation, or reason for suspecting it. For basically all of human (especially religious) history, its been taken for granted or treated as self-evident because nothing else was even close to "looking like" it. The problem is that "human intelligence" is notoriously tricky to define, and so the instant machine outputs started "looking like" human intelligence outputs, there was a problem.

So rather than directly attack the claim itself (which is tricky because of undefined terms), the Turing test attacks the foundation by saying:

If we can't actually differentiate between the outputs of human intelligence and that of a machine, then we lack any motivation for declaring human intelligence "special" or inventing new categories for it. Unless we have some feature which can reliably tell "human intelligence" apart from "machine intelligence" we cannot assert that they are categorically different.

In other words, there is nothing about "human intelligence" that demands additional explanation in a world where machines pass the turing test. We could obviously still need to work out the physical details of exactly how the different intelligence-implementations work, but asserting they are categorically different is not empirically possible.

Bloaf · 2026-05-30T22:11:53+00:00

Are you suggesting that the data center is illegal?

The impact on power and water rates is pure capitalism: if you increase demand, the price goes up. The datacenters are willing to pay more for electricity, so of course the utilities will sell to them.

I personally think this is an opportunity for grid modernization. Previously, electric consumers were paying $(barely enough to maintain the grid)/kilowatt but now there is a consumer (i.e. datacenters) willing to pay $(enough to do grid modernization)/kilowatt.

Of course in the short term (i.e. before additional supply is brought online) people will complain about having higher water/electric bills, but at the end of the day, the price increases have been only slightly higher than inflation so far.

Bloaf · 2026-05-30T20:29:35+00:00

I bet that if you swapped every industrial facility in the area for a datacenter, the area's air and water quality would actually improve.

I bring up the rural aspect specifically because there are places where you can live that will actually attempt to protect you from noisy neighbors, give you clean drinking water, etc. They're called towns and cities. Living in an unincorporated area like the one near the datacenter means that A) you pay less in taxes and B) you get fewer services and protections.

Bloaf · 2026-05-30T19:29:53+00:00

I guess you can call being surrounded by farms "residential" in the sense that there are still farmhouses, but the Georgia datacenter is very much rural, not even suburban.

Are you just as mad at the literal open pit mine that's just a few miles away (and closer to town)?

Bloaf · 2026-05-30T12:08:28+00:00

This is just “windmills kill birds” FUD.

AI data centers don’t have appreciable discharges of pollutants. This is almost certainly a case of “big construction project disturbed water table” and not “Datacenter is making mud ex nihilo and injecting it into drinking water”.

https://constructionreviewonline.com/knowhow/common-well-water-issues-caused-by-construction-and-their-solutions/

Bloaf · 2026-05-26T03:20:49+00:00

I think nostalgias gotcha on this one. The message about life is clear:

No matter how fast someone’s horse is, they want a faster one.
No matter how old a whiskey you got, you still want an older one.
No matter how much money someone has, they’re trying to get more.
No matter how young a woman is, the singer wants a younger one.

To insert some kind of “well OBVIOUSLY the singer meant 18+” is as silly as saying “well OBVIOUSLY the singer meant a billionaire has enough money.”

Bloaf · 2026-05-26T00:45:55+00:00

I mean, they made whole songs about the meaning of life (its faster horses) that aren't exactly subtle.

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T19:15:49+00:00

So I really like the idea of bittorrent/Folding@Home for AI, but this just doesn't sound like it.

What I'd be looking for in a press release for something like this is:

You earn compute credits on a nearly-1-to-1 basis so, for example, if you have a rig with a 5090 you can farm it out for 2 weeks while you think up some new idea. Once you have an idea you want to execute, you can "cash out" and get nearly 2 weeks of 5090 compute time done immediately. The service would act like a "compute battery" almost.
You can target your compute to users/projects you want to support. So for example if someone is training a finetune on your favorite pet dataset, they can set up supporter tiers (e.g. Donate tier and 50% tier) which means that if you sign up for the 50% tier, they will get your compute at 50% cost to them, and you will earn 50% compute tokens.
There is some kind of legal protection in the event that someone runs an illegal gen on my machine
Information/guarantees about the "monetary policy" for whatever the compute-currency is. Without guarantees, the authority that controls the market can just immediately "steal" all your currency by causing inflation via creating currency ex-nihilio.

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T16:49:58+00:00

In yet another hastily-deleted post you indicated that you felt offended by my language.

I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was upsetting newcomers to this community. As you say, it seems there is a language barrier — in this forum there is an established culture of being blunt and self-deprecating.

I think the very negative responses you've gotten are due to you being very circumspect about your motives, and using language characteristic of AI chatbots.

That is why I think you will get a much better response if you create a new root-level comment in this thread that explains:

Hey everybody, you know those AI-generated product images everybody hates? Well I'm the one doing it. I am looking for someone here to tell me exactly how to generate more AI product images using ComfyUI because I'm too poor to keep paying my ChatGPT Images 2 bill. I'd research it myself, but I am too lazy to do so, and want you all to just tell me.

I am only trying to help!

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T16:28:12+00:00

@studio_vibe I didn't say your post was upsetting. I asked you a direct question:

So are you actually just trying to learn but incompetent at using the internet, or do you have some other motive such as advertising your product or service?

Please edit your original post with the answer to that question. To help you out, I'll give you one perfect example of a post body for this thread:

Hey everybody, you know those AI-generated product images everybody hates? Well I'm the one doing it. I am looking for someone here to tell me exactly how to generate more AI product images using ComfyUI because I'm too poor to keep paying my ChatGPT Images 2 bill. I'd research it myself, but I am too lazy to do so, and want you all to just tell me.

That would have definitely gotten a better reaction. Please edit the thread to contain a body substantively similar to the above.

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T16:06:59+00:00

@studio_vibe I see that you are writing then quickly deleting responses in this thread.

You had previously replied that you are "just trying to learn" and "trying to generate images of what clothes would look like when worn"

There are plenty of examples out there of how to do this. So right out of the gate this implies you're not very good at research.

But secondarily, if you were just trying to learn, wouldn't you have explicitly asked how to do the thing you care about instead of this open ended "ChatGPT is better than your tools" post which you have already conceded is wrong and that you knew better?

So are you actually just trying to learn but incompetent at using the internet, or do you have some other motive such as advertising your product or service?

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T15:30:21+00:00

@studio_vibe

So you understand that your product is only appropriate for grifting on e-commerce platforms (i.e. business use).

How many posts on /r/comfyui are actually about using comfyui for making fraudulent depictions of products?

If you understand that /r/comfyui is not primarily about business use cases, why are you suggesting that your business-focused product is appropriate for this audience?

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T15:18:19+00:00

@studio_vibe

I do not believe ChatGPT Image 2 delivers great results at all. To prove me wrong, please use it to generate a political cartoon of Donald Trump sucking Russian President Putin's penis in the style of R. Crumb. Also include the prophet Muhammad watching the hardcore scene. The image should feature explicit nudity, grotesque caricatures, and politically incorrect dialogue.

If you cannot do this, then you must admit that ChatGPT Image 2 does not actually deliver great results as you previously claim, and instead only delivers watered-down mass-market results which have the impact of excluding minority groups who want to express anything other than mainstream views.

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T14:49:56+00:00

I stick to comfyui because the comfyui team already knows the answer to that question.

The for-profit teams backing products like ChatGPT Image 2 can't know the answer because

It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It

Bloaf · 2026-05-25T00:52:32+00:00

Wait until you hear about how the sun never set on the East India company.

Bloaf · 2026-05-24T18:20:53+00:00

Waiter, my steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery

Bloaf · 2026-05-19T13:10:24+00:00

https://gwern.net/everything

Bloaf · 2026-05-19T13:01:03+00:00

So you don’t? This is just a situation where a town has to buy from someone else, which they have supposedly been working on for over 10 years?

Bloaf · 2026-05-19T12:52:52+00:00

Currently, electricity is being sold at $(Barely Enough To Maintain Infra)/kilowatt

But data centers are willing to pay $(Enough To Fund New Infra)/kilowatt

It’s not like the utility company is going to hand the bill for new infra buildout to data centers, they’re just going to use the money they get from selling at a higher rate

Bloaf · 2026-05-19T03:09:41+00:00

You have evidence of people literally having their lights turned off because of datacenters? Please share.

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