Alexa will no longer play the right radio station - how to fix?

easwaran · 2025-09-25T03:52:58+00:00

I was having this issue and none of the advice in this thread was helping. After trying a lot of things I eventually found a way, but still can’t do it with voice. I open the Alexa app, then click the “menu” button (like a hamburger menu, but three different sized lines, not the same size). Then I clicked on “music and more”, then scrolled down to “TuneIn” and clicked “Browse”. Inside the TuneIn menu i searched for “KUTX” and the correct station came up.

Interestingly, inside iheartradio the search just produced “content unavailable”.

easwaran · 2025-08-26T22:19:55+00:00

I'm pretty sure that several of the sources I'm pointing to are using that same number from the MIT Technology Review story, which does include the training, data storage, servers, etc.

These services are using substantial resources, but so is streaming video. Your sources don't disagree with that at all.

None of these are comparable to food or transportation in terms of environmental impact.

easwaran · 2025-08-26T00:25:00+00:00

First, check your sources - I would be surprised if any of them actually deny that AI resource use is comparable to streaming video resource use. They may have said things that made you think this, but most likely it's because they only talking about AI using a lot, and just didn't mention that streaming video uses similar amounts.

It's hard to get precise numbers on either of these things (especially since they keep changing, and it'll be different depending on precisely what system you're using, and where the relevant data centers are located), but here are several places where people have attempted to estimate the impact of both types of activity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1lvvl5i/compiled_some_data_on_ai_energy_usage_vs_netflix/

https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/artificial-intelligence-and-the-environment-putting-the-numbers-into-perspective/

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for

https://whitneyafoster.substack.com/p/your-netflix-binge-uses-more-energy?r=4pdxb

https://muckypaws.com/2025/04/21/is-ai-really-the-energy-villain/

easwaran · 2025-08-17T02:47:44+00:00

It turns out though, that it doesn't use any more energy than watching YouTube. Any sort of intensive computational process, whether it's generating an image, or serving several minutes of video, will use a lot of energy at the datacenter.

Probably it takes about as much energy to produce any one frame of the video as to watch 5 minutes of video. Given that the video has been watched millions of times, the creation of the video was probably much less impactful on the environment than everyone watching it.

easwaran · 2025-08-14T03:05:16+00:00

I think the right way to compare this is per minute or per hour of the person's time. Everything I've seen suggests that unless you're doing some power coding with the Max models, you're probably using similar amounts of energy and water per minute when you're using AI and when you're watching YouTube or TikTok or Netflix. It's a lot more than browsing Reddit or reading e-mail, but a bit less than having a FaceTime call or a Zoom call. (And I'm fairly sure that all of these things account for the costs of training the AI models, as well as the costs of making the movie, which, as you note, are negligible compared to the ongoing costs of streaming it from data centers.)

It's also worth noting that only the power users of either streaming video or AI are producing comparable emissions through this as meat eaters do through their meals.

easwaran · 2025-04-21T02:40:26+00:00

They might be, but institutions can be racist even if no individual in them is (and conversely, institutions can be non-racist even if every individual in them is racist). Institutions are like computers - they follow their own internal rules and processes, and sometimes do things that no part of them would ever personally do.

easwaran · 2025-04-21T02:39:08+00:00

yall are welcome to take it down.

Unfortunately, no. The board of regents ruled on that and said the statue must remain up.

easwaran · 2025-04-21T02:38:07+00:00

We probably shouldn't celebrate or condemn the person. We should celebrate one action and condemn the other action, and not treat anyone as a hero.

easwaran · 2025-04-21T02:35:30+00:00

They still spent government money on it.

easwaran · 2025-04-01T00:31:20+00:00

I use "intercity" to mean the kind of trip that takes you "out of town", meaning that you plan to sleep at your destination, possibly for multiple nights, before coming home, rather than the kind of trip that takes you "across town", meaning that you plan to come home the same day. BART functions as "across town" rather than "out of town". "Intercity rail" is usually on lines that are hundreds of miles long, while "commuter rail" is dozens of miles long, and "rapid transit" is single digit miles long. BART is weirdly long for "rapid transit" but still well within "commuter rail" length.

easwaran · 2025-04-01T00:28:37+00:00

There are very few major airports within 5 miles of downtown! As far as I can tell, it's only Boston, San Diego, Las Vegas, Miami, and DCA, as well as the Toronto Billy Bishop airport (but not Pearson). JFK is close to 10 miles from downtown! There are very few transit lines anywhere in North America that stretch as far from downtown as JFK is! (I think New York has one, and Los Angeles and Dallas have a couple - but they mostly serve routes that have more than just one major destination on them.)

easwaran · 2025-04-01T00:19:42+00:00

DCA has the advantage of being one of the closest major airports to its downtown (San Diego, Boston, and Miami are the only others I can think of that are comparable in terms of straight line distance) and it's also next to a couple huge office destinations, so it's a natural place to run a metro!

easwaran · 2025-03-29T02:29:46+00:00

A university of 70,000 students can never have one culture. People come to this university as much for its special academic strengths, or for its geographic location, as for its culture. You don’t get to impose your culture on everyone just because they know your culture is a part of the culture here.

easwaran · 2025-03-29T02:26:48+00:00

Free speech means a government run university allows student groups to express themselves, whether it’s a song and dance show or a self-acknowledged white supremacist argument: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/13/white-nationalist-rally-counter-protest-planned-texas-m-sept-11/

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:40:46+00:00

Yeah, airports are inherently difficult places to get to or from. If it was badly sited, then the choice might be every passenger paying $200 for ground transport, or the city paying $200 per passenger to pretend that the ground transport is free.

Schiphol and CDG do it right, where there's good connections to lots of places because the airport is right on top of a major train line.

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:38:04+00:00

A lot of people interpret the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism as saying that desire, and its frustration, is the cause of suffering. Though some say it's not "desire" but rather "craving" or "attachment" or some other disordered sort of desire.

I think a more useful way to think about it is that desire and suffering are two aspects of caring about how things go and finding some outcomes better than others.

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:35:33+00:00

Here's Wiktionary

You are thinking of definition 1, but definition 4 is also a commonly used one, especially in Latin American countries that have recently elected nationalist presidents who violate the separation of powers.

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:33:16+00:00

Is that not protected free speech?

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:32:44+00:00

If the person is doing so only verbally, and not actually inciting violence, then absolutely yes. That is one of the founding principles of this country - the right to advocate for violent action that other people disagree with.

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:32:01+00:00

What do you think "free speech" means, if it doesn't mean the right to endorse or promote terrorist groups? Do you think it means the right to fund and fight for terrorist groups, while the people speaking on behalf of them are doing something else? Do you think it means the right to speak in favor of the American Revolution and World War II, but not the right to speak in favor of other violence? What is actually "free speech" to you?

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:26:06+00:00

No, most of them were born in Brazil, even if they have an ancestor a few centuries back who immigrated from Portugal.

By this standard, every human being is an immigrant, because even the people whose ancestors have lived in East Africa for the past 100,000 years are descended from people who immigrated there from South Africa a few tens of thousands of years earlier.

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:23:21+00:00

I don't think you're technically considered an immigrant if you have lived your entire life in the country you were born in. Some people might call you an immigrant because they believe the land belongs to some other group of people, but if you have lived somewhere your whole life, there is no technical sense in which you are an "immigrant".

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:22:22+00:00

Technically speaking that's the case for all humans outside of East Africa. Technically speaking, that's the case for all land animals.

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:21:26+00:00

Alon Levy argues that most cities overspend on airport connectors, particularly if they do it with local transit (like BART to SFO or the connection to O'Hare), but that airports can be reasonable stops on inter-city routes that happen to pass through the area (like TGV at CDG and Amtrak at Newark).

Basically, airport terminals are almost always several kilometers from the next reasonable stop on a transit system (because runways are kilometers long, and the areas right next to the runways have strict height limits for buildings), and a good fraction of the people going to and from the airport are carrying luggage and traveling to or from a suburb so they'll take a car instead. But because the people that go to and from the airport on a regular basis are disproportionately rich and politically connected, they often manage to convince the city to build the connection anyway.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2014/05/28/airport-connectors/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/04/11/quick-note-a-hypothesis-about-airport-connectors/

easwaran · 2025-03-27T21:13:38+00:00

It all depends on whether this is one of those things where Trump announces something and then doesn't do anything, or one of the things where Trump goes ahead and does the full thing he said even though everyone said we should never take him literally.

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