Technology

This boston company has developed a new process to manufacture steel using zero carbon dioxide and a whole lot of electricity

The Israeli military wanted to kill more Palestinians faster. They unleashed powerful technology to do it.

Multiple groups are working to keep Amazon, Google, and Microsoft from doubling the number of centers in the country, fearing environmental devastation.

• Over the past 12 years, 16 data centers have been approved in Santiago’s metropolitan area. Most use millions of liters of water annually to keep computers from overheating.
• Chile is in the midst of a drought, expected to last until 2040.
• The government has said it will launch a national data center plan to regulate the industry.

Executive summary

The purpose of this primer is to publicly expose Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide against the people of Palestine, and to connect technology workers to the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. Introduction

We are No Azure for Apartheid, a group of technology workers within Microsoft and its subsidiaries seeking to expose and condemn the specific technologies complicit in the ongoing apartheid and genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine as a whole. We are part of the broader No Tech for Apartheid movement, which began with opposing Project Nimbus at Google and Amazon. With Microsoft leading advances in AI technology, we, as Microsoft employees, are morally obligated to guide the ethics and lasting ramifications of these technologies for the future.

When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/16433795

Framework Laptop 13 gets Intel Core Ultra with a 120 Hz display, and cheaper AMD models

In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”

This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.