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I Would Walk 500 Miles

The Proclaimers will not be at the coronation because they supported the interruption of the proclamation. Also, Twitter mishaps, Supreme Court non-decisions, expensive AI hardware and more.

Endeavorance

Apr 24, 2023 — 3 min read

The best kind of proclamation

Best known for their hit single "500 miles", Scottish music duo The Proclaimers would walk quite some ways, but NOT FOR THE KING.

Their music has been pulled from the playlist of songs for the King's coronation ceremony after it came out that they harbor anti-crown sentiment. Apparently they sided with a dude who shouted and jeered during the proclamation King George.

SHOCK. HORROR.

Its a lot of Twitter bullshit, so here's the short(ish) version

Elon is a moron and finally made good—mostly—on the promise to remove blue check marks from legacy verified accounts on 4/20 because of course it was on 4/20.

But then for some reason, some celebrities still had check marks, despite publicly stating they weren't paying for it. Then Elon claimed he was paying for it on their behalf, for some reason. Then a bunch of Elon stans got all butthurt about that because they actually believe him when he talks about an "equal status for all".

Anyway, basically everything stupid that you'd expect to happen happened. Account impersonations, followed by a seemingly haphazard reinstatement of unverified accounts. Some accounts just started getting re-verified, including accounts for dead celebrities.

To throw gas on the fire, Twitter also fixed their NPR debacle by just blanketly—

oh sorry my dog wants to play fetch 1 sec...

Okay sorry about that. So to recap, they first labeled NPR and PBS as state-affiliated media. Then they changed the wording on it to try and make it less bad, but then they now just blanketly removed "State-affiliated media" from all accounts, including those that are actually state-affiliated media.

Anyway its just kinda all on fire.

Supreme Court doesn't ban pill that was really up for debate in the first place

The Supreme Court has decided not to allow restrictions on a pill that is extremely common and safe for at-home medical abortion care.

To be clear: all they're really doing here is not immediately allowing the restrictions to go into place. We now have to sit around and watch for… probably years as this plays out in various appeals courts and then eventually makes its way back to the Supreme Court, which may then allow it to happen anyway.

But for now… yay? I guess? We won't randomly have restrictions on a pill that has never been in question before imposed by a judge that the vast majority of the country had absolutely zero saying in seating? Victory?????? SURE DOES NOT FEEL LIKE IT

Guess how much it costs to run ChatGPT

The answer is "several dollars". According to The Information, it is estimated that ChatGPT costs about $700,000 to run daily. (Futurism did a write-up here that is not behind a paywall).

Microsoft is working on an AI-focused chip which may dramatically lower costs here, but what you may not know (but can probably believe) is that ChatGPT has to run on some serious hardware, so the data centers powering the AI language model are chewing up quite a sum of money.

Especially to have it work at scale and quickly, it just takes a ton of raw computing power. And to paint a pretty clear picture of the scale we're talking about, ChatGPT is not just ChatGPT. Essentially every AI assistant that you're seeing come out right now? That is nearly all ChatGPT. Technically its just companies putting a coat of paint on top of OpenAI's APIs for hooking into the same technology that powers the default ChatGPT app.

Like literally its not just that a bunch of companies suddenly started doing AI, they're just all rebranding the same exact thing.