Above: Spameater, the 2024 Techtonic marathon premium. Three tracks by Hurst and Ottsc in tribute to Hall & Oates – plus other tracks chosen by Mark Hurst. Cover designed by Greg Harrison.

How to get the Techtonic premium: Pledge $10/month or $75 one-time, then click “1 DJ Premium”. Then on the next page under Monday, click “Techtonic With Mark Hurst - Spameater.”

Or just call 1-800-989-9368 and say you want the Techtonic premium.

Today: Marathon week 1 w/cohost station manager Ken Freedman

• “Being nice to chatbots pays off” (Axios, Feb 26, 2024): “It pays to be nice to your AI: Large language models (LLMs) tend to give better answers when prompted respectfully — and failure to do that can ‘significantly affect LLM performance,’ per a new cross-cultural research paper.” See Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance, submitted Feb 22, 2024. “Impolite prompts may lead to a deterioration in model performance, including generations containing mistakes, stronger biases and omission of information.”

• From the U.S. Energy Information Administration (Feb 1, 2024): “we estimate [current annual] electricity usage from Bitcoin mining based in the United States to range from 25 TWh to 91 TWh. That estimate represents 0.6% to 2.3% of all United States electricity demand in 2023, which was 3,900 TWh.”

• The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud (MIT Press, Fal 2023): “The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. . . . In Bluffdale, Utah, residents are suffering from water shortages and power outages, as a result of the nearby Utah Data Center, a facility of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that guzzles seven million gallons of water daily to operate.”

• HP misreads room, awkwardly brags about its “less hated” printers (Ars Technica, Dec 7, 2023): about HP’s ad campaign, last fall, with the tag line “made to be less hated.”

    --> ...then, three months later: HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors (Ars Technica, Feb 29, 2024): “HP launched a subscription service today that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee. . . . The All-In-Plan privacy policy also says that HP may ‘transfer information about you to advertising partners’ so that they can “recognize your devices,” perform targeted advertising, and, potentially, ‘combine information about you with information from other companies in data sharing cooperatives’ that HP participates in. The policy says that users can opt out of sharing personal data.”

• AI deepfake in real time, translating French to English and syncing it with the speaker on camera, from Channel 1 (Nov 10, 2023)