In particular I’m not sure if my “woke cat” comics should have the box checked for future posts.
Written by me, and then I take multiple chat bot images and make manual corrections and edits in GIMP to get the comic panels.
So if I had to pick yes or no to “is it AI generated?” I’d say “no”
But I’m not sure if the “AI generated” check box is equivalent to that question, or more like “does it contain auto generated content?” which would be “yes”
Edit - will absolutely not be using the check box for these comics due to a fucked up reply that got too many upvotes
The USGS is my go-to source for mineral reserves. Their website is becoming harder to navigate by the year, here is a directory with their reports on several minerals: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/ And also here is a mandatory reading on the various definition of ‘reserves’ that they use. The misconceptions usually come from there.
I am too. Because I always see the claim, “there is a rare earth problem with AI” but every time I ask for specifics, I get nothing. I have had to defend against the claims of depletion of copper, lithium, uranium, gallium, in the past, I am ready to defend whatever they now claim is going to miss but it always remains vague.
Rare earth are strategical and of interest to states but not because of mineral availability reasons, because of capitalist incentive reasons. What people do not realize is that the actual problem is that these minerals are actually very cheap, yet hard to extract! They are usually the byproducts of other mining (IIRC gallium is a side product of some aluminium deposits) and are absolutely not profitable to mine solely by themselves. Yet, if you don’t have access to a source, no microchips (for gallium) or efficient electric engine/turbines (for neodymium) for you!
So there is an incentive to have access to mines, but the precious part is the actual mine with its investment done and its working business, not the geological resource.
I am a bit tired of defending it online but maybe I should indeed. I have tried to make some posts on [email protected] in the past, but the hostility is draining. I feel I should spend more time helping the OSS scene rather than addressing vocal critics online that may actually be a small minority.
ADEME is usually a good source. I am surprised they would make such a claim. Do you have a link?
Not really. Oil and in more general fossil resources are special in that they come from an organic process that makes them available only on a thin layer of the crust and only where some precise geological conditions were met. Their scarcity is much more immediate than minerals which are basically available pretty homogeneously once you start digging.
Minerals do get a bit harder to get but oil becomes impossible to get at one point. Like always, the key is to quantify the problem. A (imperfect) proxy to the difficulty to obtain minerals is market price. Minerals like coppers have seen their price rise quite a bit but rare earths like gallium have seen their price go down. None seem to have an unsustainable trend.
Me too! That’s why I try to fight the rejection of “AI” as a whole. This work is currently being done, open source is actually winning this important battle in the general indifference, and it really breaks my heart to see it thrown in the same bag as some genuinely evil people of the corporate AI world.
Oh yes totally, I don’t trust OpenAI one bit, it is just that I do have examples of propaganda training by DeepSeek and Grok and would have loved to know if some proofs exist for OpenAI (or Anthropic). I don’t consider them ethical either even if they don’t, they have many other problems.