Scale matters. And how serious an issue does depend on percentage, not just absolute levels. Moreover, percentage is especially important when one is considering issues of prioritization, where I explicitly compared it to golf. So far, you've doubled down on insulting people rather than making any argument involving sources. It might also occur to you that you are apparently assuming that everyone you disagree must have some dishonest agenda. But if you bothered to actually read my comment with a minimum of good faith understanding, you would not that the comment explicitly notes specific problems from AI data centers, which should suggest to you that the agenda you apparently want to impose on the comment is not accurate. Now, it would be appreciated if you could actually attempt to respond with something resembling reasoning and sources and less insults. But I do appreciate from our prior interactions that is apparently difficult for you to do, so have a good day.

There appear to be two interrelated issues with your sources. (Although thank you for giving sources, which was much more than the person you were replying to did.) First, there's a substantial issue with how representative these environmentalists are from the general movement. The ability to point to specific people doesn't really say much about the movement as a whole (although I will grant there's a decent fraction of the environmental movement which really does seem stuck in a 1970s sort of "degrowth" or "antigrowth" attitude). But you seem to also confuse sources saying "Hey, this is creating a serious problem" and not wanting to have that thing at all. The Science.org article for example is about the actual fact that steel production really does contribute seriously to climate change, but then much of the article is about the effort to make steel manufacturing more environmentally friendly. So the article is not about getting rid of steel manufacturing but about making it work better. Others in your list are not about getting rid of things, but moderation. To use the very last example, large scale car use really is creating a lot of problems. But one can recognize that and favor more moderation in terms of car use without getting rid of cars as a whole.

Narcc, why are you incapable of polite discussion with people you disagree with? Would it hurt you so much to some day, maybe try to do people the courtesy of responding to what they have with some detailed arguments or reasoning rather than insults?

The environmental issues are exaggerated. It is true that electricity prices are going up, https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/average-electricity-cost-increase-per-year but this is barely a blip above the current (very high) inflation rates https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator/consumer-price-index-1913-. The complaints about water usage are also not highly reasonable. The vast majority of water used for data centers get reused. Current data center water usage is about a 10th of the water usage for golf courses by the most extreme plausible estimates, and US golf courses account for a bit over 1% of all water usage, so being concerned about data centers here when a more useful thing would be to not have golf courses in the middle of Arizona would be a far more reasonable concern. https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2025/03/water-conservation-playbook-released-golf-industry.html. There are legitimate grid concerns; AI data centers don't just use a lot of power, but they use it in hard to predict ways, which makes load balancing the grid very difficult. So there are legitimate concerns.

But it seems like much of the left has adopted an anything involving LLM AIs is bad attitude in the US. This seems connected to the fact that the US attitude towards LLM AIs is more negative than pretty much almost every other country https://today.yougov.com/international/articles/53654-english-speaking-western-countries-more-negative-about-ai-than-western-europeans. But rather than having a serious discussion about the positives and negatives of this technology (and there are a lot in both columns), there's this tendency to just pick any possible negative and throw it on the wall. This is also particularly unfortunate right now in the US because there's major problems with the Trump administration rolling back all sorts of environmental regulations, including not just those for CO2 but for many other pollutants, and the administration is now actively stopping almost any new US wind and solar on a large scale. While there's been some legal pushback against some of that (see for example, this victory just today https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wind-federal-judge.html ) this would be a far better use of these groups time and resources than going after a specific industry.

Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

It may not be attracting to you but it is certainly popular. ChatGPT has about 800 million active users as of April https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/. Now, that's using data in part from OpenAI, but other metrics which are not from OpenAI paint a pretty similar picture. ChatGPT's website is one of the world's 10 most visited websites according to Similarweb and has been consistently that way for over a year now https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ . Whatever problems ChatGPT has, lack popularity is not one of them.

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

Too much money for not enough content.

When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.

...laura

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.

What part of NO do you not understand?

...laura

My employers recently signed up for a ChatGPT account and I've been seeing how it can help me.

I remain responsible for the big picture, for actually making apps that work on iOS and Android. I've found ChatGPT helpful for refining details. It saves sifting through years worth of Stack Overflow postings. It's a handy tool, but it won't replace me any time soon.

If you say "Chat GPT" in French it sounds like "chat j'ai pété" ("cat I farted"). I guess I need to get out more...

...laura

What's really unfortunate here is that due to OpenAI's drastic exaggeration of what happened here it distracts from the real capabilities here. Being able to efficiently find sources in the literature is an incredibly useful tool. And even aside from that there are now multiple examples where professional mathematicians have used GPT-5 in the thinking mode to make progress on math problems. Nothing as major as any Erdos problem, but still clear use. Terry Tao for example used GPT-5 in thinking mode to help locate a counterexample to a conjecture here https://mathoverflow.net/questions/501066/is-the-least-common-multiple-sequence-textlcm1-2-dots-n-a-subset-of-t. Now, he could have almost certainly done this on his own, but it clearly saved time. Similarly, computer scientist Scott Aaronson used it to get a specific useful suggestion for a function with specific properties he needed that he was then able to use to do a specific thing https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183. In neither of these cases was anything deeply groundbreaking done by the LLM. But the LLM clearly helped and likely saved many hours of work otherwise. And these systems continue to improve.

Star Trek is definitely not community. It is post-scarcity. The idea of some sort of "post-scarcity" society is itself pretty unlikely, but the broader ideas of a prosperous free society where advanced technology is used to help people, better ourselves and explore the universe is very different than one where drones and self-driving cars are being used by cops for unclear purposes.

This seems like this is going too far in the other direction. The news is often very negative but that's because we don't have headlines like "Last month, more solar power was installed than any other week in history, again for the 40th month in a row." Similarly, many diseases that were death sentences a few years ago have with the advance of modern drugs been turned into manageable illnesses. Cystic fibrosis for example used to kill early almost everyone who has it. Now we have drugs which make people with it likely to have lifespans close to normal. Similarly, HIV invariably lead to AIDS and a functional death sentence within a few years. Modern HIV treatments give people with HIV life expectancies better than a typical person in the 1950s. Lots of positive things are happening even as lots of negative thing are happening also.