EST extends well past the city limits of Chicago up here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Most of the UP is in EST (except for a strip along the border with Wisconsin) including areas 100 miles west of downtown Chicago. Granted, the moose don't really care about time zones, but there are a few humans around here as well.

Not that the article bothered to say, but scanning the docs shows that the purpose of this is to display hardware performance graphs and maybe some other statistics. Maybe that's obvious to people who are in the loop regarding Steam Machine news, but I'm not and it wasn't.

eInk seems like an odd choice for this, since it's meant more for static displays than constantly updating ones. If you don't want to play with the eInk hardware I expect someone will eventually re-implement it as a tablet or phone app.

Not to mention the most '70s guitar riff ever to grace the small screen!

Awesome effects, awesome sets, awesome props, awesome music. All they needed were some awesome screen writers, which they unfortunately didn't have.

You can't just create water.

Well, I mean, you can. You do it by burning hydrogen. If they were really clever they could power the data center by burning hydrogen, and use the generated water for (at least a portion of) the cooling. I'm sure it wouldn't be energy efficient nor economically efficient, but it could technically be done. (Forget that the water generated would be in the form of vapor, not liquid. Details.)

And no, it's not good that a journalist was able to track her down using it. Or at least, regulations that prevent police from using it should also prevent them from using it by proxy via some third party. The facial recognition should be thrown out as inadmissible in court.

I agree that just labeling the AI-generated stuff *should* be enough, but I wonder if it really is enough. Yesterday someone sent me a video of Brian Cox describing some concept. Right in the text of the original post it said, "This video features an AI-generated voice for storytelling and educational purposes. It is not the real Brian Cox." So, fully disclosed, but it didn't stop people from forwarding it.

When I complained, the person who sent it to me said that the idea's interesting regardless of where it came from. Is it, though? Would you have bothered watching it if it was some unknown talking head with an anonymous AI voice? The presentation matters. The video used Brian Cox because he's smart, personable, and has a history of explaining difficult physics concepts in a manner most people can understand. People generally trust him in his area of expertise. Using his likeness in something he had nothing to do with is simply a dishonest way to ride his coattails, even if you do add a caption saying, "Not really Brian Cox". It's the academic world's version of stolen valor.

So in principle, I agree. Just marking something as AI-generated should be enough. In practice I fear it's going to be an asterisk and fine print so small people won't notice it, and even if they do the realism will trick their hindbrains into letting their guard down because it appears to be someone they trust.

That's the beauty of data, you can put the data center somewhere far from where the data is used. Put it somewhere appropriate, not Texas or other places that are high on ambient heat and low on water.

I've been wondering if geothermal might be a solution, only use the ground as a heat sink instead of a heat source. Here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula the abandoned mines stay at 40F all year round, regardless of the air temperature. Place the servers in the mine, drill some cooling loops into the rock. I don't know enough about thermodynamics to know if this is viable. A thousand feet of earth and rock ought to be pretty good as noise insulation, too.

Assuming that AI is actually capable of coding useful, non-trivial, defect-free products... You're still going to need programmers. But instead of writing code, they'll be writing formalized specifications.

The English language suuuuuuuuccckkks at precision. Just look at any RFC that spends the first page defining the terms "MUST", "MAY", and "SHALL". AI prompts will need to become formalized and written to look like legal documents. The average person just doesn't think like that. Programmers do.

"AI Specification Language" (probably several different ones with subtle differences depending on the exact AI model being used) is going to be the next big programming language. Netcraft confirms it.

We'll still need programmers, at least until honest-to-goodness AGI comes along and makes all of us meatbags obsolete.

Agreed. I wish people would stop treating data centers as bogeymen. Most people aren't opposed to data centers per se, they're opposed to the side-effects. They're concerned about the energy usage and its effect on consumer energy rates. They're concerned about water usage. They're concerned about noise. They're concerned about heat pollution in the surrounding environment.

The thing is, all those things (with the possible exception of heat pollution) are fixable! They just take money and regulators with teeth. Don't let the data center owners externalize the costs onto the community. Make them pay for new power plants to satisfy their needs. Pass noise regulations. Require closed-loop cooling instead of evaporative. Address the actual concerns. And when writing the regulations, don't even mention the words "data center". Establish thresholds applicable to any industry, so when the next big thing comes along you don't have to start all over again passing the same rules but in the context of "hoverboard manufacturers" or whatever.

I expect it means there are two Outlook icons on the desktop.

And here I am, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, sitting on 347" of snowfall this season. And today, the Second of April in the Year of Our Lord 2026, we have a winter storm warning with another 2-4" predicted this afternoon.

All I'm saying is, if the western states want snow they can feel free to come get it! No one here will argue.

I look forward to the clash between the sites that require you to prove you're not a bot and everyone currently engaged in the agentic AI circle-jerk. I mean, how can I tell my agent to read and summarize a thread and reply to it in the style of Boris Badenov if the site checks that the user is a human? I mean, maybe I could login and prove my humanity before handing the keyboard over to the agent, but who has time for crap like that? That's the kind of boring busy-work we have computers for.

tackle (verb)
1. To attempt (but not necessarily succeed at) a task.
2. To knock down so as to impede forward progress.

Either way, I'm sure Claude can tackle modernization of COBOL code.

If there is one thing I don't care for, it is the placement of the power switch. Underneath the machine, in the left rear. As I told an Apple representative, they produce these pretty machines, but must employ an evil genius to place the power switches in bizarre or obscure places.

I honestly can't think of a reason to ever turn off a computer that stays plugged into the wall. I'm sure you have your reasons, but I expect that 99% of buyers press the power button exactly once.

We're weak against it because we're stupid.

"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb." - D. Helmet