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Comment Mining+power (Score 1) 25

I guess the logical next step is to capture the heat output as hot water, concentrate the heat somehow (or heat the water a bit more) and use steam to drive a turbine producing electricity. Ye cannae break the laws of physics, but it should be possible for a datacentre to recoup at least part of its electricity costs this way? Essentially a steam-driven power station where the heating element is a bank of GPUs with water running over them.

Comment Re:Yes, but no.. (Score 4, Insightful) 116

It's not clear to me that the people making the hiring/firing decisions, and deciding how many programmers can be replaced by AI, know the difference between the copy-paste coders you're talking about and the people who are doing the harder things.

And, given the way they think, and given the fact that all of us are subject to a whole host of cognitive biases, some places at least are likely to want to keep on the cheap copy-paste types than the more expensive senior programmers.

Short term, things will look good. Quarterly reports will be up. It will take longer for companies to realize that they've made a mistake and everything is going to shit, but because of the emphasis on quarterly returns, plus because all of these companies are caught up on the groupthink bandwagon of the AI evangilists, a lot of them as institutions may not be able to properly diagnose why things went to shit. (Even if individuals within the institutions do.)

I'm in science (astronomy) myself, and the push here is not quite as overwhelming as it is in the private sector. Still, I've seen people who should know better say "an AI can just do that more efficiently".

Comment I really miss Netflix DVD (Score 5, Insightful) 99

Somewhere early on in the video rental business back in the 80s, there was established a legal precedent that production companies couldn't forbid rental of anything they'd released on video. That carried over to DVD. Eventually we had Netflix DVD, which was superior to video rental stores because of its gigantic selection. Usually (though not always) what you wanted to rent was in stock. Yeah, there was a two day (or so) delay between deciding to watch something and getting to watch it, which we don't have with streaming. But one subscription got you pretty much everything.

Alas, the open renting thing did not transfer over to streaming, so now you have to subscribe to n different services to be able to get what you want on a whim -- undermining at least part of what streaming promised. And, stuff moves between services all the time. This is even before we talk about how crappy the discovery tools within one stream service is.

It was a sad day when Netflix DVD closed down.

Comment Re: Vim is already available for Windows (Score 1) 105

Well I know that you can't argue over personal tastes, and many people like modal editors, but I don't think it is about "educating yourself". Perhaps the opposite is true, as this interview with vi's creator, Bill Joy, explains:

REVIEW: What would you do differently?
JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think the interesting thing is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

Comment The Surface Studio had a good screen, at least (Score 1) 16

I never had a Surface Studio. But I always wanted one for its 4500x3000 display. Microsoft did a good job in pushing 3:2 aspect ratio and driving the PC market away from the horrible letterboxing that dominated laptops and monitors for a decade. It's a pity that panel was never sold in a standalone monitor (Huawei talked about it but the product never reached the market).

Comment Re: Were is Wikipedia for Code (Score 2, Informative) 58

Funny. On the several projects I've tried it for, Claude always offers to explain. And when I've needed that on a particular block, it does an excellent job. It does understand what it's doing, at least to some extent.

It doesn't understand anything.

It is trained to echo explanations, or at least things that sounds like explanations and may often accidentally be correct, based on all the various technical documentation you can find on the net.

Comment Not only that (Score 2) 104

If their government in China had their ass so far in their rectum to refuse global warming as factual, and promoted coal like Trump/GOP did, they would not be doing renewable like crazy.

The more important is not whether it is a democracy or a dictatorial regime, the more important factor was : they are not rejecting basic science.

If both side of the aisle accepted global warming and had the will to fight, you would see the same effort in the US. Unfortunately you have the GOP which is anti science. So instead you get a dead end.

Comment Re:Fundamentally Similar to Fake Quotes (Score 1) 85

Did you try asking one chatbot to check the quotations given by the other chatbot? If you ask the AI to find something then it will do its best to please you. But if you ask it "is this quotation real" or "is there any evidence for X" then at least some of the time it can perform the useful service of saying "no, can't find it".

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