What kind of strawman is that? I never said anything about never having had an energy crisis or shortage of metals before. I said that we had never replaced ICE vehicles with EVs and had problems finding enough electricity to charge them either previously or now.

I am not sure what your point is here. As it is, plants are not as efficient at producing energy from sunlight as solar panels are, also corn is not the best energy crop anyway, and additionally making ethanol from an energy crop involves multiple steps that waste energy at each step. Might as well just burn the corn directly if you're using it to make electricity. Corn ethanol exists because there is a powerful corn lobby in the US that gets corn subsidized and also because, after the subsidies, ethanol is a cheap way to raise the octane rating of fuel (ethanol has an octane rating of 100-109, equal to or higher than iso-octane itself) which is useful for the petroleum industry in their "premium" gasoline scam.

They will put them at what they think is the optimal overlap of cheap land, electrical access and available data bandwidth. While they indeed don't care what they clear cut, the locations are still unlikely to be in forests. Also, aside from that, while they certainly are not environmentally sound, data centers are generally pretty compact in terms of land use, so this is pretty ridiculous. As for transmission loss, it is small enough that colocation of solar or wind power makes little sense for large, power hungry installations unless somehow the location is also perfect for solar or wind. It is actually more logistically sound to put solar and wind where they produce the most power and transmit that power.

In the US, the majority of household power is used for heating and cooling at around 52% with the second largest usage being water heating at about 18%, so those together account for 70% of usage. Now, to be clear, those are not all electrical in all homes. Obviously some homes use natural gas or even oil (sometimes wood) for heating and/or hot water though virtually never for refrigeration (technically you can have fossil fuel powered refrigerators like in many RVs, though even those are moving to battery and solar power). However, enough of that portion of household usage is electrical for it to still be a significant fraction of average household electrical usage. Refrigeration is around 5%, other appliances for cleaning, cooking, etc. take up somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% with lighting being around 7%. So the categories you mentioned (except for "central air" which falls under heating and cooling, which I covered, and of course EVs, which are also clearly covered in what I said before with typical miles driven per household) are only about 10% of household usage. So, aside from the TVs, game consoles, computers, cell phones, and unnecessarily "smart" devices, the other categories I mentioned are all devices that have a lot of room for improvement: heating and cooling can be significantly improved just by improving features like insulation and other passive heat control measures in many homes. Then the active heating/cooling measures have huge room for efficiency improvement as well, such as by replacing many existing systems with modern, high-efficiency heat pumps. Ditto for water heating. Heat pump-based water heaters can provide huge improvements. For refrigerators and other home appliances that I mentioned, there's clearly room for plenty of improvement in efficiency with much more efficient versions of refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, dryers available, and things like induction cooking, etc. available. For lighting, even though LED lighting has made a huge improvement and is nearly universal now, easily fifty percent of lighting power usage could be eliminated if homes had occupancy sensors installed to control lighting.
As for the TVs, game consoles, computers, cell phones, and unnecessary "smart" features of devices, IoT and all that, yes there is waste there. There is definitely room for improvement and I certainly agree that there are too many devices that simply never power off (although it's not like you actually need to go for the breakers when they plug into the wall or even into a power strip that has its own power switch - on that note I should point out that the "central air" is normally on a thermostat). Still, they're only a small percentage of overall usage and what room for improvement there is, if improved, would lower that as well.
Ultimately, just in the context of household EV usage, the extra power needed could be made up for by home efficiency improvements. So, the argument I made still stands. I should point out in addition though that household electricity usage is only about 38% of total electricity usage in the first place, and EV power would only be a fraction of that so, even if not offset by household efficiency improvements (which it certainly could be), it would not be a significant increase in electrical usage.

I can't even understand what you're trying to argue here. I mean, aside from positing a data center with power requirements at least an order of magnitude larger than any singular existing facility, making the bizarre assumption that it would operate solely using solar power, and making the other bizarre assumption that engineers designing a data center that runs only on solar power and battery storage would somehow forget that they would need to build out enough solar capacity to charge the batteries, what is the actual point?

Ultimately, aside from some general ranting and apparently subscribing to the nonsense anti-EV theory that somehow electrical power availability can't scale to support them, it is hard to discern what you are ultimately actually trying to say with all of this.

I disagree, this effectively outlaws chatbots.

This isn't merely semantics. Training is a radically different operation from programming. The pretraining of LLMs is simply throwing vast amounts of text at them. The model is able to generalize what was learned from its pretraing and apply that experience to its context. There is no explicit programming.

You claimed the chatbot was programmed to manipulate people. What did you mean by that? When I hear statements asserting such and such was programmed to do something it carries with it a presumption of intent on the part of programmer. Is this an unreasonable interpretation of your words? If this is not what you intended to say what did you intend?

AI is not executing anything. It is merely passing code to an interpreter which executes the code outside of the model.

Random examples of things AIs are able to do without having been programmed to do them:

- Language translation
- base64 decoding
- Solve simple ciphers
- Adding fractions
- Writing code in a variety of languages

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

Big deal. That's only one out of four.

But he keeps falling for that gift horse statue left on the front lawn.

I too bought memory in April to avoid tariffs. I had to run a stupid python program to generate a dataset that required 96GB of RAM for a delayed project so I figured I might as well bite the bullet. DDR4 was still a good value at that point (it's a problem that can run overnight, performance wasn't too important).

But how are the tariffs limiting the manufacturing supply capacity of RAM factories in East Asia?

Do you have a mechanism to propose?

Do you think they're making enough to meet demand but then blaming tariffs to justify jacking up prices? All of them? It would be an interesting conspiracy but is there any evidence to support that theory?

> How much is this problem is down to AI and how much to beautiful tariffs?

What mechanism are you thinking of where tariffs could limit supply of VRAM from East Asia?

Simple price increases, sure, definitely, but this is described by manufacturers as a supply & demand problem.

Do you have a different angle we should consider?

The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.

There were two people in the cockpit. Possibly with different agendas.

No doubt that is (part of) what the experts were called on to answer. They just didn't want to get stuck in a remote facility until their answer was deemed "correct".

Sounds like they caught a case of MCAS.

Gesundheit.

AI has its place in replacing live music. I don't really want to share an elevator with a symphony orchestra.

But that's about it.