Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

You're assuming the companies with these fleets of (currently largely non-existant) robots are still going to solvent if the bubble pops. That seems highly unlikely in many cases given the business model for AI is apparently "borrow massive amounts of money to fund it using the promise future orders as collateral". Asset strippers have no interest in salvaging a business; their business model is to buy the physical assets cheap, dump the debt on to bagholders (the shareholders), and sell the assets off to whoever wants it, hopefully for more than the cents on the dollar paid they probably for it. I buy stuff from these auctions from time to time; it's a great way to get nearly new, and often still on the market, kit at a fraction of the retail price.

Also, Facebook might not be the best counter example there. Remember what happened to many of the hires, business units, servers, and services, Meta setup when Zuck went all-in on the Metaverse? What do you think he'll do if going all-in on AI doesn't pan out for him?

Yeah, but these are Humanities students. That, by its very definition, is an area where AI should have very limited use, where it is applied should be done really, really, carefully, and job losses are far less likely than in many other fields. Sure, there's analysis of datasets, especially of geographical and historical data, but that is one of the areas where a specifically trained model can really be of use, but an AI is never going to painstakingly brush away dirt from some ancient historical site, and I shudder to think what would happen if AI hallucinations get let loose on philosophy or religion. That said, it would probably be very amusing watching those who buy into the output; and doubly so if the model was trained on the Butlerian.Jihad from Dune, less so for actual crusades, jihads, and "holy" wars.

Still, if these presumably tech savvy Gen Z students are not fans of the tech, regardless of whether that's because the recognise how its being used by corporates or some other reasons, then I think the people that need to be more worried about this are those that have built the massive pyramid trillions of dollars of debt to build something that few seem to want or trust. Like the .com boom, the bubble must pop sooner or later and sort out who is a "pets.com" and who is a "google.com", and there are growing indication that, unlike .com, the demand that will be required to pay for it all just isn't there, and we're already way beyond the scale of any previous government bailouts. That kind of crash only has one outcome; a lot of shareholders (which includes pension funds) are going to lose their shirts.

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

It is effective at reducing staff cheaply, but it has a huge downside, shared with most attrition-based schemes for reducing payroll: The best employees are also the ones who find it the easiest to leave. The worst employees are also the ones who will grit their teeth and hold on to the bitter end.

It's harder and more costly (in the short term) to do targeted layoffs which allows the company to target low-performers, or those who are low performers relative to their cost. It's the better choice, though.

Lots of the top performers will.

According to TFS, the layoffs are due on 20th May. No one is going to voluntarily quit if they can just phone it in for another 8 working days and get at least some additional severence pay to tide them over while they look for a new job. If they don't get cut and are still hacked off enough on the 21st, that's probably when people are going to start to quit.

Of course, one thing Meta is very good at is profiling people. And another, as TFS points out, is being callous sociopaths. Chances are they've factored all that in and I wouldn't be at all surprised if their actual target is a 15% RIF and they've worked out that if they fire *this* 10% on the 20th, then *this* further 5% that have definitely had enough and were hoping to be laid off will be so fed up with the loss of their former colleagues and even more hostile workplace will quit of their own accord over the next few weeks. If Meta was aware you were looking for another job before they announced the 10% RIF, it's pretty good bet you're in the additional 5% they are hoping for.

It's not a lake under the city, it's an aquifer, so it takes quite a bit of time for the water to disperse, rather than flow, through it. Replenishing a little bit of the water in one area through a leak might stave off some of the sinking in that area, but the areas where water is being extracted from will continue to sink much faster, with the additional complication that the density of the aquifter likely varies as well. The net result is the same though; different parts of the city sink at different rates, with those near leaks or denser parts of the aquifer slower than those near extraction points or the more porous areas, hence all the tilting buildings.

As a matter of fact, yes. Specifically, to the Greenland region.

Although a golden bridge of grossly outsized proportions and festooned with tacky ornamentation would be much preferred.

Using a proper password hashing algorithm mostly addresses this concern... and standard cryptographic hashes like MD-5, SHA-1, SHA-256, etc. are not appropriate. They're designed to be as time and space-efficient as possible while still achieving their security goals. Password hashing functions (more precisely, password-based key derivation functions) are designed specifically to be time and space-hungry, efficient enough that you can execute them in half-second or so for user authentication, but slow enough that brute forcing even moderately-good passwords is intractible.

The best widely-available algorithm is Argon2id. The modern algorithms don't focus so much on requiring lots of CPU cycles because GPUs. Instead, they focus on requiring significant amounts of RAM, in ways that provably cannot be reduced. The most-recommended Argon2id configuration requires 2GB RAM. This makes it feasible for most servers to handle fairly easily, as long as they don't have to verify too many passwords in parallel, but it means that GPUs don't help the attacker, and it's also slow enough that while you can get some traction by using a large botnet, it's really not very much. If a PC requires 500ms per attempt, and you have a million-machine botnet, you can still only try 2M passwords per second. If user passwords have, say, 30 bits of entropy, your massive botnet can find one every five minutes on average. If they have 40 bits, your botnet can find a password every ~3 days, on average. That's not nothing, but if you have control of a million machines, you can definitely find better uses for them.

Of course, even better is to use passkeys or similar, but as a practical matter you probably have to have a password to fall back on.