Data centers use water for cooling.

Ok, I get that.

But don't you get the water back?

My car uses water for cooling too, and the radiator recirculates it. I'm not pouring in gallons of water to drive across town.

Even if the water comes out of the data center "hot", why can't it be cooled again?

What am I not understanding here?

If you don't like your honey having been regurgitated, there are alternatives for getting honey...

Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones.

That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees".

And an individual bee has limited memory. They even forget which hive they are from after a while if they don't return to it.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

Bees have both a geospatial "mental map" (based on landmarks, the sun, etc) and a chemical fingerprint (they recognize their nestmates' smell). Concerning their geospatial memory, not only is it not poor, the main problem with it is that it's too stubborn. If you move a hive 20 meters away, the bees will fly back to the same empty location where their hive used to be and wait there. They don't adapt well to change because they have a long-term memory of "the hive was here".

If a beekeeper wants to move a hive, they have to trigger an "orientation flight" to get the bees to learn the new location (this typically involves locking them inside their hive for several days to disrupt their routine). During an orientation flight, the bees will learn the new hive location, and then they'll subbornly remember that location long-term, even if you move the hive again.

As for recognizing their nestmates, this is again based on smell. A bee being isolated for days or weeks will still be recognized by guard bees at the entrance and welcomed in. However, guards will sometimes let in bees that don't belong to that hive as well, if e.g. they're passive and laden with pollen and nectar; they haven't "forgotten" their scent, they're just "forgiving" of mistakes if there's a reward to be had (bees sometimes make navigation errors, esp. if all nest boxes are similar in shape/colour or due to wind, and enter the wrong hive)

I'll repeat: bees do NOT have a short memory. This is a myth. It's not true. The very example you gave is actually an example of bee memory being too rigid.

It's IMHO amazingly impressive how dense information can be stored within neural networks. Even a comparably tiny LLM can store more information than the human brain, despite the brain's theoretical storage being far higher due to its vast number of connections (ANNs are better at information density, we're better at learning from limited datasets). The tiny LLM will crush humans at a quiz in virtually anything except said human's particular areas of expertise. Storing information as a superposition of states across a large number of neurons and connections (whether we're talking artificial or biological) is an immensely space-efficient way to do so, and the human mind is nowhere near the limits of information storage capability.

There is no technical reason why a given organism, such as a bee, could not achieve far denser information representations in order to be able to do more with its limited neural capacity (though there are always tradeoffs). One of the reasons that ANNs learn slower-but-denser is the use of a very low learning rate with a very large amount of data that covers the same topic from many different angles, giving the weights ample time to explore different possible circuits in parallel and seeing which ones predict reality the best ("learn everything all at once" vs. "learn this thing NOW"). Bees aren't tasked with learning anywhere nearly as diverse things as a human is and spend all day doing the same basic job (the same information "from different angles"), so it seems quite possible that their greater "information specialization" as they go about their day may be able to lead to denser representations of said information.

BTW, at risk of a tangent (your comment about non-neuron cells playing roles), it's been really interesting to me seeing how a key difference between artificial and biological learning has been clearing up. In biological neural networks, weight cannot flip sign (Dale's Principle). In the general case, a neuron is either excitatory or inhibitory (usually a small number of inhibitory neurons per cluster of excitatory neurons); it can't change from one to the other even if learning would favour that. At a first glance, that would seem to cripple learning capability (and definitely does if you implement that in ANNs). But what appears to actually happen in biological neural networks is a sort of horizontal learning, co-dependent synaptic plasticity, between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Instead of merely weakening an excitatory connection down to zero and then being able to go no further, learning simultaneously weakens the excitatory connections and strengthens the inhibitory connections. The excitatory neurons are the primary drivers of information storage and processing, but the inhibitory neurons adjust the baseline to give them the flexibility to express negative net activations as needed.

It is a myth that individual bees only retain information for half an hour. Depending on the memory at hand, bee memories can last days, weeks, or even the remainder of their foraging life. They have to remember things, because the timeframes a hive operates on are much longer than half an hour, including night time and being kept inside by inclement weather for days or even weeks at at time. Individual bees also learn much more than can be conveyed through waggle dances, such as what colours and shapes of flowers are yielding best in a given area at what time of day (bee learning is essential to them being able to function as generalists, able to handle any mix of plants at any latitude).

Also, the hive doesn't just blindly accept whatever any bee says. Each bee functions as an individual in a society. When a bee waggles in the "town square" (on the comb), other bees gather around to "listen" (detecting oscillating shifts in the electric field plus tactile contact and sound). But whether a bee actually decides to make use of that information depends on whether they're having good or bad foraging success. Only a small fraction of bees on average (usually a single-digit percentage of watchers) will decide to make use of the information. And if another bee "disagrees" with a waggle dance - for example, if they've been there and found nothing, or worse, found dead bees, predators or a rival hive), they can make a counter-buzz to argue against it. The arguments can get quite "heated", with many bees taking part.

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own. There are simply various rallying factors that keep them together (for example, the scent of the queen, the desire to live in a warm hive, etc). The information communicated within a hive is limited; bees overwhelmingly rely on their own mind and memory, and perform their tasks as individuals.

I mean, bees attack small hive beetles by building prisons of propolis around them, that's something :)

Why?

Even if you could do that effectively, wouldn't that further entrench the idea that The People are the government's bitch

What, exactly, is the point or purpose of including code in your program that is downloaded from a third-party website every time you execute the program?

If you want to include a function or subroutine or library in your program, why wouldn't you just download it and use that?

"Lets drag in random code every time we run the program" is a huge security hole on its own and I genuinely don't understand why anyone would do that, or would even consider it as a worthwhile idea.

The Hegnet and Orangenet

They can easily stop Google from "taking" any of their content that they wish.

robots.txt is a thing, and Google honours it.

If it's not listed in robots.txt, it's not password protected, and it's available on the public Internet (notice the word public there) then why shouldn't Google have the same right to read their webpage as you or I do.

"Oh, but they're telling others what it says."

Yeah, and I just told my wife/friend/dog that my favourite hockey team won their game. I saw that information on a news website and passed it along.

If your business fails you stop doing it and move on to something else.

And if there's a demand for your business elsewhere then you set up over there instead.

Should there also be a law saying that McDonalds or Pizza Hut can't set up shop within four miles of any independent restaurant?

"My business model is failing. Make those guys give me money."

I understand the value of newsrooms and have a lot of sympathy for their sudden lack of viability in today's world, but I'm not convinced that is the answer.

Other than government taxation, monetary transactions in a capitalist society are supposed to be voluntary,

The rare AI enthusiast

Hey, I know this is the site for devs who are so old that they're out of the game or enthusiasts who wish they could call themselves developers, but AI assisted coding is just plain normal today. It's not even controversial.

In all the projects you love, hate, or don't care about. If you're developing today and not using AI at all, you're the rare developer.

Probably in here somewhere: "run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud"

EU techie: "We did it, we replaced Google!"

Boss: "Good job! Are there any other US dependencies?"

EU techie: "Um, yes, it runs on top of Bing."

Boss: "Microsoft!?"

EU techie: "Yip. We couldn't get our home-grown one to work right."

Boss: "Uhgg, well, don't tell anyone and you can have a Citroen."