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 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?

You are dead right. Agnosticism is much closer to a "null hypothesis" than atheism, yet many atheists like to present their view as "more scientific".

A really rigorous scientific examination pretty quickly comes to the conclusion that the existence of deities (in the spiritual, moral, and experiential ways that most deities are defined) is essentially impossible to prove or disprove with scientific examination of the material world.

In my own opinion it's because faith and religion are mostly about questions of meaning and purpose rather than physical assertions. One's reaction to the tenets of a religion are also experiential - if those tenets provide meaning clarity and improvement in one's being they make sense.

The other aspect of agnosticism is that I find attractive is a kind of intellectual humility. As a single, limited human being, who I am to say what is absolutely true in the metaphysical planes of existence?

I think his age is a big factor even without dementia.

Many older people I've seen have a much stronger "wow, look at this reaction" to new technology- they still see advances as minor miracles when myself and others see them as incremental progress.

I also think a lot of people in that generation have spent less time with psychology and are less prone to being aware of their own emotional and cognitive reactions. This means they don't spend much time reflecting on whether that "wow" reaction is a factual assessment or just an emotional reaction.

And of course the LLM vendors love having people debate this stuff, it keeps the "AI is magic" aura alive even when so much of what "AI" is making seems to be slop.

...and the Cybertruck range and launch date, and the Model 2, and the 4680 battery process, and...

Based on Musk's track record, you can pretty much count on this being a lot less than what is promised and a lot later.

I also just don't see the opportunity. I wouldn't call myself all that knowledgeable about WeChat and its ilk, but I think these "super apps" emerged as China's mobile revolution was taking off, meaning that people started out doing banking and ride sharing etc within these apps. In the US, all those services came out separately.

Admittedly the app landscape is fairly cluttered, but I just can't see the path to US consumers suddenly wanting to hail a ride inside of Xwitter. It's not how most Americans learned to hail rides, and the consumer value in having it all inside of Xwitter seems pretty minimal.

I'm not sure I fully agree. If you know what you're doing, LLM-based code can be quite helpful. I just built a Python scraper using Antigravity in a few hours that would've taken me many days of work and required a lot of effort to learn async function syntax.

It's not a super complex code base, so there's nothing architecturally complex about it. Even then, if I hadn't had a decent understanding of how playwright works, I would've had a much harder time debugging things and fixing some of the dumb decisions the LLM made.

The "anyone can build anything" hype is clearly bogus, but "people who can clearly specify things" can build a lot more than otherwise.

That's actually quite tricky for Google. LLM-based searches unquestionably cannibalize traffic to the web properties that make them the lion's share of their revenue.
However, they surrender their position directing traffic to websites to competitors like OpenAI or Anthropic, then they are far less able to make ad revenue period.

I think their hope is probably to outlast some of the hype cycle and then come in with decent products that leverage their current dominance in ad sales.

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

(And yeah, it was a fun degree. Just a BA :) Decided to go back to school for a second degree on a topic that had long been of interest to me)

DNN-based, like nearly all modern AI. Not Transformers, as far as I'm aware.