"It uses less electricity than a modern frig"

So that seemed incredible; but after doing some research it is plausible (with caveats). I have a few questions:

1) What 'modern' fridge are you using for comparison? There is a substantial difference between 1982, 2002 and 2022.
2) What are the volumes of the two fridges being compared?

The average 1940s fridge looks to be only 6-8 cu ft; while the average 2000s fridge is 20+ cu ft. Even if it slightly beats the modern fridge on total electricity, it's probably only cooling 1/3 to 1/4 the volume

For example in the 1940s you might be around 400kWh; but if its 7cu ft, its only getting 57kWh/cu ft/year; and comparing it to a 550kWh fridge from 2002 cooling 21 cu ft for 26kWh/cu ft/year. (And that's a 20 year old not particularly efficient "modern" fridge... you could get that down to 300kWh annually on a new fridge if you buy specifically for efficiency)

Sure the 1940s fridge might beat that not particularly modern or efficient "modern fridge" on total use but it's still not really a win unless you only need 7 cu ft. And if all you need is 7 cu fit, in 2025 you can get 8 cu ft for 167kWh year. (60% less electricity)

cites: some data on 2025 fridges
https://shrinkthatfootprint.co...

data on refrigeration energy usage and capacity over time:
https://www.researchgate.net/f...
https://appliance-standards.or...

Fair comment, but the point stands that it's in there and sooner or later it will.

That's such an arbitrary calculation. The big turning point was in the 70s energy crisis when energy star became a thing. And there is a huge efficiency jump from 1970 to 1980; sure 2020s appliances are significantly more efficient than 1980s appliances but is a logarithmic improvement curve and there's no justification to buy one every 10 years.

I bet it uses 4-5x the electricity of a modern one and is slowly leaking Freon too. Nice flex!

You probably could pay for a new basic fridge in a couple years with what you are wasting in electricity to run that old one.

Get a new one without an ice maker and just use ice trays and it'll be rock solid too. (The vast majority of the reliability issues across ALL brands are in the ice makers.)

I think the real issue is warm parts of China selling to cold parts of India without including the features that aren't needed near the factory. We know lots about battery chemistry, but rural farmers have had more immediately relevant things to know about up to now and don't have a good source of information on this new thing the government is pushing, so they skip things that sound like luxuries and end up with something inappropriate for their purpose.

What difference does the age of the iceberg have in relation to where the ice in it came from. The fact that we weren't talking about climate change when this iceberg broke is irrelevant.

The source of the ice in the iceberg under discussion is Antarctica. You didn't even have to RTFA, this was even mentioned in the summary.

That aged well.

Your point? That would be most people by a huge margin.

OneDrive offers
- protection against local hardware failure.
- protection gainst loss in a laptop theft or loss situation
- protection against loss in a fire/flood, catastrophe situation unless you have remote offsite backups (*)
- protection against ransomware
- protection against accidental data overwrite and other common user errors
- simplified data migration to a new device (especially good for people without IT... but its handy for IT too if, people can just sign into a freshly imaged laptop and go)

vs...
- increases risk of disclosure in a cloud breach or phishing attack

(* and if you DO have current remote offsite backups you are probably using the cloud to facilitate that anyway.)

That's not to minimize the risk of a cloud breach... but you need to properly assess your risk profile. Data stored locally can also be targeted and ex-filtrated, the risk is generally smaller, but it remains, especially if its valuable enough to target.)

And I know plenty of people who have had devices break or get stolen many times and lost valuable data, or lost data in an automated low effort ransomware attack (and targeted high effort attacks too)...Point is: for a lot of people, probably even the large majority of people, cloud storage is very much a net positive.

There is almost no scenario where the initial cost to put things into orbit, and the increased cost to build them to exist there, maintain and support them there, and replace them when they fail is ever paid back by the efficiency gain in having it there though.

Unless you've got essentially unlimited free energy to put things into orbit ... but if you have that you probably don't need space solar panels in the first place.

Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service because various corporate sites are geoblocking countries for various b2b and other small scale portals. I see this pretty regularly.

Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service for some peace of mind in sketchy internet cafes etc. It ensures you are using a known DNS provider, all your non-encrypted traffic is opaque, and you can use 'nearby' endpoints so aren't running packets around the globe.

Another significant use for VPNs is to route around censorship blocks. And log-less VPN services can be used to drop leaks to journalists and stuff... assuming you trust the vpn service.

Some people just want to confound potential tracking and profiling by their local ISP... in exchange for potential tracking and profiling by their VPN service... but maybe they know the ISP is selling their data, and they trust their VPN isn't.

Your computer, email app, pdf viewer, printer, scanner, and mobile phone, are all non-human and naturually can't have a valid I-9 ...therefore under federal law also cannot 'be used' to work in hiring or staffing? Is that your position here?

AI probably cannot legally make hiring decisions, but as a tool to process, summarize, grade,rank, or perform social media correlation or other pre-background-check type stuff ... it probably can be used by a human just like any other tool.

That said, It probably shouldn't be used for that for a lot of good reasons, but all that is entirely unrelated to whether it can have a valid I-9.

If there's 10s of millions of people in china looking to cheat on their exams using llama models... i figure the "market" will make suitable models happen pretty quickly.

You realize of course that Exams are also highly tuned for one specific thing, like "20th Century English Literature", "Linear Algebra", "Criminlology: Overview of the Prison System", and "Axiomatic Meta-logic".

Eigenvalues are all but guaranteed to show up in the the 2nd exam, and all but guaranteed not to be mentioned in the other three.

PS That last one is highly recommended, but its a little dense.

It doesn't interfere with the "TrueDepth" Face ID stuff because it IS the TrueDepth Face ID stuff.

https://support.apple.com/en-u...

You called it an "IR emitter"... but its an IR camera.

This camera is also used for "attention awareness features" (and for this, yes it is constantly taking pictures.)

Is it quite the situation the GP suggested... no, of course not.
But yeah, it is pretty constantly taking IR photos of you when those features are on.

It's likely not doing anything with them beyond the functionality apple claims... but it is taking them, and it could be doing something more with them.

I am if the AI generated slop can only exist because the LLM owner ripped off the human creators to train the LLM.

More like the same way Napster and Limewire worked, where we all just picked the songs we want and copied them for free digitally over the internet, rather than paying for a CD to be manufactured and shipped around. Napster was just the market deciding ... right?

Except it was massive copyright infringment. Sure the CD distribution model might have been outdated in the face of a more efficient digital model, but that doesn't mean just copying all the work you wanted for free was a good solution.

The LLMs right now are like Napster -- they took all that copyright work for free and are exploiting it for profit. That's plainly wrong.

We need to get to a spotify/apple music world, where the LLM systems respects copyrights. Artists decide if their content may be used as training material or not, and they get paid for it if they do.

I actually do agree with you here. But I think youtube is a pretty shitty platform, that promotes *mostly* shitty content. Because the engagement and incentive model of ad supported systems is pernicious. We can do better. But that's a separate conversation.

Separately LLMs training on their own AI slop causes problems and LLMs can easily produce content at a rate that can overwhelm human output ; so even without a creative apocalypse caused by people not wanting to create; there may be a practical one if ai slop drowns everything else under a flood of shit.

Humans are special.

Agreed. The contents of your mind are beyond the reach of copyright.
But the contents of your computer memory and hard drives are not.
Memorize it all you want, but copies on your computer are legally different.

Well, yes, people ARE forbidden from doing exactly that.

For example, if you want to recite lord of the rings to a paying audience? you need license for that. Translate it to Klingon and distribute copies?... you need a license for that too.

Sure you can show off to friends in a bar or around the kitchen table all you like privately. That's all fair use. But try to commercialize it and distribute it, broadcast it, or perform it? Yes, people also need a license for that.

AI companies by and large are for profit enterprises copying data that doesn't belong to them and exploiting it for commercial gain by training LLMs on it. LLMs aren't people. It takes input, it runs an algorithm, it generates output. For it to have a model of LotR in there, either the model is getting passed in the prompt the user gave it (it's not) or its getting in there via the training on the copy of LotR and everything else that was fed in (yep this one). So copies were made to train, and some sort of derivative copies are persisted inside the model data too... which then are commercially exploited.

And even if it did work exactly same way as a human brain worked it still wouldn't matter, because its still a computer, and memory and storage, and those things are all treated by copyright law differently from a human mind.