"overstating the degree to which genAI helped them"

You actually legitimately believe this, don't you?

I literally linked a map of where pistachios are grown in California. They are overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands (not merely "the San Juaquin Valley" as a whole - specifically the Tulare Basin (the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley). Bakersfield to Merced, mostly Bakersfield to Fresno, is where almost all California pistachio cultivation is located. We're not talking e.g. Stockton.

The southern end of the San Joaquin valley - the Tulare Basin - gets 5-8 inches per year in the lowlands. Bakersfield gets 7 (same as Phoenix and Reno). That's desert (defined less than 10 inches per year). Fresno is borderline-desert (10-11 inches per year). Merced is 12. Stockton gets 14-18 inches per year, but that's not relevant because that's not where the concentration of pistachio cultivation is.

7 inches of rain per year is NOT Mediterranean. Even the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley (where only a very small % of California's pistachio cultivation is conducted) is at best marginally Mediterreanean. Compare Stockton's 14-18 inches to famously "Mediterranean" cities:

Athens: 15.7 in
Tunis: 18.7 in
Málaga: 19.7 in
Marseille: 20.7 in
Tel Aviv: 21.5 in
Barcelona: 24 in
Algiers: 23.6 in
Nice: 31.1 in
Beirut: 32.3 in
Naples: 39.6 in
Antalya: 41.3 in
Dubrovnik: 41.7 in

Stockton, the NORTHERN end, is up there with the absolute driest of famous Mediterranean cities. The San Joaquin Valley is not Mediterreanean. It ranges from desert in the south, borderline desert in the middle, and arid in the north. It is coastal California that is famously Mediterranean.

Specifically, Mediterrean climates are Köppen classification (Cs). Coastal California, from Los Angeles through San Francisco, is clasified as "Hot-summer Mediterranean" (Csa) to "Warm-summer Mediterreanean" (Csb). But southern San Joaquin Valley lowlands are a mix of BWh (Hot desert climate) and CWh (Cold desert climate). Most of the rest is BSk (Cold semi-arid). The northern end around Stockton just barely qualifies as Csb (Warm-summer Mediterranean). The coasts are solidly in Csa and Csb.

These are the facts, and you need to come to accept them. California's pistachio cultivation is overwhemingly in the SOUTHERN San Joaquin Valley, which is desert and borderline desert, NOT in the north, which is arid to borderline Mediterranean.

By the way, do you even know where pistachios are native to? They're native to Iran. Specifically, the high deserts and arid steppes of northeastern Iran (the Iranian Plateau, not the Caspian coast), extending into western Afghanistan. Typical rainfall in their native range is 6-16 inches per year. Their native summers are hot (~38C / 100F), highly dry and they cannot tolerate significant rainfall during the growing season. They develop a very long taproot to search for deep sources of water, so despite being adapted to dry climates, they thrive on access to water. They have high salt tolerance because they're commonly found around the edges of endorheic basins. Their native terrain looks like this. They are not a mediterranean tree.

California pistachios grown overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands. The Tulare Basin lowlands get only 5-8 inches of precipitation per year (for comparison, Phoenix and Reno both get about 7 inches). As a desert is a region with less than 10 inches of rain per year, yes, pistachios are grown in the desert. Without irrigation projects the pistachio lands would be barren desert scrub. They get the water from deep wells (causing land subsidence, because they're not getting replenished), mountain rivers (which are overdrawn and under seasonal threat from diminishing winter snowpack accumulation), and water channeled all the way from the Oregon border. So much water has been channeled from rivers in the region that Tulare Lake, once the largest US lake west of the Mississippi, is usually largely dry.

Outside the San Joaquin valley, the other main ag centures are the Imperial Valley, Palo Verde Valley, Coachella Valley, and the Yuma Project, which are fed via Colorado River water which was overallocated by the Colorado River Compact. These are in the Colorado Desert, part off the Sonora Desert system.

Stop blaming washing machines for water scarcity and start blaming your decision to buy, say, pistachios grown in a friggin' desert. A one pound bag of pistachios requires ~1200 gallons of water and contains the calories to feed a family of 4 for a single day. A modern front-loader washer uses about 10 gallons and said family probably runs it about once per day. That's a 120-to-1 ratio. Other desert crops are even worse - beef raised on alfalfa (a major crop in the desert southwest) is orders of magnitude worse. And the wastewater from the washing machine gets reclaimed for other purposes after treatment, while the irrigation water is completely lost to evaporation.

I'll repeat: your washing machine is a tiny blip on the radar. It's your choice to buy food grown in the desert southwest that is your actual water consumption. And it's a perverse historic water-rights system that leads to growing all those crops in the desert using unsustainable amounts of water. Without these historic granted water rights, if water were just an open market relative to how much were actually sustainably available, it would be basically limitless to households, and agriculture would shift to areas where water is more sustainably available.

In another company, the employee could *apply* for the voluntary exit, but management reserved the right to decline to accept in 'special circumstances'.

There was a lot of pressure to accept of course, but they did cover the scenario of making sure they can keep someone if they thought they could not afford it.

The key is that either way, the severance is the same. When my company last did a voluntary buyout, it was more than the standard severance to sweeten the pot. If it is equal to severance, then people would be inclined to stick it out unless they *really* were looking to leave anyway.

If you stick it out, you get normal pay until the layoffs actually happen, and if you are so unlucky to be out of work for over 39 weeks, then you can start the UI checks to get that once the severance 'runs out'.

eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [ ... ]

...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.

I'll broadly agree that self-hosting even when easy is skipped by most people, but funny to use email as the shining example of a relatively easy thing to self-host, that's one of the messiest things to try to self-host. But it is easy to point out that the vast bulk of AWS/Azure business is 'stuff people don't bother to self-host' and I know a lot of folks that would rather open a web hosted paint application than just start an already installed paint application.

I do think that the 'pure AI' companies are vulnerable to being rolled over in the long term by the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. The companies that in various ways control the 'onramps' to this sort of tech (e.g. my company exclusively gives money to Microsoft for access to the models, because that's what they are used to doing for so much other spend).

So the private investors will fuel profit taking with IPO sell-off and the debt load may result in the company going bankrupt and the pieces being picked up by an older tech company.

To be clear, and despite the bad reporting, this "$80 billion loss" is a paper loss. For example, $72B of it is convertible notes. They became a liability because the valuation of the company skyrocketed. They have nothing to do with the company's operations.

If you stopped irrigating crops in the US desert southwest, there would be no water issues at all, either for households or for industry.

I'll repeat, it is agriculture that consumes meaningful amounts of water, not homes and businesses. Farms by water by the acre foot - an acre of land flooded to a depth of one foot. Water is not abundant on the scale of "farms buying it by the acre foot", but it absolutely is on the scale of "what you need for your house".

You left out that he doesn't only have one class.

"I'm sure if I cared enough to go looking".

So you just made a weird, false assumption in order to justify to yourself something you already wanted to do.

I used to have your viewpoint, by the way. The reality eventually became undeniable. Musk is a unique threat to western democracy.

Well, the use of AI *should* be encouraged, but that's a lousy way to do it. After graduation the students will need to live in a world where they deal with AI...but we don't know what the shape of that world will be.

OTOH, the main thing you're supposed to learn in mathematics classes is "the shape of mathematics". Learning to do the mathematics is secondary, now that calculators have advanced to AIs. (I've become nearly dependent on spell-check, but I don't really think of this as a problem.)

The tapes I was talking about were 800 bpi reels even parity. (The odd parity ones had better error recovery.)

How much energy does it take to drive to a laundromat and back?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant. It's agriculture that uses the overwhelming majority (70% of withdrawals and 80-90% of consumptive water use. Industry next (20% of withdrawals). Residential usage is way, way down the list, and washing machines are only 17% of that (well below for example lawn watering at about 30% overall, but which in some regions is over half of all consumption, and in the summer and times of water scarcity can be the vast majority). An early 1950s top-loader washing machine would use about 40-55 gal plus 0,3-0,5 kWh of electricity for the machine itself, and if your water wasn't municipally heated, heat would cost about 4,5-6,5kWh / 16-23 MJ (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a litre of gasoline / 0,13-0,19 gallons). At the then-standard 14-15 MPG in the US, that laundromat better not be more than 2-3 miles away if you're trying to save energy (just ignoring the energy they use to heat their water!)